Why couldn't I put this book down?

[Tim]

I tried to figure out why this novel was so compulsively readable. After all, the main characters are completely unsympathetic, and the story is unrelentingly dark. So what keeps us reading? Here's what I came up with:

http://bit.ly/1au5Hv9

What do you think?

[Jason]

I think you're probably onto something. The novel is bleak, but many novels are bleak. I think it's the foreboding, the sense of dread once it becomes apparent what's going to happen to these characters. I read it sometime in the late 90s, but it has stayed with me. I think I'm going to have to give it another read soon.

[Tim]

Thanks for your comment Jason. I love a bleak novel once in awhile. Cormac McCarthy comes to mind, though he is of course a very different kind of writer . . .

[Stephen]

It's precisely the vividness of the settings -- both the external and interior -- that gripped me. And there is a certain inevitability, even beauty, to bleakness that is very compelling.

Nice post, Tim.

SRW

[Tim]

Thanks Stephen. I agree with you about the setting. So vivid, and the internal and external are well matched in the palpable dread they evoke.

[Dolly]

I recently read this book, and I agree that there was something compulsivily readable about it. You are almost propelled along by the sense of doom. Kit and Port are definitely unsympathetic characters in an equally unsympathetic (though beautifully drawn) world. Normally, I would never finish such an unrelentingly dark book. But I read this through to the end, and I find myself thinking about it often.

[Tim]

Thanks Dolly. My grandfather, a great man, said that reading dark literature helps you lead a joyful life. Another dark novel that brought joy and beauty into my life was Cormac McCarthy's The Road.

[Kallie]

Thanks for the link. Very interesting. Bowles referred to his American protagonist in 'Let It Come Down' as a nonentity. He also comments, in 'The Sheltering Sky,' when Kit encounters a leper, that in a non-materialistic culture, one would not feel repelled by such a person. I think Bowles felt that some important connections to life had been left behind by our western pursuit of material comfort and possessions -- that life lived with the bottom line in mind is too often empty of meaning. He also smoked a lot of hashish, which is pretty merciless toward constructed ego identities. He almost always endows Moroccan (or Latin American) characters with a much stronger essence, and a stronger connection with senses and feelings. Perhaps he saw our western way of life as lacking substance and destined to self-destruct, like Port and Kit.

[Eric]

Bowles' selection of these liminal territories between familiar/unfamiliar, Eastern(Oriental)/Western, wilderness/civilization is key to creating this fascination, I think. The unlikeable characters serves to make them feel real, but allows us to subtly hope for bad things as they cross from safety to danger. That's part of Kit's horrifying journey, so riveting in the back half of The Sheltering Sky: we in part wanted her to feel different, and new, receive some comeuppance.

If you haven't read it, I'd 100% recommend his short story "In the Red Room." As much as I love, love, love The Sheltering Sky, this story I feel even more. I think it treads that line even more overtly -- he generates a suspense where we WANT to know what evil lurks, even when this may damage our sensibilities or place these fictional characters in danger.

So I think setting is key. His development of his character collaborates so well.

http://www.classicshorts.com/stories/...

[Tim]

Thanks Lenny. I've bookmarked that and look forward to reading it. I've probably read it before, but looking forward to a refresher. Bowles is a master of the short form, for sure - every story in "The Delicate Prey" is exquisite, painfully so.

[Kallie]

Thanks for the story link. "may damage our sensibilities" . . . that's an interesting phrase. It suits my first experience with Bowles, reading "Up Above the World."

[Mike]

Tim wrote: "I tried to figure out why this novel was so compulsively readable. After all, the main characters are completely unsympathetic, and the story is unrelentingly dark. So what keeps us reading? Here's..."
Hi,
Port is a hero in the book, I think. I'm not sure that the story is unrelentingly dark.