The Sheltering Sky

Good read but the audiobook is far more enjoyable. The story came alive in the audio. A performance by a wonderful actress. The foreign phrases and names that are diversions in print just flowed beautifully from the audio reader. A great read was transformed into a frighting immersion into individual fear and loneliness in a uncaring universe. Relentlessly draws you in and down and down.

I had to turn the sound off. It was distracting from the text. The narrator did not acknowledge punctuation, i.e. end of sentences. When different languages were spoken she slurred the words together. I can't believe the author allowed this to be put forth let alone the store to charge people for a narrated version.

In The Sheltering Sky a post world war II couple sets off for the Sahara desert with loads of luggage and a pair of alligator pumps. The goal of the husband seems to be as useless as humanly possible, while his strangely subservient wife tags along, worrying away in her own hotel room. For the first part of the novel the characters threaten to take off on an adventure at any moment. Later, what actually drives the plot is more passive: sickness and death.

The question I have is: Why has this been such a highly acclaimed novel? For one thing it has a mysterious, evocative title. In what way does the sky shelter? Particularly in the desert, the big sky alerts a person to the impermanence of national borders. My guess is that timing of the novel's appearance was also important. The book was written in the late 1940s. Then the artistic set felt alienated from the mass movement in the U. S. towards family creation. Especially for homosexuals at that time, a family in the suburbs, even openness about identity, was not even a dream. Instead, many artists became expats in exotic locals. Their national boundaries ceased to exist. At that point, whether in the desert, or out at sea, perhaps the only shelter to be had was from the sky. Finally, judging from reviews on the store, some fan had his/her high school English class write five-star reviews. There are hundreds written by people who couldn't have read the book.

There is a natural urge among some to set off and explore the exotic and the unknown. That part of the novel made sense to me. A generation after Kit and Port set off for the Sahara, thousands of us followed instructions in 'The Whole Earth Catalog' by taking local buses from Europe to Kathmandu. By the early 1970s, rather than luggage and alligator pumps, it was a backpack and hiking boots.

This is without question one of the best books I have ever read. The story is interesting on it's face but the psychological development of the characters carries one away in thought and emotion. There is an ebb and flow between the characters, each taking the focus of the narrative at one point or another. Bowles fleshes out the interior life and indeed the growth or transformation of the characters as the story proceeds.

Read this for a book club but i was one of the few who actually finished it. Be prepared not to like the main characters, which isnt' a show stopper for me but was with alot of people in my club. It was worth the read but i won't read it again.

very depressing story and rather over the head of many readers I think in his intellectual portrayal of the characters' thoughts and actions.....didn't enjoy very much, kept hoping it would get better.

This book blew me away. I was on the edge of my seat through half of it. I did find it quite sexist. I did not care for the female character, however, I learned a great deal about an from both characters. Very powerful book.

The Sheltering Sky chronicles a trip into the Sahara by three individuals apparently born of sufficient privilege not to be concerned about matters of money, although this is never explained. They wander from place to place for no apparent reason other than the wish not to be where they are, and engage in behavior motivated more by almost terminal boredom than by any sense of adventure or intellectual interest.
At the conclusion of the story, there is a long bio of the author, himself an immense talent in a variety of mediums, who appears never to have settled on one. The reader is left with the impression the novel is a largely autobiographical account of a forerunner of the current generation of Millennials.

*SPOILER ALERT*
What the hell was this that I just read? The Sheltering Sky disguises its pretentious, self-absorbed characters as existentialist travelers exploring North Africa. Too pre-occupied with overly-consuming thoughts of "why am I here" to appreciate the profoundly different geography or culture with which they spend months of their lives, they cope with the heat, dust, gnats, and each other's superiority complexes in childish ways and without common sense. Port's existentialism seems forced and contrived, Tunner is a parasite who later seems to develop a conscience after all, and Kit is ridiculous and a colossal idiot and serves only to reveal Bowles' misogyny. Little did I know that I would come to loathe every single character in the novel and would have lit this book on fire had I not read the Kindle edition. The writing is mediocre, the pace uneven, plot development unconvincing, and the ending ludicrous and contradictory. If a reader's loathing of the characters could be considered character development, then, Bowles nailed it. Upon arriving at the end of the novel, I felt like I needed an antibiotic and a good scrub with a loofah.

Described as a "landmark of 20th Century literature" and " one of the most original, even visionary, works of fiction," I was expecting a whole lot more. Yes, it is unfair for someone who doesn't write and wishes she could write a great novel to criticize what is considered a great work.

The second half of the book picks up speed and becomes even more ridiculous. Kit's husband Port contracts typhoid in Bou Noura but doesn't realized how ill he is until the bus arrives and he collapses in al Ga'a. So desperate is this couple to escape such an inferior town that offends their sensibilities that they burrow EVEN DEEPER into the Sahara towards a city that they know nothing about and where neither English or French is spoken.

Al Ga'a is experiencing its own epidemic of meningitis, so its citizens want nothing to do with the couple. Naturally, there is no doctor or hospital. A total stranger who speaks French appears out of nowhere and spends the entire day investigating how to get the couple help. He informs them that a French outpost, Sbaa, sits a couple of hours away and would be able to help them with medical care and return back to Tangiers and then the States. An unconscious Port, who just spent an entire day sleeping with his hand in camel dung because not even his wife thought of moving it out of the pile, is loaded into the back of a truck. Kit climbs in and the truck takes off on her signal, leaving the kind stranger behind.

Port dies in Sbaa unconscious and alone because Kit gets wanderlust and decides to explore the Sahara around Sbaa. I will say that his dying and death were truly great writing and worth enduring the tripe in the surrounding chapters. When she returns and discovers him dead, she packs an overnight bag, locks the door (leaving his body behind) and wanders into the desert. No food. No water. But she did remember to bring her mirror, lipstick and a fetching bed jacket.

Realizing her mortal error in judgement, she flags down a caravan of camel traders, who without question lift her onto a camel and ride away with her. She endures the daily rapes by two traders, and one trader and she end up falling in love. Seriously? From what I understand, this would not happen when Bedouin camel traders come across a white woman lost and alone in the desert. He ends up disguising her as a boy and bringing her to his home in the Sudan where he already has three wives. He has another wife in his other home in Fez - yes, a Bedouin with two homes in two different countries - but ends up marrying Kit, too. Muslims are permitted to marry up to four wives, not five.

Kit escapes with the help of the wives and a maid - miraculously still in possession of her overnight bag - and begs a local merchant to hide her overnight. He's Jewish. He and his wife are honored to host her even though hiding a powerful Bedouin's runaway wife right under his nose places them in grave danger.

From there, it only gets worse. Kit is raped, drugged, robbed along the way to she-knows-not-where, and she falls in love with them all. Kit's story is no existentialist adventure. Kit just exists. The only value she has is sexual, and she's not even getting PAID for it! She is saved while in a drug-induced stupor - by a French soldier and the nuns (because European Christians have evolved higher than the indigenous people) - and brought back at tremendous expense to Tangiers with the intention of sending her back to the States. She runs away, and that is that.

Only Hemingway writes snappy misogyny. Only Albert Camus writes existential "Man's Search for Meaning" set in North Africa. And only John Malkovich could bring credibility to the story, even if he's cast opposite Debra Winger.

Bowles could have written a beautiful book. His descriptive prose is lyrical and invocative, and ought to have been a reader's feast. But there is too little of his lovely descriptions of that sheltering sky and the beauty lying under it, and there is far too much of a cast as unattractive as they are unwise. By the time we have met them all, we realize that there is little interesting about them. They seem all to be ignorant, vain and self-destructive. We have occasionally met incompetent travellers like them, but never so many so concentrated in time and space. There is nothing to be learned from such willful stupidity, and their story is not at all worth the telling. Save your money; read something else. Preferably, by someone else.

I remember rather enjoying this book at the time. I know it's on a number of required reading lists, which isn't necessarily a recommendation. It has been about a month since I read it, and I can remember nothing about it.

Back in the days when it was written editing standards must have been very lax. Multi viewpoints abound, even in consecutive sentences.

It kept me going to the end, more out of curiosity than entertainment value. The ending was flat and disappointing.

Could barely make it through to the end of this book. Perhaps I just don't get it, which is fine, but not sure why other people rave about this book. The characters are thoroughly unlikable and I can't relate to any of them. The monotonous descriptions of one location to the next were boring and didn't interest me either.

There were a few great paragraphs in the book, small passages that I found enlightening, but for nearly all of the book I was simply waiting for it to end.

Not recommended.

That should be in any library collection.

This must be in your collection.

The Red Fur Room
[...]
A novel based on a true story. A coming of age experience of a naive young man named Sali Hand from a small southern town built on textile mills. With his boyhood friend they unwittingly visit an isolated coastal city, fallen to decay, for a town ritual. Hidden under a canopy of old oak trees drapped in spanish moss the beauty of this old place immediately arrests Sali's imagination and wonderous curiosity, and his heart is intoxicated with his first love. Incidentally Sali will not return home, and consequently his friend's destiny will leave him in pieces to be found hidden throughout the grand park that is home to the blight after dark. With certainty a plague will soon seep in from the trees and began slowly distilling the life from Sali's new found friends casting him into a dark nightmare he may not escape. With the rising hot air the spanish moss sweeps gracefully in slow rhythm over the arms that have embraced a culture for hundreds of years. It will now set the town on fire with fear.
Due out this fall 2013

I read "Sheltering Sky" after seeing the movie by Bernardo Bertolucci. Usually I see a film AFTER reading the book, but this film, in a Bertolucci retrospective, was intriguing and left me with many questions about the characters that I thought might be resolved in the novel. The novel was unfulfilling in terms of understanding the main character's motivations, particularly those of Kit and Porte. Nonetheless, the first half of the book, set in North Africa, probably Algeria, was compelling. However, in my opinion "Sheltering Sky" deteriorated as the story focuses on Kit. Without giving the plot away, I'll say only that her behavior turns incomprehensible and disturbing. Sheltering Sky unexpectedly degenerates into a kind of gothic novel -- which is not the genre I wanted to read.

Clearly I'm not on the same page as the majority of reviewers who rave about this book. I found it to be pretentious, boring, unbelievable and ultimately pointless. The only thing that gave me pause for thought was the rather disturbing fact that most people seem to think this book is fantastic...

This book was a good choice to read on a recent trip to Morocco. Bowles lived much of his life in Morocco, and the story begins in Algeria, before the protagonists begin their fateful journey south into the Sahara. (Bowles is at pains to point out in a 1998 preface that the novel is not autobiographical. And though elements of it may be difficult to separate from the author’s own life, certain events in the book make his general statement undeniably true.)

Port and Kit Moresby, a young American couple, have arrived in Arab North Africa along with a friend, having chosen this great adventure in preference to the ravaged cities of Europe following the Second World War. They will have reasons to question that decision eventually, but it undoubtedly seemed like an exciting idea at the time. The Moresbys and their friend Tunner (as well as Eric Lyle and his mother, who dart in and out of the story) are among that class of people in literature and film, and I suppose in real life, who seem able to travel endlessly without worrying about money. They apparently have all they need and then some. These are people who travel with large valises (usually several) lugged by porters, and who always manage to have tea in the afternoon and to dress for dinner. As the story progresses, they make their way deeper south, into the forbidding landscape of the Sahara and deeper into their own psyches. Is it possible for someone not of that region to venture too far into the desert? And is it possible to venture too far into one’s own psyche? These questions give depth to the story and drive it to its conclusion(s).

In addition to his writing (novels, stories, travel writing, poetry, translations), Bowles was also a composer of some note, having studied with Aaron Copland. This is the first work of his I have read, and while I cannot say with certainty whether or not I will read more, I can see why readers return to him. In addition to the richness of his descriptions, there is a psychological depth here that adds nuance and urgency, and some searingly perceptive insights into human nature and motivation. (The short first chapter, by the way, is the best description I can remember reading of what it feels like to struggle awake from a midday nap.)

There is an inevitability to the story—the inevitability of will-lessness, of acquiescence. It is hard to describe the main characters as the story’s protagonists, simply because so much is involuntary, as much in personal relationships as in personal destiny. This creates its own drama, as the lack of will does not mean that there are no forces driving the characters, to destruction or otherwise. There is, in fact, an undercurrent of impending doom from the beginning which carries right through to the eventual descent of Kit into a complete yielding subjugation to circumstance. The Sahara is a large and powerful place. There is little to be gained by struggling against it, as puny humans will never conquer it, either physically or psychologically. Intrepid though these travelers may be, in the end there is little they can do in the face of the desert’s assault on their bodies, minds, and even their identity.

The Saharan travelogue and the descriptive language were entertaining. Katherine sees a mirage, and Porter hallucinates even when he's not in a fever. Unfortunately, the plot was desultory, the theme did not capture my interest, and the characters were implausibly silly.

I liked the uncultured, "not comfortable with ideas," Tunner much more than the two oh-so intellectual protagonists. This is one of my pet peeves. I don't like to see a character written as a straw man, to be mocked by the author. Characters have rights, too.

Speaking of rights, the latter half of the story is devoted to Katherine, who is basically a blowup doll in a khaki skirt. Try to count the scenes in which she is seduced, raped, bullied, beaten, or enslaved - yes, enslaved. It's offensive, and monotonous.

People say this is the style. The modern novel is meant to be chic and clever - not engaging or sympathetic. Compared with, say, Steinbeck ,this just means the author didn't put in much effort. Maugham gives a fine critique of modernism in his preface to Ashenden. Maugham and Steinbeck are roughly contemporary with Bowles. Read them instead.

Synopsis: Two young marrieds and a male friend head to French colonial North Africa soon after World War II for adventure and experience, and very quickly discover there are many, many levels to adventure, with hubris and naïveté informing and enabling danger and misfortune.

For me this book took an awful long time to pick up and get moving, with the first hundred pages a hot, dusty, languid introduction to the hot, sweaty, and languid main characters. It was all “dreadful” this and “exhausted” and “unbearable” that, three comfortable Americans, “unhealthily preoccupied with [them]selves,” doing their best to imitate classical European colonial status and trite ennui—“…we just haven’t all managed to get up the necessary energy at one time…”—as they attempt to achieve deep and true travel experience, off the beaten path. “There was no end to the world’s intense monotony.”

Then they head south, into the vast expanse of the Sahara, and it all gets real, way too real, way too quickly. The story moved quickly then, and then just seemed to come to abrupt halt. Yes, I’ll admit it’s a good place to leave the story, but there’s also a lot left to see of and hear from those who remain in the narrative.

Reading this I was surprised to be reminded first of Catcher in the Rye. As I saw in Catcher, we’re in a US-ascendant post-World War II environment, with young Americans thinking they know an awful lot more than they really do, and then making mistakes based on ignorance and arrogance.

I was also reminded of Cormac McCarthy, in that this is a story of essentially good people, well-meaning and trusting, not monsters, who stumble into tragedy. No, this story is not nearly as visceral and brutal as a McCarthy tale, not even close, but this theme was similar.

Bottom Line: This is a modern literature classic that is easy reading, about the dangers of adventure and overconfidence.

The Sheltering Sky is the story of a pretentious and self-absorbed American couple, Port and Kit (Katherine) Moresby, who set out with a mutual friend, Tunner, on an existential odyssey across post-WWII North Africa in a vain search for a spark to rekindle their estranged relationship. Port and Kit are incapable of expressing love toward one another. Instead, as they journey from city to city, Kit becomes more introverted, finding solace in drink and omens. Port, meanwhile, disappears night after night, in search of a high risk "pure love" among the denizens of the seedier edges of each subsequent city. Tunner is a go-along, get-along kind who seems immune to the self-inflicted despair that neither Kit nor Port can shake. In fact, Tunner's easy-going attitude annoys the unhappy couple. Eventually Port tricks him into taking a ride with a couple of English grifters, the Lyles, who support their own travels around Africa with petty larceny. As the Moresby's go deeper into the Sahara, Port becomes infected with typhoid while Kit's mind slowly unravels. The rest of the book chronicles their descent into self-destruction, both of them victims of a self-absorption which renders them oblivious to the savagery and dangers all around them. In the end, it's Tunner who proves to be the truest friend of all. Despite it's dark subject, The Sheltering Sky is a shining, lyrical book filled with a poetic descriptive prose that carries the reader along like a song. As should be the case since Bowles was an accomplished musician and composer by trade. The Sheltering Sky was his first novel and was based on his own experiences traveling in North Africa. Bowles occupies a unique place in American literature forming a link between the post-WWI "Lost Generation" of expatriate writers like FS Fitzgerald, Hemingway, W. Somerset Maugham and the post-WWII generation of "Beat Writers" such as Kerouac, Burroughs, Vonnegut and Mailer. The Sheltering Sky has all of the ingredients of a Lost Generation novel like The Sun Also Rises (frustrated, unhappy people lost in an exotic, unreal reality) and a Beat novel like Slaughterhouse Five (crazy, lost people trapped in mind-altering, time-bending real-feeling unreality). There is very little of the adrenaline stirring suspense required of most modern novels because again, it's that lyrical prose propelling the reader along. And although the book is about secular, amoral people hiding their twisted passions behind a façade of civility, the sexual encounters in the book are neither explicit nor crude (The Bible's Song of Solomon is more erotic than this). Bowles is writing about the peers of his young adulthood here -- smug, cynical, urban intellectual wannabes (the kind we call "hipsters" these days). Yet his social observations of their vanities and pretensions are devastating. He probably crossed paths with many more of their kind during his expatriate years in Morocco where he spent most of his life after 1947. The Sheltering Sky is a true American classic. And this 65th Anniversary edition is beautiful, evoking the feel of those high-quality, literary soft cover novels from the days when The Sheltering Sky was first published. Recommended.

If I were to describe this book’s essence in two words, I would say doom and gloom, as this is the story of three clueless people, Kit, Port, and Tunner, abroad in Africa after World War II, drifting from city to city. The themes in the novel are detachment, fear, and regret with a hint of prejudice thrown in toward the local cultures.

Their flawed relationships, faulty indifferent personalities, and lack of understanding of the local cultures and the culture clashes become their means of destruction by the end of the novel. The book takes its title from Port’s musings. “How fragile we are under the sheltering sky. Behind the sheltering sky is a vast dark universe, and we're just so small.”

The story begins with Port Moresby awakening in a hotel room in Oran, Algeria. He is the kind of man who’s always on the go, since he’s had a hefty inheritance, and he doesn’t see the necessity for having to work. Kit is Port’s wife and Tunner is their friend who is traveling with them. All three people are alienated from one another in some way and from the secondary characters they make friends with on the voyage, namely a mother and son from Australia, Mrs.Lyle and Eric Lyle.

Port and Kit love each other without actually realizing their own feelings. Tunner has a thing for Kit. All characters including the secondary characters are quirky.

The Novel is divided into three parts:
Book 1: Tea in the Sahara
Book 2: The Earth’s Sharp Edge
Book 3: The Sky

In the first two parts, the protagonist is Port. His dark moods and emotional denseness propel the plot, pulling Kit’s character along even though she is not in agreement with everything while her hopes for Port to connect to her diminish as they go along. Both feel they have control over events and they just let whatever happens to happen. It is too late for their relationship to take hold as fate intervenes when they finally realize their love for each other.

The third part of the novel is Kit’s story after she disappears into the desert and becomes the sexual slave of a man she meets in a caravan, who takes her to his family’s compound with his three wives. When she finds her way into freedom and returns to freedom she’s gone mad and unable to speak. Kit, who was already weak, is a broken woman at the end as she disappears into the landscape, before facing Tunner.

The story takes place in different cities in Northern and interior parts of Africa, namely Oran, Boussif, Ain Krorfa, Bou Noura, Sba and Belqassim’s place somewhere away from Algeria.

What is most remarkable in this novel is the author’s strong voice and amazing storytelling. While the point of view is third person omniscient, the author has an amazing knack in going inside the character's heads and presenting their personalities. It is his words and narrative that made me read this novel to its end.

After reading this novella, I found myself asking what the point of it was? Or, maybe, the point was that there was no point? Life's a mystery and, beyond the dome of the sky (death, universe), it's all mystery?

Kit and Port Moresby are a young American couple travelling in Africa with a friend named Tunner. The trip is meant to bring Kit and Port closer together, which suggests that their marriage of nine years isn't solid. During the course of their trip, we learn the personalities of the trio - Port's feelings of solititude and sadness, Kit's detachment and superstitious fear of death, and Tunner's superficial opportunism.

Kit seems to love Port, but, then, has a one-night stand with Tunner. Was it her own choice or did he get her drunk? Clearly, she wasn't getting emotional or physical support from Port since she found Tunner repulsive, but turned to him anyway. In turn, Port seems to love Kit, but, then, his own feelings of alienation and sadness got in the way.

It's later revealed Port's father died and left him enough money so that he didn't have to work for a living. With a nice apartment overlooking Central Park and no need of money, is it any wonder he lacked motivation to do anything? I would've preferred if Port was not independently wealthy with too much time on his hands to think; his wealthy status undercut the work for me.

The story mostly meanders, but picks up when Port contracts an illness. Some of the descriptions are nicely written especially the parts concerning Port's death and scenes of the Sahara desert. This work reminds me of Albert Camus' The Stranger, published six years earlier in 1942. It also bears similarities to Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises(1926), which I like much better.

“How fragile we are under the sheltering sky. Behind the sheltering sky is a vast dark universe, and we're just so small.”

As much as I disliked the existentialism of Camus' traveling "Stranger" in Algeria, I could not help becoming entranced by Paul Bowles' THE SHELTERING SKY, a gorgeous, poetic novel following a married couple and a male friend ("travelers," they say, not tourists) as they travel aimlessly through the desolation and harshness of the cities and deserts of North Africa after World War II.

An allegory within the novel, THE SHELTERING SKY, of the three sisters who waited for the prince to join them for tea in the Sahara desert, but the prince never arrived, has inspired numerous songs, including "Tea in the Sahara" by The Police.

My sisters and I
Have this wish before we die.
And it may sound strange
As if our minds are deranged.
Please don't ask us why
Beneath the sheltering sky
We have this strange obsession
You have the means in your possession.

We want our tea in the Sahara with you.
[Gordon "Sting" Sumner, "Tea in the Sahara"]

As this story concluded in the novel, “Many days later another caravan was passing and a man saw something on top of the highest dune there. And when they went up to see, they found Outka, Mimouna and Aicha; they were still there, lying the same way as when they had gone to sleep. And all three of the glasses,' he held up his own little tea glass, 'were full of sand. That was how they had their tea in the Sahara.”

In short, this fascinating novel is one that, more than any other I've read, transports the reader by the most poetic of prose to the point of utter alienation.

The introduction says that an editor initially rejected this book because it's "not a novel", which, in terms of story structure, is true. For a very long time the characters, none of whom are likeable, drift through the story with no real motivation or sense of purpose, with no clear problem to solve or goal to achieve. Things happen and time marches on with no indication of what the book is about.

"The Sheltering Sky" is described as "existential" and that is apparently the way that it should be approached. It evokes a mood more than anything -- not eliciting intense, passionate emotions, but rather a feeling of cold, bleak, distant apathy -- not unlike an Ingmar Bergman film. This certainly sounds boring, and for many readers, it probably is.

Existentialism isn't my own personal philosophy, and I am a proponent of traditional story structure, but the style of the writing kept me interested all the way to the end. It is difficult to explain why, but for some reason I like it.

In the mood for transport to an alien world, dangerous, exotic, hypnotic? Seeking an unforgettable novel in which the desert environment is as pitiless as post-war North African Arab, Berber, French-Algerian, and Bedouin culture in which you'll feel you've disappeared? Seeking insight into a part of the world eternally mysterious, inexplicable, impossibly ancient, and elemental? Then try Paul Bowles' famous first novel, written when he was 38, A SHELTERING SKY, (1948) in print for almost 70 years, and still as fresh and innovative as the day it sought a publisher, not an easy task, and likely worse now in our (pretend) neo-puritanical country.
Bowles is possibly the only American writer who lived most of his adult life in the distant desert world he describes. Briefly, the subject matter is the science-fiction like, and fully non-Western, culture of obscure towns, villages, and camel caravans in the Sahara, and the doomed protagonists who venture there. They are three misfit young Americans seeking idle adventure to assuage their sad ennui, the "Lost Generation" indeed.
Bowles' literary technique is deceptively simple: careful, but unaffected. He employs simple language to highly complex ends with unexpected results, and casts a spell. Sunstroke is the least of it. The landscape is as haunted as its occupants. Finally, the occasional jolt of the telling detail, also one of Bowles' techniques, leaves you never knowing when, or what, will hit you next, much like his characters, as they endure disorientation, neurosis, alienation, and slavery.

After reading a great deal of pulp and adolescent science fiction, I decided to read some serious literature again. Namely this novel, that NEW REPUBLIC claims “It stands head and shoulders above most other novels published since World War II.” I won’t argue that, though I haven’t read most novels published since World War II. The SUNDAY OBSERVERS claims that this novel “does not repeat the pattern of commonplace existence . . . but makes us realize that our life is extraordinary.” I will not argue the first part of this, but I will the second part. There is nothing optimistic about this novel, and it made the lives of its characters, who are not especially admirable, seem quite pointless. The characters engage in adultery, rape, and it’s not clear that they like each other, or why they are together. At first I did not think I was going to care for the novel as the main character was wandering around in the slums of a poverty stricken area in a Mideastern town and he finds the foul odors elating. That is not easy to relate to. However, the novel possesses that quality of writing which leaves the reader with the feeling of having vicariously experienced real human lives in an extreme setting. Gore Vidal says, “Bowles has glimpsed what lies back of our sheltering sky . . . and endless flux of stars so like those atoms which make us up that we experience not only horror but likeness.” When I read that blurb on the back cover, I thought it sounded rather pretentious. Since stars comprise the sky, and they extend to infinity, perhaps the sky is “sheltering” because it is infinite. Perhaps that interpretation is also pretentious, but it at least implies that life’s tragedies aren’t the most important thing in the grand scheme of existence. Or something like that.

After two forays into North Africa, in 1989 and 2009, I was interested to see what Mr Bowles had to say about the 1949 Sahara. I devoured the book quickly and felt transported by his prose into the past. However, I must say the last half of the book disappointed me in his lack of insight into the female mind. This book caused an emotional state within me much like when I read The Stranger by Camus. Bleak and dark - you just know nothing good is going to come of it. Another reviewer called this Gatsby Goes To The Desert. I agree.

[SPOILERS]

The Sheltering Sky, to my mind, touched most prominently on the theme of death and mankind's unfortunate awareness of it. While death exists for most of us in the realm of "not yet," most people feel the press of it in quiet moments, when we are no longer able to distract ourselves. What happens when we strip away consciousness--that intricate web of neurons and circumstance woven into the picture of a self? What is left over? Bowles shows us these moments where the lack of consciousness and language threaten to reduce human beings to something less than what we presume to be--in particular Kit's time in the desert, and Port's illness. An illustrative passage of the soul-weariness Bowles's characters undergo so far from home:

“When I was young” … “Before I was twenty, I mean, I used to think that life was a thing that kept gaining impetus, it would get richer and deeper each year. You kept learning more, getting wiser, having more insight, going further into the truth” – she hesitated.

Port laughed abruptly. – “And now you know it’s not like that. Right? It’s more like smoking a cigarette. The first few puffs it tasted wonderful, and you don’t even think of its ever being used up. Then you begin taking it for granted. Suddenly you realize it’s nearly burned down to the end. And then’s when you’re conscious of the bitter taste.”

Paul Bowles was the type of writer who understood what it meant to kill his hero halfway through the book. He also knew exactly how to do it: with masterful aplomb. What is so powerful about this shift in focalization is that it breaks the lie of fiction: that if a character survives to the end of a book, then they never die. Bowles shifts so fluidly from Port's delirium, to Kit gazing on Port's corpse that even we as readers begin to understand that we are not life's focal point anymore than the Earth is the center of the universe. Few novelists will write a book of this caliber in their entire careers.

After reading a great deal of pulp and adolescent science fiction, I decided to read some serious literature again. Namely this novel, that NEW REPUBLIC claims “It stands head and shoulders above most other novels published since World War II.” I won’t argue that, though I haven’t read most novels published since World War II. The SUNDAY OBSERVERS claims that this novel “does not repeat the pattern of commonplace existence . . . but makes us realize that our life is extraordinary.” I will not argue the first part of this, but I will the second part. There is nothing optimistic about this novel, and it made the lives of its characters, who are not especially admirable, seem quite pointless. The characters engage in adultery, rape, and it’s not clear that they like each other, or why they are together. At first I did not think I was going to care for the novel as the main character was wandering around in the slums of a poverty stricken area in a Mideastern town and he finds the foul odors elating. That is not easy to relate to. However, the novel possesses that quality of writing which leaves the reader with the feeling of having vicariously experienced real human lives in an extreme setting. Gore Vidal says, “Bowles has glimpsed what lies back of our sheltering sky . . . and endless flux of stars so like those atoms which make us up that we experience not only horror but likeness.” When I read that blurb on the back cover, I thought it sounded rather pretentious. Since stars comprise the sky, and they extend to infinity, perhaps the sky is “sheltering” because it is infinite. Perhaps that interpretation is also pretentious, but it at least implies that life’s tragedies aren’t the most important thing in the grand scheme of existence. Or something like that.

After two forays into North Africa, in 1989 and 2009, I was interested to see what Mr Bowles had to say about the 1949 Sahara. I devoured the book quickly and felt transported by his prose into the past. However, I must say the last half of the book disappointed me in his lack of insight into the female mind. This book caused an emotional state within me much like when I read The Stranger by Camus. Bleak and dark - you just know nothing good is going to come of it. Another reviewer called this Gatsby Goes To The Desert. I agree.

[SPOILERS]

The Sheltering Sky, to my mind, touched most prominently on the theme of death and mankind's unfortunate awareness of it. While death exists for most of us in the realm of "not yet," most people feel the press of it in quiet moments, when we are no longer able to distract ourselves. What happens when we strip away consciousness--that intricate web of neurons and circumstance woven into the picture of a self? What is left over? Bowles shows us these moments where the lack of consciousness and language threaten to reduce human beings to something less than what we presume to be--in particular Kit's time in the desert, and Port's illness. An illustrative passage of the soul-weariness Bowles's characters undergo so far from home:

“When I was young” … “Before I was twenty, I mean, I used to think that life was a thing that kept gaining impetus, it would get richer and deeper each year. You kept learning more, getting wiser, having more insight, going further into the truth” – she hesitated.

Port laughed abruptly. – “And now you know it’s not like that. Right? It’s more like smoking a cigarette. The first few puffs it tasted wonderful, and you don’t even think of its ever being used up. Then you begin taking it for granted. Suddenly you realize it’s nearly burned down to the end. And then’s when you’re conscious of the bitter taste.”

Paul Bowles was the type of writer who understood what it meant to kill his hero halfway through the book. He also knew exactly how to do it: with masterful aplomb. What is so powerful about this shift in focalization is that it breaks the lie of fiction: that if a character survives to the end of a book, then they never die. Bowles shifts so fluidly from Port's delirium, to Kit gazing on Port's corpse that even we as readers begin to understand that we are not life's focal point anymore than the Earth is the center of the universe. Few novelists will write a book of this caliber in their entire careers.

In1949, Porter and Kit Moresby learn that North Africa is one of the few places to which they can now obtain boat passage in the aftermath of World War II. Married twelve years but staying in separate bedrooms, the Moresbys travel to Morocco with another American named Tunner, a single man enamored with their spontaneous style (and possibly with Kit). This threesome and the Lyles, a mother and son from Australia, are uniformly self-centered, superficial, spoiled, ignorant, and insensitive, and Bowles's level of detail in showing the Lyles' cringe-worthy lack of respect for the local culture through their insulting dialogue suggests that he has overheard dialogue like this more than once during his two years as an expatriate in Tangier.

Eventually, Port and Kit decide to travel together, hoping, belatedly, to revitalize their marriage. Both are so self-absorbed, however, that improvement seems unlikely, especially since Kit suffers from personal "terrors", and Port, a nervous man to start with, begins to wake up from nightmares, sobbing in bed. In Ain Krorfa, as in the port where they first arrived, however, Port Moresby seeks a liaison with a local woman while his wife is sleeping. He also runs afoul of the commander of the military post of Bou Noura when he accuses a local corporal of having stolen his passport, only to have it found by Tunner.

The middle section of the book wanders a bit, lacking direction almost as much as the characters do, and focusing on Port and Kit's personal problems, which are legion. When Port becomes ill with typhoid on his way to a town that has shut down because of a meningitis outbreak, he and Kit find a primitive place to stay so Kit can be nursemaid to the seriously ill Port. "I'm very sick," he confesses. "I don't know whether I'll come back." Kit, however, gets tired of nursing and leaves him alone in the room, seriously ill, for hours. As his fever continues to rise, Port begins to panic, and he later begs Kit to stay beside him, but as he fades in and out, Kit thinks, "He says it's more than just being afraid. But it isn't. He's never lived for me. Never, Never," a highly revealing thought, under the circumstances. The final section continues Kit's story as she tries to deal with new problems which threaten to overwhelm her.

In this unusual and thoughtful debut novel, Bowles takes crass Americans out of their normal post-war environment, allowing the reader to see them in a more universal context. The two main characters are so limited, both in their relationships with their peers and in relationships with the wider, outside world, that neither is fully capable of feeling real emotion for anyone other than self. The novel raises the question of how much the characters fail because they are failures to begin with and how much they fail because they have never looked inside themselves or tested themselves in any serious way. Their casual "adventuring" in Morocco, while recently returned veterans at home are struggling with their memories of war and the aftereffects must have hit hard at the American readership when this novel was first published. Bowles's depiction of Americans like this may partially explain why he spent the last fifty-two years of his life living quietly as an expatriate in Morocco.

Paul Bowles' masterpiece The Sheltering Sky," is enjoying a literary resurgence, and well it should since it embodies much that defines excellence in literary fiction. Bowles' descriptions of foreign environments are exquisite in terms of telling detail and psychological intent. His dialogue is sophisticated and profound, leaving the reader with the impression of human complexity, even if his protagonists lack emotional depth. The plot, slow in parts, and elaborate in attempt, moves like a caravan through the vast regions of the diaspora with a subtlety that resonates, suggesting the wayward, crippling tendencies of people who lack faith in the world or themselves. Drifting aimlessly in search of diversion from anxiety and propelled into the outer reaches of civilization by a sense of personal emptiness and desire for novelty, Kit and Port Moresby are incapable of human intimacy. These are despairing, damaged people whose intelligence and education have convinced them of their superiority. Yet Bowles is quick to point out that their existential dilemma is the inevitable fate of all who cannot, for whatever reason, shoulder their fates in the modern world. Thus are Bowles' protagonists destined to wreak discord among their compatriots because they lack the psychological tools to understand their fellow man. They retreat from relationships rather than grow through them. There are no heroes in Bowles' book, no caring, empathic people on whom one would pin his hopes for civilization and humanity; there are only parasites of a disillusioned modernity, yet the less civilized natives dwelling in the extremities of the Sahara also exhibit little understanding of their fellow man.

The book centers on Kit and Port, a young, bored couple of means who ostensibly set off for Africa to divert themselves from the stalemate of their marriage. They book separate rooms, treat each other with civility and feigned concern, but neither cherishes the other or is particularly affectionate or caring. Instead each attempts to reassure himself/herself that the other is worthy of allegiance. Kit has an affair and then is remorseful, Port lapses into sexual indulgence with a woman procured for him on one of his many excursions without his wife. While Kit sees Port as her safe harbor ("port"), she cannot love him; meanwhile he is forever seeking her approval, as if her respect defines his identity. Both are critical of others, particularly their friend Tunner, who has accompanied them on the trip - a man of singularly simple motives and predictability. They scorn him as they do another couple they befriend, for a lack of intellectuality and seeming vulgarity. Yet these people have somehow accommodated the world into a schematic from which they can make their lives work, whereas Kit and Port cannot "squeeze the universe into a ball" and assume the responsibility necessary to function in a world where choices and action are required, not escape and endless brooding. Because they cannot fall back on any beliefs that justify their tired lives, they continue to wallow in their despair until their poor choices and lack of action result in self-destruction. Port, for one, seems to harbor a death wish: In a particularly depressive incident, he dreams of "blood" and "excrement" and concludes that he must "reach out, pierce the fine fabric of the sheltering sky, take repose." At that defining moment, he realizes that he is relieved to acknowledge a lack of meaning in life and love. The interminable choices no longer have to be made if one gives up caring and submits to his fate.

The book is about boredom. The couple is bored with their marriage. They are bored with their lives and what each sees as his own failed choices. Kit focuses on her stylish clothes and the mask of her carefully made up face and superficial beauty. Port takes refuge in a Hemingway notion of manhood by taking care of their travel arrangements and seeking out voyeuristic thrills in the creepy outbacks of the Arab world, flirting with danger which allows him some refuge from his doubts about his masculinity. Yet when he returns from his adventures, he seeks out his wife for reassurance. Port is a fearful man, one who would be a hero or at least a man of art and literature, but he is ridden with a million little fears, fears about what he really is in the enigma of life. It is this failure to understand life, despite his constant pondering, that not only dooms him, but increases his anxieties to the point that they dominate his vision. No one understands life, but some have faith that it has some kind of coherence, like the Arab couple to whom Kit eventually turns for refuge.

Thematically, what is most important in this book is implied in the title's metaphor and evident in the plot. Although as one reviewer pointed out, the characters are not definitively revealed, it is their very lack of development that not only relegates them to lives of entitlement, complacency and superficiality, but also makes apparent the reasons for the malaise of much of contemporary society. Whether you view their underlying anxiety and its concomitant traits of escapism, voyeurism, and mindless chauvinism as pathology or merely the unavoidable existential angst of modern life, you still have here two people unable to cope with the challenges inherent in an immense and impenetrable universe, symbolized by the "sheltering" sky. One presumes that wrestling with the absurdity of life would be, as it is for them, fruitless and demoralizing unless one had some kind of certainty to fall back on. For some of us this is the love of family and friends or the absolutes of religion, at least some governing passion by which we build lives of meaning that fortify us in the face of despair. Alas, for Kit and Port, such insight does not occur. Instead they look inward at the chaos of their own fearful minds, seeking reassurance in each other to mitigate their nihilistic leanings. Yes, life is ultimately absurd; it does not make sense, even in the most predictable circumstances. Still, most of us forge on, endowing our lives with meaning by the decisions we make. Underlying those is a sense of who we are, a knowledge that evades Kit and Port, although both of them are self-absorbed enough that were they to connect emotionally with anyone, they might grow to the point where they not only understand themselves somewhat, but find enough meaning in life with which to sustain something close to satisfaction.

Instead Port more or less gives up, and Kit submits to the dark forces of her own untethered fears. Her downward spiral reflects an emptiness beyond despair. She lacks imagination and the capacity to empathize, among other traits. Alas, it is no wonder that she sinks into degradation, seeking in her victimhood compensatory punishment for her disloyalty to her husband as well as her own vacuity. Her insanity is her final self-inflicted retribution for a life led without principle and direction. She is at the last pathetic in her unwillingness to be present, to be seen for what she is: an irresponsible reprobate that has buried herself so deeply in her own abyss that there is no hope for her because she cannot acknowledge responsibility for what she is. She wallows in masochism. In her denial,her subjugation is not her fault; in this vein she avoids responsibility for her behavior and still experiences the decadence her need for novelty has driven her to. She is the classic existential character or she is a pathetic, superficial, uncaring woman. You decide. I choose the latter. Ironically it was Port whom she clung to for refuge; when he could no longer protect her from her nameless fears and propensities, she slid into the oblivion of mental illness as easily as did he submit to illness.

The desert metaphor is powerful and incisive. The heat, the light, the aridity, the alien culture, the predatory flies, the filthy dust, the dark horizons and alleyways, all are images that stay with you because Bowles weaves them into his rich tapestry of African life. One is reminded of "The English Patient" in the images of limitless sand and incomprehensible people, languages, customs and the omnipresent shadows and looming dangers of the Sahara. The important theme here is the idea of how strong a person must be to meet life head on without fear. Such strength is not attained through education, imagination, money or entitlement. Instead it is acquired through the daily struggle for self-betterment and commitment to others, goals neither Kit nor Port can embrace. Without marriage, intimacy or empathy, the challenges of life can suggest an overwhelming unfathomability both the uncertain and fearful may yield to. This is spiritual defeat, and this is the stuff of Bowles. He portrays these lost and drifting individuals with great insight, illustrating how bereft life is when one's relationships are shallow. Like his predecessor, Joseph Conrad, Bowles penetrates the heart of darkness in people who for whatever reason have grasped the full horror of life and been unable to cope with its lurid truths, the same terrible epiphanies that occupy every man's psychological abyss. Yet sooner or later, this is human fodder, and so man must confront those fears with courage and equanimity. Drifting around the world and from each other simply won't do it, as Kit and Port ultimately realize. Nor will intellectuality ameliorate the darkness of life.

For the most part, the book is well realized, if repetitious in parts and even if the triviality of moment by moment experiences is dwelt on rather than minimized. The characters are well drawn and the themes of alienation, fear, marital unhappiness, and the shadowy uncertainty of life are well developed and universal. The book is polished in style and believable in most aspects. At the same time, it is a rough ride into the dark and mysterious realms of the tormented psyche. The book is full of extended internal monologues where a character's mind confronts the enigmas of life, only to arrive at the same paralyzing fears of death and the stark recognition of the insignificance or insubstantiality, not to mention the infinite "unknowingness" of life. For the sky does not shelter; its limitless, infinitely perplexing image arouses doubt, confusion and malaise -- what many would term the "existential dilemma." As Port notes upon waking from one of his most anxious dreams, "The soul is the weariest part of the body." And so it is with man that he both yearns for and fears death, but the survivor is the person capable of coping with fears that always reside beneath the surface of life, challenging the true seeker. Thus, it turns out that Kit was right when she explained to Tunner, "I was never meant to live." Alas, she didn't know how...

Marjorie Meyerle
Colorado Writer
Author: "Bread of Shame"

I cannot in this instance agree with Vladimir Nabokov's view that this book is "an utterly ridiculous performance, devoid of talent" (Vladimir Nabokov to James Laughlin 27/4/50 from "Selected Letters 1940-1977). Bowles did admire Nabokov and his reaction to this verdict upon his most famous book makes for nice speculation. But then, Nabokov was never a fan of the existentialists.

Port and Kit Moresby try a Saharan trek to salvage their loveless marriage and end up destroyed by kif, heat, sexual assault, typhoid and catatonia, a fairly accurate reflection (death from typhoid aside) of the real life of Paul and Jane Bowles. Appalling experiences related in commonplace terms, Bowles nevertheless manages to convey the ravages imposed on the facile tourist by a deep and pitiless culture.

This is a book I may not have chosen to read had I known more about it, but since it is a classic I am glad I did anyway.
The main female character was totally selfish and irrational, in my opinion, and therefore all that happened to her was because of her seeming sense of superiority. Her lack of understanding of the ways of the people in whose country she was visiting was severely lacking, which led her into very dangerous situations.
It's a fascinating read.

Kit and her husband Port Moresby (sic) have turned their backs on the futility of an idle New York life to embark on a journey without an end in North Africa, still French-owned at the time this is set. The couple is troubled, and finding an aim amid the sandy waste is also expected to solve their sexual problems. But what can be expected from a journey to nowhere, except that it should lead into the void?

Paul Bowles's The Sheltering Sky differs in all respects from the movie. Bowles's Sahara isn't that of Bertolucci's technicolor photo; it is cruel, unforgiving, dirty; it is full of flies, of petty colonial officials and impenetrable locals, a stark and treacherous place. Port and Kit aren't a romantic and courageous couple, at least not initially, more a spoilt pair, self-centred, sometimes mean. Kit only comes into her own later, and Port never does, though the typhoid scene is beautifully written (the same in the movie must be Malkovich's worst piece of acting).

Indeed, that's just the thing: Bowles's novel is convincing; it feels real. At the same time, this is a philosophical as well as a psychological piece. Two characters search for meaning in a vast, bleak, empty landscape where they can only hope to get lost; life's quest must end in death, and all meaning can only be incidental, such as the devotion to Port Kit rediscovers in herself when it is too late. The strength of The Sheltering Sky is that it does not lecture, however; it is never blatant or pompous. Only the ending is dubious; here the philosophical point takes over, perhaps, at the expense of psychological likelihood. Bowles himself is supposed to have declared later, in an interview, that it was `idiotic'. More equivoque and provocation? You will have to judge for yourself.

THE SHELTERING SKY by Paul Bowles is one of Time magazine's 100 best novels in English since 1923. The novel focuses on a married couple, Port and Kit Moresby, who are rich enough not to work and have decided that rather than travel in Europe after WWII, they would see northern Africa. Along with their friend, Tunner, they tour Algeria for a time until the issues they brought with them separate them and the brutality of the Sahara does worse.

Kit and Port clearly have an unhappy marriage. One of the first incidents of the novel involves Port finding a prostitute with the help of a local, using her and escaping without paying. Kit also sleeps with Tunner on a train when Port has gone ahead of the two of them to the next town with two other Americans with a car. Kit decides that she and Port should find a way to separate themselves from Tunner so that she won't feel "in the middle," and they do, "ditching" him and going farther afield.

The barren harshness of the Sahara is a good outward landscape for what is between Kit and Port as well as what is between them and others, and I won't go further into the plot, as I don't want to spoil the novel for others. This was Bowles first novel (he is a composer, as well) and the reader can tell that he lived in the Africa he writes about. The supporting characters -- the locals and French officials -- seem pitch perfect to this (ignorant) reader, and they populate the pages with a great deal of flavor and create real atmosphere. This is a short book (335 pages), but completely engaging and alluring. Bowles has a light hand with his story telling, and doesn't write explicitly about what has happened between Kit and Port, just including some of their thoughts about themselves, each other and their future as they progress through the story.

"It's funny," went on Miss Ferry. "The desert's a big place, but nothing ever really gets lost there" (p. 332). Kit and Port lose a great deal in their flirtation with the Sahara, a flirtation we get the impression is supposed to have deepened their relationship with each other. Bowles creates a startlingly keen emotional landscape with his tone, manner and the characters' interactions with a pitiless physical world as described by a deft author.

This 1949 novel is considered by the literati as classic literature that reflects "post-colonial alienation and existential despair." (Quote is from Wikipedia.)

Apparently I don't like "existential despair" because I didn't enjoy reading this book. I will grant that the writing is good. It occurred to me while listening to the audio edition that many portions of the narrative could be presented as free verse at a modern day poetry slam and it could be passed off as good poetry.

But the story itself is about some Americans travelers--they don't think of themselves as tourists--wandering across the Sahara Desert. I found these characters not only unlikeable but also prone to repeatedly and inexplicably make unwise travel decisions. The adventure of the three main characters begins in Morocco and then moves into French Algeria. (view spoiler)

Many readers at the time this book was published apparently considered the deserts of French colonial North Africa to be a romantic setting for such a story. Subsequent history of that area in particular and the Moslem world in general has erased any romantic associations in my mind.

Why is it that exquisite writing elaborating a depressed outlook on life by bored characters is considered literature that provides an insight into post-war 20th Century life? I must not be depressed enough to appreciate this literature.

The following are some excerpts from a review written by Tennessee Williams and published in the New York Times in December 1949.

..." "The Sheltering Sky" alone of the books that I have recently read by American authors appears to bear the spiritual imprint of recent history in the western world. Here the imprint is not visible upon the surface of the novel. It exists far more significantly in a certain philosophical aura that envelopes it. "

"There is a curiously double level to this novel. The surface is enthralling as narrative. It is impressive as writing. But above that surface is the aura that I spoke of, intangible and powerful, bringing to mind one of those clouds that you have seen in summer, close to the horizon and dark in color and now and then silently pulsing with interior flashes of fire. And that is the surface of the novel that has filled me with such excitement."
.....
"In this external aspect the novel is, therefore, an account of startling adventure. In its interior aspect, "The Sheltering Sky" is an allegory of the spiritual adventure of the fully conscious person into modern experience. This is not an enticing way to describe it. It is a way that might suggest the very opposite kind of a novel from the one that Paul Bowles has written. Actually this superior motive does not intrude in explicit form upon the story, certainly not in any form that will need to distract you from the great pleasure of being told a first-rate story of adventure by a really first-rate writer. "

I suspect that a good many people will read this book and be enthralled by it without once suspecting that it contains a mirror of what is most terrifying and cryptic within the Sahara of moral nihilism, into which the race of man now seems to be wandering blindly.
For myself I can say that I was not enthralled by the story. And since reading Tennessee Williams' explanation of its deeper meaning, I guess I can also say that the "mirror of what is most terrifying and cryptic within the Sahara of moral nihilism" is not to my liking either.

Beautifully-written novel about the cruelty of that which we do not know or understand. There were unbelievable descriptions of the filth and abject poverty in the some of the North African cities. At these times, it was difficult to see the beauty that the main traveler, Port, was searching for, and also laid to waste a lot of the glamor attached to the "world traveler" in third-world countries. The entire story was filled with poetic imagery of the desert, death, the sky, the sun and heat. Also many characters along the journey; the descriptions of the Lyles were incredible: A wonderful picture of such a disgusting and despicable pair. There were many other characters like the menacing Captain Broussard, the frightening yet intriguing Belqassim.
For the first part of the book, we met Kit and Port, who supposedly went to North Africa to rekindle their marriage, although I didn't get that impression simply because a) Port invited his friend Tunner and b) Kit didn't seem to share Port's interest in North Africa and c) neither Port nor Kit seemed interested in each other once they got there. At some point, all three of them had cheated on each other, betraying each other's trust, friendship, and love, though the issue was never confronted by any of them. In fact, these characters' personalities and relationships to each other were the most bewildering issues of the book.
There was a constant criss-crossing between a desperately strong sense of duty (without knowing why) to utter complacency and indifference between Kit and Port. They, along with Tunner, seemed rich, spoiled and ignorant. I couldn't understand their reactions to certain situations; such as Tunner's thoughts as to how his friends at home would interpret Port and Kit's disappearance, or Kit's reaction to Port's death, or Port's overreactions to Kit! Then again, the three of them were in an extreme environment. They wandered aimlessly in another world, void of Western reason, void of Western fairness, powerful, unyielding, and wholly unsympathetic.
I loved Bowles' constant symbolism throughout the book; such as Marhnia's retelling of the story of the women who wished for tea in the sahara, for which they got more than they bargained. Then there was the train dream that was so important for Port to interpret: "one's hesitation was an involuntary decision to refuse participation" in life. I think that this sentence pretty much described Port, Kit and Tunner. Again, they drifted much of the time, making decisions very much on a whim, living moment to moment, refusing to face the feelings deep in their conscience: Guilt, regrets, fear, etc. Finally, Port's stolen passport was a wonderful symbolism of his inevitable erasure from existence.
The last section of the novel was fantastic. Kit was forced to stop living according to omens in the sky, forced to stop living in fear. Up until this point, most of her living was vicarious through Port. Her journey with the men in the caravan was frightening and savage, yet it completely opened a long-hidden facet in her character. The irony was that it took her to the point of no return. Once she was "saved," it was sadly clear that no Westerner could possibly understand what she experienced, so it seemed fitting that Kit would just disappear into her own madness, or was it even madness?
Yes, I loved this novel--a gorgeous illustration of the cruel beauty of the desert and its culture. Such a seemingly benign environment was powerful enough to bring any arrogant Westerner physically and psychically, to his knees.

Paul Bowles' 1949 novel, "The Sheltering Sky" is a phenomenal, terrifying, and exhilarating journey into the depths (or surfaces?) of human existence. That's a lot of work for a novel to do, but this one pulls it off. This is a novel that deals with three Americans on the run from themselves, from each other, and from preconceived notions of identity. Set in the aftermath of World War II, the novel exposes and disrupts firm ideas of national identities and international relationships - between the Americans, French colonials, Arabic African natives, and a wealth of other ethnic/national categories - and shows how they react to and resist each other.
"The Sheltering Sky" begins with Porter and Katherine Moresby, a married couple who have never stayed in any place too long, in a North African city, with the intention to casually move from one place to the next, idealistically hoping to stay away from "the places which had been touched by the war." Accompanied by their wholly annoying friend Tunner, they embark upon an unplanned meander southwards into the vast, forbidding Sahara. The remainder of the novel shows these characters' adventures in Africa, and the resulting changes to their highly individual, naively constructed ideas about being-in-the-world.
Among other points of interest in "The Sheltering Sky," one thing that particularly grabbed my attention was the omnipresence of the main characters' sense of cultural superiority. Despite Port's early insistence that he is a 'traveler' and not a 'tourist,' he and his companions soon discover that knowledge of maps, hastily gathered information about the next town on the route, and knowledge of the French language are insufficient to acclimate them to their surroundings and insure their comfort. The novel does an excellent job of disrupting cultural stereotypes, particularly of the region's Arabic inhabitants, as the travelers make their way south into the Sahara, further and further away from 'civilization' as they understand it. It also forces us as readers to take into account the perceptions of what we consider foreign from the point of view of 'foreigners' in their own element.
The journey southward exposes the characters increasingly to peril - threats of thievery, disease, and existential despair - and the environment plays a large role in this. The sky itself, often characterized similarly to Ahab's 'pasteboard mask' in Melville's "Moby Dick," as sheltering the characters from knowledge of the infinite, looms as a challenge to each of the characters. Continual encounters with sand, heat, hills, and the difficulties of transportation complicate the experiences of Port, Kit, and Tunner. The most independently mobile and problematic characters in the novel, the British/Australian Eric Lyle and his eternally irascible mother, provide an interesting counterpoint to the strictly-considered 'native' or inherently existing impediments to travel and stability.
"The Sheltering Sky" is a very oppressive and depressing novel - but don't let that stop you from picking it up - sometimes oppression and depression are necessary to force us to reconsider our relationship to the world. The novel is as vital and 'timeless' now as it was in 1949, and perhaps even more important now. The philosophical, social, cultural, and geopolitical currents of Bowles' novel make "The Sheltering Sky" worth a careful read.

The Sheltering Sky is pretty dull. The action and events of the story are mostly angst-based, anxiety and uncertainty providing much of the motive force that get its characters through their adventures. After a wonderful start, complete with some passages of rather detailed psychological insight, we are taken along with these hardly exotic American strangers through lands that seem every bit as alien to us as they do to them. And the tension of being a stranger in strange lands crosses the boundries of fiction and somehow invades us in our homes.
It is a slow to appreciate book (at least it was for me), with a desire for something to happen and a continuing frustration when nothing does. Near the end of the novel I began the see the power in this particular approach: to put the reader literally there with them, seeing that the character's romanticized delusions and high-minded ideas about themselves are a large part of the reason they are all so unsuccessful in their endeavours. And, what's worse, that the boredom we might experience when winding through the occasional meandering, exhaustive passages describing for pages on end the windswept sub-structures of the calcified desert sand is also what these characters are feeling, kind of a helplessness under the power of something they cannot comprehend, much less control.
Here is a book about being pushed to the limits. It tells of the numerous personal failures a traveller might accomplish, of the ways in which they respond to crisis and of how ultimately futile all of this is if you're more interested in what a foreign land says about you than what it actually says about itself.
Beautifully written and only slashed down to four stars (on the four-and-a-half I give it) because anything under five has to get rounded down. This was a book that I actually contemplated over when reaching this superficial decision, one that each of the main characters would no doubt have taken even longer to come to.

A superb read and a fascinating study of the industrialized world as seen from the other side. When I say "the other side" I'm speaking of the desert. For in the end, it is that haunting landscape which shapes the lives of everyone in the novel. The Arabs and the native peoples have long been shaped by it, but the travelers who have come from America (the most hyper-industrialized nation on earth)do not have the advantage of customs and bodies which have been conditioned over thousands of years to cope with such a harsh environment. Bowles is at his strongest when he delves into the description of settings. Few writers after WWII have even come close. I'm reminded of Thomas Hardy's dexterity, but Hardy was of a different time, when you could afford to spend one whole page describing the shape of a wagon wheel. Bowles does not have this luxury because his readers simply do not have the patience to wade through such dense prose. Perhaps this is part of the reason he excels when describing the Sahara's alien splendor: it is of itself a sparing place, unforgiving and brutal. As a young, ambitious writer, Bowles asked Gertrude Stein where he should go to write and she suggested Morroco. Of course, Bowles was followed by a great many other writers; he and Jane staked out the territory and Burroughs, Ginsberg, etc, etc. followed. It's certainly understandable why. How could any writer in the 1950s stay away after reading a masterpiece like The Sheltering Sky? At the time, it was the antithesis of all things Industrial--a bastion of the ancient world. Even today, while Hemingway's style becomes more and more tiresome, Bowles keeps growing in both popularity and critical acclaim. You can see how he and Hemingway came from the same era, but Bowles chose the road less traveled, moving to Africa instead of a war-torn Europe. Even today, his style and subject matter remain fresh in the disturbing clarity of his vision. Indeed, the face of a sand dune may change from day to day, but its expression remains essentially the same. After reading The Sheltering Sky, you will never look at the desert in quite the same way again.
Kirk Edward Sigurdson [email protected]

It's very difficult to add something more to what has already been said in the previous reviews. The deep impression this novel gave me lies in the fact that all the characters of the novel are like puppets moved by odd forces they don't even know. Nature is showed as cruel, indifferent to human feelings and to human life at all. Nature has nothing to do with human misery, so the author expresses a desperate view of life as human beings can't get shelter anywhere. The sky is the only refuge, and that means there is no refuge at all. All the characters, and above all the marriage couple, act under the influence of strange needs, almost superstitious. From the beginning they seek something near to salvation far away from the Western civilization, so they venture deeper and deeper into the Sahara desert, and there they find death and insanity.
The desert, the shuddering empty spaces, the anguish of an inhuman and amoral Nature fascinates the three Americans and envelopes them in a treacherous embrace. The desert is the place where there can be no humanity at all, no time, just a blind hideous empty space which also empties their minds and turns them into beings without soul. When they realize that they are finally lost, they don't care at all; they chose Nature in its purest form possible, but that implies that Nature has no soul. They finally lose their souls and become living ghosts.
Love, death and insanity; there is no redemption, there is no salvation, Nature has no soul, Nature is nothingness, life is meaningless. There can be no shelter but the sky. Seeking answers, they get lost in themselves and experience the total dissolution of their beings.

The protaganists in this book are thrown around with such violent force that even the non-perilous episodes are unsettling. At the opening of the book, which takes place not long after their arrival in Africa, you get a sense for three bored, generally self-centered Americans who seem to be getting along with their lives on reasonably sure footing. By the end of the first chapter, each starts the process of loosing their grip on that forward motion.

Bowles examines the loss with a subtle touch. The interior bearings of the characters change in barely noticable increments throughout the book - only after many pages do the internal changes add up substantial changes in action.

Even as Bowles depicts the characters with enormous flaws, its hard not to identify with them, and with their growing powerlessness. Its definitely artful, and its most definitely wrenching. When these characters are in pain, the thousands of miles of foreign emptiness surrounding them amplifies their smallness. When they are dominated in many ways by people better equipped to the land then they are they seem smaller still.

All in all an outstanding novel, heavier and bleaker than I expected.

Besides being a really great read in its own right, The Sheltering Sky inspired great discussion in our reading group... more opinionated response than anything we've read in the previous twelve months.
Part of the reason for this is surely the depth with which Paul Bowles exposes the psyche of his two principle characters, Port and Kit Moresby. Yet the brilliance of his writing is that much is left hidden from view, there is almost infinite speculation (interpretation) as to the motives and inner thoughts of his characters. This American husband and wife, together with their friend Tunner, set off on the ultimate existentialist journey through post World War II Morocco. Individually, it will change, ruin, and even kill them. They experience the harshness of the Sahara desert, and a clash with Arab culture that goes beyond anything they were expecting.
It is Port's vision that initially spurs them on, a vision borne of his desire for "solitude and the proximity to infinite things" and a disdain for Western culture. But soon Kit and Tunner are forced to endure the uncaring Sahara on their own, and the novel focuses in on Kit's own spiritual disintegration. Her understandable inability to cope with a profound crisis and loss.
The fullness of awayness.
Adriftness.
Lostness... in a sea of sand and unfamiliarity.
These three well-intentioned though hapless expatriates find themselves propelled out into a very real world where romantic ideas perish, and where, if the sky is your only shelter, you may well be burnt to a crisp by the unrelenting sun.
Highly recommended as a reading-group selection.

The Sheltering Sky may be the best book I ever read that nearly failed my 50-page rule. That's the rule I made up that allots a book that many pages to convince me to continue. If it fails to do so, it's back to the shelf or into a box -- sometimes to never be heard from again.
The Sheltering Sky is a good book, but it starts slow and never manages to evolve into any kind of a page-turner. But something I can't put my finger on wouldn't let me push it aside after those 50 pages, something I'm now very glad for.
The general premise of the story is simple: three Americans travel to Morocco in the wake of the Second World War to escape civilization and to find themselves. But the story is really an exploration into the way people react in a crisis and especially the way Americans interact with unfamiliar cultures.
It makes for a memorable if not effortless read, one of the popular 20th century books that deserve the label "classic" and that will compel you to confront your own morality, ethics, arrogance and pathos.
Though the book is dense and serious, it is not without a few subtle jokes: the two rival French army commanders, one of whom drinks only cognac and the other named d'Armagnac; the pathetic and entertaining Lyles; the unintentionally comic diplomat who tries to help Kit over the book's final pages.
I'll conclude with a tip: once you've finished The Sheltering Sky, go back and re-read the first chapter. It's beautifully written, but some of its insights are clear only in retrospect.

It's hard to add more to the thoughtful things said here about *The Sheltering Sky*, but I am surprised to see no one compared this book to Malcolm Lowry's *Under the Volcano*. Some elements are quite similar: both detail the interpersonal connections among a triangle of protagonists consisting of two men and one woman, who is married to one of the men. Both tell of the horrifying last days of an expatriate in an alien civilization: the consulate Firman in UTV, and Port Moresby in TSS.

Both books describe the effects of the lack of, or the loss of, spiritualism on the protagonists as they make their way in a strange environment with a bewildering culture. UTV focuses more on Firman's personal inadequacy as the cause for his undoing while TSS focuses more on universal reasons, which is why the book is usually referred to as a work of existentialist fiction.

One reviewer noted an odd sense of humor in TSS. I would agree that some of the situations that the protagonists find themselves in are so alien to their own cultural experience that humor emerges out of the sheer incongruency. For example, I couldn't help but chuckle at the image of Port running like a scared boy from his first encounter with the Arab prostitute Marhnia. Still, instances of humor in TSS are rare, and usually the incongruency between the protagonists and the culture they find themselves in produces a sense of horror or discomfort. Another element of humor is the portrayal of the Lyles. The book reaches for and achieves a subtle satire of this travelling couple, but ultimately there is little to laugh at even there. There is something mysterious and menacing in the character of Eric Lyle that cuts one's laughter short. At best it's a nervous laughter

Much has been written about TSS as a seminal work of beat literature. I find it more philosophical and more profound than beat lit usually achieves. It has more in common with the novels of Camus than with Kerouac's. War ravaged Europe produced Camus, Sartre, and Becket. America produced Kerouac, Mailer, and Bellow. If TSS is any example, Bowles had more in common with the Europeans.

I give TSS a five-star rating because it's a coherent piece of work, with all the symbols working together to produce feelings of alienation, confusion, and discomfort. The main symbolic motif, that of the burning white light of the sky, gets an unusual treatment. Light, when used as a metaphor, usually suggests knowledge or spiritual enlightenment. But in TSS, the light is used symbolically to the contrary: it is oppressive, torturing, and relentless, suggesting that what enlightenment is possible will be painful and the darkness is preferable to light.

This is a novel of escape from the known environment and of pilgrilamge into the soul. Port and Kit, an American couple, and their "friend" Tunner arrive in the Sahara during WWII and travel around. At some point, Tunner goes his own way, and Port gets sick of tyfoidea, so the couple has to find refuge in a French military outpost. What follows next is a sunburned account of a descent into mental hell. Throughout the novel, time seems to stand still. The characters wander around beneath the hallucinating atmosphere of the Sahara, under the sheltering sky, so brilliantly blue you'll see it and feel the dry heat coming from the sun. The plot is not that important, since the main character is the desert: the sun, the sky, the sand and the transparent air. There's always a sense of strange and tense sensuality.
No matter how much they travel, the characters are trapped in themselves. Kit will find out for the first time she's alive when she submerges in the cool waters of an oasis pond. She can't stand the idea of going back to New York.
Bowles, who lives and writes in Morocco, has produced an original and ver visual novel. The reader gets lost in the desert as much as the characters, feeling and seeing the desert in its full, brutal and desolated beauty. An accomplishment of writing, this novel will leave you wanting to do your own spiritual search in a desert, hopefully with better results.

If you are expecting The Sheltering Sky to be nothing more than a travelogue of Morocco coupled with a forgettable story ... well, you'll be surprised. Perhaps more so than any other novel I've read Paul Bowles succeeds in expressing the most deep, complex human emotions into words. And he does so without making The Sheltering Sky a cumbersome read. The narrative flows rather well. Yet this book is not for avid readers of Oprah books; The Sheltering Sky is far more ambitious and disturbing than anything published nowadays. And as for a travelogue, this book will not enhance Morocco's tourist business.
The story? On the surface it is about a floundering American couple who, in the late 1940s, head to Morocco with hopes of having some fun (and salvaging their marriage). However as we soon learn, through deliciously subtle language, is that not only is their marriage having troubles but our couple have seemingly forgot about their reasons for living. Worse, this trip becomes a nightmare (..no spoilers). Towards the end of the book we get an especially close look at the wife's spiritual death/re-birth (..this latter aspect might be offensive to conservative/religious folks).
As with the other reviewers I must say The Sheltering Sky is truly a special, memorable read. It is a challenging but not an especially difficult read. And I found the author's views of Arabs and foreigners to be relatively balanced. Or rather, no one race/nationality is portrayed better/worse at the expense of another.
Bottom line: one of the few books rightly called a modern classic.

Paul Bowles loved Edgar Allen Poe, wrote poetry in Paris and befriended several of the surrealist poets instead of going to college, and he married Jane who later went mad. Bowles terrain is not for the meek and he does not strike a wide variety of notes in his fictions but it is so very well written that the often spare and hollow content of each work is made palatable even seductive to readers who normally might not walk on the wild side. The desert is his favorite atmosphere. The Sheltering Sky is his best known work and the only of his many novels to gain a wide audience. His short stories are also exquisite and there are many of them. The short story is a form he is very comfortable with. Sheltering Sky is the travelogue of a couples journey .....but where to and why. You will have to read it. The less you know going in the better. Invisible Spectator is an excellent biography also. If you catch the Bowles bug you will also be led to Isabelle Eberheart's Oblivion Seekers. And his protege Mohammed Mrabet. Bowles left America in the 40's and lived in North Africa all his life rarely making visits abroad. The beats worshipped him for letting in the sex and the drugs. He was also a trained composer and collector of tribal music(Master Musicians of Morroco, excellent CD). His original recordings might be worth seeking out as a good accompaniment to his written work.

Initially, Kit and Port, the preppy primary characters in THE SHELTERING SKY, seem more like attitudes than people. The character Kit, for example, observes: "Other people rule my life." Early in his narration, Bowles adds: "The terror was already there inside her ready to take command."

Meanwhile, Port, despite his charms, is a sadly isolated person. Bowles says: "Although it was the basis of his unhappiness, this glacial deadness, he would cling to it always, because it was also the core of his being; he had built the being around it."

Early in TSS, these concept-driven characters have experiences that seeem slightly bogus, with the insightful Bowles explaining the interaction between characters but not really bringing them to life. Kit and Port, in other words, just don't ring true as people.

But then Bowles takes his characters and puts them on a bus on a heedless journey into the Sahara. And, their adventure, a truly riveting tale, is the perfect vehicle to explore the wacko personalities that Bowles has defined. "Book Two, The Earth's Sharp Edge," starts in Bou Noura, a desolate outpost where the European influence is negligible. Thereafter, everything that happens to Kit and Port is frighteningly real. And the writing becomes first-rate.

"The sun poured down on the bare earth; there was not a square inch of shadow, save at their feet. Her mind went back to the many times when, as a child, she had held a reading glass over some hapless insect, following it along the ground in its frenzied attempts to escape the increasingly accurate focusing of the lens, until finally she touched it with the blinding pinpoint of light, when as if by magic it ceased running, and she watched it slowly wither and begin to smoke. She felt that if she looked up she would find the sun grown to monstrous proportions..."

My daughter told me this book was great and she was right. Highly recommended!

For a musician, Paul Bowles was a hell of a writer. The Sheltering Sky is his generally acknowledged masterpiece, a book often cited on "Best Novels of the 20th Century" lists.

Briefly, it is the story of Port and Kit Moresby, two very self-centered (and, frankly, pretty dim) Americans traveling in North Africa just after the end of the Second World War (the book was published in 1949). The novel vaguely adapt's Bowles' acclaimed earlier short story "A Distant Episode" into the narrative in both its opening and closing chapters, first with one American character and then with the other, though the resolution in each case is different. All three (including the short story version) show a naive Westerner coming into contact with the natives of the region, with consequences ranging from tragic to near-tragic.

For a reader in the early 21st century, there is an additional fascination in the depiction of native Arabic culture just before the rise of Arab nationalism and, later, Islamism. Religion doesn't seem to be a big issue as the Westerners swill alcohol with abandon at practically every stop and Kit doesn't seem to get any grief for prancing around in Western duds, at least not until she takes it too far. On the other hand, there is a hint of things to come as one minor Jewish character mentions how he is routinely disparaged by the Moslem natives even though they do business with him (The Sheltering Sky was published just after the founding of Israel and the first Arab-Israeli War).

I very much liked this book and the portrait drawn of two very shallow people (three if you count their hanger-on Tunner) who are in a situation way past their capacities, though they are not bright or self-aware enough to realize it until it's too late. Each is perpetually going into extended narcissistic self-explorations while outwardly they continue a sham of a marriage and, at least in Port's case, a totally undeserved self-perception of savvy worldliness. Port in fact is so savvy about traveling that he skips getting the recommended inoculations against native diseases, while Kit decides that it's a perfectly great idea for a woman alone to hitch a ride on a caravan traveling into the sticks. Both get what's coming to them and I can't say that I felt particularly sorry.

The Sheltering Sky was Bowles' first novel and I am very tempted to seek out his other ones (Let It Comes Down, The Spider's House, Up Above the World) on the strength of this one.

I regret that Bowles never won the Nobel Prize in Literature for he surely deserved it. Sheltering Sky is poetic and beautifully written. Bowles weaves both dream and fable into the fabric of the novel also. Sheltering Sky is an exceptional existential novel that tears the veil of illusion for the American consciousness in much the same way that Sartre and Camus did for Euro-centric consciousness. The title is a supreme irony, since the sky does not shelter us, the blue is illusion, the darkness is the reality. The characters in the novel carry all the illusions and arrogance of Western civilization with them into a Muslim country and step by step the illusions are stripped from them, challenging their relationships, identities, health, and lives. Bowles is the master at revealing personal identity as a social construct, a fragile collection of illusions and memory and attachments. Bowles sees this personal identity as extremely vulnerable when put under pressure and in Sheltering Sky a rich arrogant well-educated couple are put into the pressure cooker of the Arabian desert.

It is a story of loss and adjustment to loss. For example, the protagonists, Port and Kit, have a shell of a marriage and have fallen out of love. They enter the stage partially dealing with this loss. They struggle and never recover. Bowles carefully paints them as selfish, aggrogant, rich, spoiled, intellectualizing, Western-centered folks who actually represent a large portion of the American upper middle and upper classes. Are these characters likeable? Not really, but do we read because we want to "like" the characters? Rather, Kit and Port are real characters, we feel ambiguous about them, and we shiver as they lose their thin veneer identities under the assaults of contracting cultures and extreme challenges of the natural world.

Port and Kit travel to Morocco where they must struggle against a vast and hostile nature and a foreign and unfamiliar culture. Then, step by step they lose every illusion which sustains their flimsy identity. They are forced to confront their mortality and Port does not pass the test. Kit's final situation is more ambiguous. She loses her mind, she becomes the slave concubine of a nomadic camel driver, she is rescued and returned to an oasis of Western culture, yet she escapes back into the dessert.

Bowles is the master at stripping away fantasy and illusion, revealing the amazing fragility of human existence and meaning. This is one of the finest novels of the 20th century with so many painful lessons to absorb.

The Sheltering Sky was published two years after Under the Volcano, and while Malcolm Lowry remained a prisoner of the style of the time -- stopping the action to laboriously take us through the biography of Hugh Firmin in the notorious Chapter 6, stopping the action again during the bullfight scene to laboriously take us through the biography of Yvonne -- Bowles sails right through the novel without bothering to give us any biography at all. Just the hint that Port and Kit come from New York, that Port has a mother in New York. In this sense The Sheltering Sky is more modern than the Volcano.

Port and Kit have every bit as much reality as Jacques Laruelle, Hugh Firmin, Yvonne (but perhaps not the Consul, one of the great characters of literature). But is Bowles as deep as Lowry? Deeper? Less deep? That is in the eye of the reader.

Bowles' cold, clinical style is worlds away from the convoluted, often affected writing of Lowry. Comparisons could be made between the alcoholic who intentionally brings about his own death and the sophisticated white woman who allows herself to become the harem slave of an Arab trader.

These are two novels about disintegration as a function of human personality, and are both very modern. Each is repellent to a certain kind of reader, fascinating and addictive to another kind of reader.

I became eager to get to know the works of Paul Bowles (1910 -1999) when I got to know and love the writings of the Beats: Kerouac, Ginsberg, and Burroughs all of whom were greatly influenced by this expatriate American writer. Bowles was an American but he lived in Tangiers, Morocco beginning in 1947.

Bowles also was an American composer of art music and wrote scores for the plays of Tennessee Williams, a writer I admire greatly. Thus I was pleased to have the opportunity to read Bowles's great novel, "The Sheltering Sky" (1949). It is, indeed, a remarkable book and captures well moods and feelings that are all-too-common.

Bowles's novel is set in North Africa at the close of WW II. There are three primary characters: a married couple, Port and Kit, and their friend Tunner. Port and Kit are educated, intelligent, and financially comfortable. They have been married for twelve years, most of which has been spent in aimless

wandering to obscure places. They decide to visit North Africa and their friend Tunner, a newsman, accompanies them. The novel begins upon their arrival and remorselessly chronicles the deterioration and destruction of Port and Kit.

The story is told in spare, understated prose and moves easily. The destruction of the characters unfolds slowly and in detail. The book presents a compelling portrait of outsiders -- of people who are alone, alienated from their families and friends and their own societies with no sense of purpose for themselves. In part, the book amplifies upon the theme of the "Lost Generation" following WW I and explores subjects, but with a far greater degree of discipline and restraint, that the Beat writers would also explore.

We don't learn many details about the protagonists -- about the reasons for their estrangements and feelings. The marriage of Port and Kit is deeply troubled as they sleep in separate rooms and have difficulty talking. An inevitable triangle develops with Kit and Tunner becoming lovers for an instant. During the book, both Port and Kit takes steps to become closer to the other -- with Kit filled with remorse for her affair with Tunner -- but to little avail. The book moves with the force of doom as Port dies midway in the book and Kit, after a series of harrowing experiences, descends into madness.

There are vivid pictures in the book of the Sahara Desert, of many towns, trains, hotels, and buses in North Africa and of a host of secondary characters, including French military officials, native inhabitants, and other wanderers of bad or uncertain purpose. We see the shallowness and foolishness of our three travelers in venturing witlessly into a forbidding land that they don't understand. But this book is far more than a conventional story of a clash of cultures. It shows people who are hollow and adrift inside meeting a terrible fate brought about by their own fundamental ignorance.

This is a tough-minded and terse book. It taught me about the place and much more about the characters and their condition. The events of the book are sad and disquieting in the extreme. But I felt a certain sense of catharsis, understanding, and release upon the conclusion.

Robin Friedman

Good book that focused on the main characters' thought, motivations, and situations in a travel setting. Port, Kit, and Tunner, had an open schedule and slowly traversed in and near Sub-Saharan Africa. Thoughts of life, dismay, the past and future, are all here. The desert and sun were constant and relevant characters in this book. One would likely appreciate these latter "characters" more if they had been the the region prior to reading "The Sheltering Sky"--so go there first. The prose and some of the wording is of the 1940s, when the book was published (1949). Tennessee Williams' review that appears in the beginning of the book is good but read it after reading the book--he gave too much away. The last part of the story takes on an intelligently gloomy quality and setting. Glimpses of Kit's and the others' neurosis and insecurity become evident as they are one of the few eccentrics lucky enough to live and go where they want to go, when they want to in general. She and her companions can stay in a particular town for a day, week, month, or the entire Winter if they choose. that is freedom. Freedom of the mind and physical environment. They develop relationships with the locals they come across, as well as some who are on the road, or Sand Dune as one might say. The only nit-pick is Bowles' frequent, although brief passages, of French and Arabic expressions that were not transliterated. It you like travel stories read this book.

...except that, at first, I did find Bowles writing oblique and pointless. However, I realized that I was reading too quickly through what I thought was an adventure story. To see if there was more, I decided to take my time and really try to analyze and understand what was being written. Some of it I still don't get, but that does not make it a bad book. What I did understand, I did find rewarding. I understood the existential levels of the novel as well as some of the feelings of dissociation I felt during my own travels in North Africa.
This book could have received less than five stars from me if I did not stop and correct my attitude towards the writing.
Instead on focusing on plot, themes, and the subtleties of the novel in this review I will only recommend to the reader to take their time with it, re-reading parts if they have to. You will be well rewarded and might just give it five stars like I did.

What a sad, sad story Bowles The Sheltering Sky is. It is not sad in the sense of being powerful, but sad and strange in a completely different way. There is no real resounding message or theme that ultimately comes through. But its very nature seems to depress. The characters are real, in a weird way. I think the sublime description Bowles used about the world around them is the most significant aspect of the novel. It describes the setting and emotions with clarity and originality. I don't know if there is a point to it all, but it is a very interesting ride to take.

The story opens in café in Northern Africa. Here we will be introduced to the characters we will follow throughout the remainder of the story. One is an ambitious traveler named Port. It never explains fully how he acquires all the money to go on his trips and journeys. One thing is for certain. This is how he lives his life. He is with his wife named Kit. She is a complex character who is beginning to feel estranged from her husband. They really have little in common. The third character is named Tanner, who is a friend of both of them. Tanner secretly lusts after Kit and will eventually sleep with her later on in the novel. Kit never will tell her husband about it, but it will remain with her.

Together the three make their journey deeper and deeper in the Sahara. Tension increases, the weather escalates in climate. Port and Kit seem to constantly be arguing, and on one night of drunken passion inside of a train, Kit and Tanner commit adultery. That is not to say Port is perfect either. There are a couple of scenes in which he attempts to sleep with women, but both turn out badly and he never gets the chance.

Eventually, Port ends up ditching Tanner in an attempt to be alone with his wife and spend some together. It seems the more they are alone, the more distance elapses between them. They continue to travel deeper and deeper into the Sahara desert. Conditions become worse. Tanner continues to follow them. Port, however, becomes very ill and only in his final moments is there any moments of closeness between him and his wife. But it feels forced.

After his death, Kit realizes she really did love her husband. She ends up going mad from the whole experience. She runs away. The novels final moments show her in her frenzied state and Tanner's quest to find her. These scenes are well drawn out. While before the narration used to comment frequently on her thoughts, after she loses her sanity, the prose suddenly halts. We do actually feel that she is crazy.

I felt both sad and intrigued reading The Sheltering Sky. It was highly creative with its use of language and feeling. I guess the main point was to describe the dissolution and strain of relationships. But again, the message was a bit muffled. Nevertheless, my mind didn't think about it all too much. I enjoyed the beauty and depression of it all. It manages to do both at the same time and it works.

This is an odd and appealing story. One, despite how familiar it should be, manages to put a fresh spin on its content. Bowles is certainly a talented writer. His description is flawless and the characters are eccentric and believable. It unfolded much like a haunting dream one has, or the haunting moments we fear will never come to pass in our own lives. It is unfortunate that for Port and Kit, their nightmares really did come to pass, but we can't help but be fascinated to experience it.

Grade: A-

Paul Bowles' classic novel of the Sahara, "The Sheltering Sky", is perhaps the closest to perfect a book can attain. The characters are absolutely real, and Bowles digs so deep into the American psyche with them the effect is, at times, horrifying. In this book of three American travelers who journey through North Africa, Bowles shows us, with gripping yet subtle tones, how rigid is our comprehension of foreign culture, and how incomplete is our knowledge of ourselves. It is a novel for the mind. As the journeyers separate, first from each other then from their own sanity, we undestand how delicate our grip on reality is, especially when faced with the awesome spectacle of untouched nature. As dialogue and plot imperceptibly give way to long, lush interior landscapes, Bowles charts a course to the heart of human evil for us, much as Conrad did in "Heart of Darkness", but this time with more depth and more passion. There is no mistaking this book or a potboiler, and it is not an easy read, but once begun it is not easily ended, even when the last page is read. It echoes. It will echo one hundred years from now. Pick it up and begin a journey into yourself you will never forget

One of my favorite novels. As streamlined, full of surprises and action as any thrilled, but with a deft, incisive voice. Reading this you know you are in the hands of a master storyteller, and one who has seen this very foreign world with his own eyes and soul.

Paul Bowles was a genius. Along Maurice Ravel, Saint-Exupery, Debussy and Buñuel...Bowles is a distinguished memeber of The Club. The sky above us is like a shelter which protect us from what is beyond...the obscurity of the universe, the obscurity of the soul. It happens in the same place where the plane of Saint-Exupery failed and was forced to land to find the little prince. But The Sheltering Sky is the total treaty of the soul. The face to face stand with fate and fortune -at once- when we discover that loosing our companions can lead us to the point of no return, the point which Bowles understood from Kafka, the poin to be reached, where the streetcar makes a wide turn...the end of the line, when we realize that our lives will never be the same it used to be a minute ago. Until we can avoid or cheat destiny we tend to believe life as an endless, limitless well, but here comes the powerful point of Bowles: how many more times we'll see the fullmoon rise? Perhaps quite few -surely very few as a matter of fact- and folishly we think life will never ends!
Bowles himself gave a sublime review to this matter: our soul is the weariest part of our being. No special stock collection of the soul is compleate without this masterpice. Get it, you will not regret the cost, it will be surely an invesment with the great return of deeply apreciated knowledge.

The beginning of this book moves quite slowly, and when it picks up in pace, it picks up only a little. I even found the writing tedious at first, though it became quite wonderful by the end. It isn't a page turner for sure, but still I found myself slowly moving from bored to being very interested in the characters to being completely swallowed by the story and unaware of the world outside the novel.
The book is about a couple, Port and Kit, and their friend Tunner. They are travelling in the Sahara Desert, far from their familiar culture. Things happen to them which compose the story, but the novel is great because it captures the tension in the relationships between people. Nobody seems to be able to understand the others, and each of the three characters are in some ways as foreign to each other as they are to their surroundings. Eventually, Kit emerges as the main character, unable to comprehend her identity in a place that has stripped her of the sureness of her existence. In a sense, she loses her post-War American psychological angst, and becomes immersed in the more basic anguish of fear and surrender. Finishing the book is like waking from a bad dream.

Port, Kit and Tunner are supposed to be friends that decide to take a trip to North Africa to explore the desert, know more about the culture, and drink tea with the locals...Port and Kit (the couple) decide to separate from Tunner since he is trying to get Kit's attenion which get's on Port's nerves. So they do, and do their own travelling.

Port and Kit live the real experiences crossing the desert, they have the chance to mix with the locals, and get to learn more on the desert, and the challenges in belonging their. Their learning experiences come with a very precious price that they have to pay...Tunner on the other hand takes a less risky approach, and keeps trying to get Kit's attention. When he does, he founds out that it's too late...

The beginning of the story is a little slow until you know all the characters, and what are they about...The book is real, and it keeps you excited and reading on the edge, the last third of the book is just unbelievable...

One of the WORST boos I have ever read...threw it out in the middle...no plot..just aimless wandering through arid, fly-infested lands...hero dies of disease and woman gets lost in world of being abused by men...exitstential crap...at least Sartre did it with some feeling. More lie a terrible photograph of a land, but made by emotionless, vapid, one-dimensional characters. GARBAGE, full of itself, saying NOTHING.

25 years after Hemmingway in the 'Sun Also Rises'wrote of expatriot rich Americans raising lell in Paris and Pamplona, Bowles spins his tale of ugly Americans, this time in North Africa. Bowles' improbable story is written with much more passion and meaning than was Hemingway's style.
Three bored Americans try to discover themselves in the brutally hot and dirty Sahara. Kit and Port try to recapture thier affection and are accompanied by their dull friend Tunner. Drunk and terrified, a vulnerable Kit succombs to Tunner's advances while Port becomes obssessed with native dancing girls.
Eventually Port and Kit separate from Tunner in an attempt to regain their love for each other. Port becomes desparately ill leaving Kit emotioanlly unprepared to do what she must do Rather than face the truth and her obligations, Kit escapes from reality and finds herself alone in the dessert and prisoner to the savage ways of the desert.

This Paul Bowles novel is a beautiful, difficult and uneven work. It has all the things the other reviewers suggest--Bowles captures vividly the ultimate strangeness of a culture so different that one might as well be on another planet. The descriptions of the dark streets, the monochromatic beige--grey--white of the desert and cities, the filth and poverty, the sand--all perfectly drawn. The author's picture of a terrible death from the point of view of the person experiencing it was truly frightening--he depicts death as an experience of the mind rather than the body. The section depicting life inside the home of the Arab who takes Kit across the desert was intriguing. But ultimately I was frustrated by the characters--I suspect this all has to do with the postwar existentialist view of the world. I closed this book with far too many unanswered questions--why are these people in North Africa to begin with? Money seems to be no object--why aren't they being driven around in a Mercedes? Port and Kit are estranged but each longs to make a connection with the other, and they subconsciously conspire to dump Tunner sothey can be alone. But we have no idea how they came to be this way--although their inability to reach out to each other is real enough. Who is Tunner anyway? These characters seem to deliberately create a hell for themselves in order to reinforce the view that life is meaningless, we are all alone in the end, etc., etc. This is not a funny book, but after arriving at a hotel strewn with garbage and diseased babies (lying on the garbage pile no less!), finding vermin in the beds, and eating soup laden with weevils and a disgusting stew with pieces of fur floating in it, Kit exclaims "I wish we had gone to Italy!"--I had to laugh!

A parable for the traveler. The greatest kif-induced writer in English delivers a beautiful nightmare of fools and nancies running around in North Africa. Their downfall is that of every traveler: the inability to see the "new" as anything but a comparison to the "old," no matter how nonjudgmental, all-embracing, unperturbable, and tolerant one perceives oneself. These comparisons inevitably lead to the belief that one brings ones familiar surroundings along on a journey and can re-create them to some extent in an unfamiliar setting. Displayed by the stacks of parcels and trunks and by the jalopy rumbling around the Sahara, Bowles is warning us all. The ex-pat world of SUVs and global cells demonstrates that his words have yet to be heard. This idiocy calls into question the very purpose of traveling.
It is truly staggering, therefore, that this is one of the most popular travel books around. To see backpacking sorority babes and fratboys lugging around designer packs and bitching about the price of a hostel (due to a pilsner-soaked incomprehension of exchange rates) or berating a tiny restaurant's owner for his town's lack of a McDonald's, and then to see a Bowles paperback jammed in next to their Lonely Planet bar guide... Father, forgive them, for they are clueless.
Back to the novel. Direct, violent in its unwavering focus, and somewhat darkly funny, this quick read is a keeper.

I just finished reading this book for the second time. The first was nearly thirty years ago when I was in my impressionable twenties. At that time I considered it extremely powerful and I, as an addictive maker of lists, thenceforth ranked it as my favorite book. Now, a thousand experiences later, including a ten-day venture to Morocco (I currently am an ex-pat living in Spain), I decided to get the book off the shelf and read it again. Would the book live up to my own rapturous opinion of it?

The answer, quite simply, is yes. Bowles creates a story as gripping as any I've known and had me hanging on every word. The bizarre relationship between Port and Kit, the depiction of the Arab world, the caravan crossing the desert, everything is painted in masterful strokes while leaving much food for thought. For instance: Why do some people, like myself, feel so alienated from American culture that we go to great lengths to distance ourselves from it? Bowles offers a clear answer while showing the consequences of fleeing that culture and pitching ourselves headlong into another more exotic one. A more emotional reading experience would be hard for me to imagine.

There are few novels in English as bitterly ironic about the human condition as "The Sheltering Sky." The title itself is a sick joke, for the relentless Sahara sun--at least as depicted by Paul Bowles--scorches and shrivels everything it touches. In prose of breathtaking, pellucid elegance, Bowles takes us on the tragicomic final journey of wealthy New Yorkers Port and Kit Moresby across French North Africa in the late 1940s. (Their names alone are deeply ironic; "Port Moresby" waves all sorts of danger signals for those who know their geography, while "Kit" implies a kitten, willful yet tragically dependent on the kindness of friends, strangers and enemies alike.) On one level, the novel can be read as a tale of two more stupid Americans imagining themselves as enlightened travelers and coming to grief because of their illusions. On another, it can be taken as a tract on the impossibility of dealing with the world as it truly is, and on the various defense mechanisms people create to ward off either death or insanity. (Bowles uses those mechanisms to create some unforgettable characters, especially the horrible Lyles--putatively mother and son--who resemble a grotesque, unholy experiment between P.G. Wodehouse and the Marquis de Sade.) Meanwhile, the Sahara, vast and arid, remains what it is, forever, as Bowles makes plain toward the end of the book: "The coming of day promises a change; it is only when the day has fully arrived that the watcher suspects it is the same day returned once again--the same day he has been living for a long time, over and over, still blindingly bright and untarnished by time."

The book begins in a rundown hotel on the Mediterranean coast of North Africa. Port Moresby, an American and a self defined "traveler" as opposed to tourist, experiences a prophetic and metaphorical dream. Port has traveled to North Africa with his wife Kit and friend Tunner to experience new adventures and try to reestablish the emotional bond between himself and Kit. Finding themselves in a harsh and hostile environment, the trio must battle not only their situation but also conflicts within themselves. As the story draws to a close, one does not survive and one emerges forever changed by the brutal desert. The third, who did not venture into the Sahara, remains unchanged.
The author has done an excellent job creating a Saharan setting throughout the book. Descriptions are rich and vivid. The story is both dramatic and suspenseful. My complaint of the story, however, is that I thought far too little was done with the Lyles, a supposed mother-son duo engulfed in suspicion. Had these characters been allowed to develop and their motives made more clear, I believe that it could have become a very interesting sub-plot.
This book is an enjoyable and entertaining read about people in search of themselves and seeking to reconnect. Their journeys and struggles will remain etched in my memory for many years to come.

Written in the early post-World War II years and published in 1949, Paul Bowles' THE SHELTERING SKY carries with it the full bouquet of aimless, nihilistic despair that characterized much of the work of the so-called "Lost Generation" writers (Dos Passos, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Sherwood Anderson, etc.) after World War I. Cynicism, ennui, disillusionment, and rejection of (or at least indifference toward) prevailing moral standards come in full dosage in Bowles' story of three young Americans traveling in post-war north and central Africa. Unfortunately, this attitude toward life no longer shocks. Indeed, lines like, "The soul is the weariest part of the body,"come across as rather quaint and somewhat cloying, literary forerunners of everything from National Lampoon magazine and TV's whining "Thirty-Something" series a few years ago to David Letterman, Steven Colbert, and "The Office" today.

Notwithstanding the sense of datedness in the characters' life philosophies, THE SHELTERING SKY offers an interesting perspective on American attitudes toward non-Western, and especially Arabic, cultures. The main characters are Porter and Kit Moresby, a too-well-off young couple from New York traveling more or less randomly around Northwest Africa, sseemingly in search of a reason to be traveling more or less randomly around Northwest Africa. The two are ostensibly married, although through much of the book they sleep in separate rooms and behave far more like brother and sister than husband and wife. Porter and Kit are loosely accompanied by another American, Tunner, who prances around Kit like a hyperventilating puppy dog begging for attention while she barely deigns to kick him away. Occasionally intersecting their journeys are the Lyles, mother and son. They form a truly abhorrent American pair, she demanding and dismissive of all non-Americans and he unctuous and unsavory even as he accepts the leash by which his mother holds him. Filling the gaps are a variety of hospitable, French-speaking Arabs, local gendarmes, and an aggressively possessive camel driver named Belqassim.

Each of Bowles' American characters represents a distinct attitude toward the newly emergent Third World - Porter as inveterate romanticizer, Kit as losing her identity in it ("going native," as it were), Tunner as the classically grounded, glad-handing, culture-sampling tourist, Mrs. Lyles as domineering and condescending, and young Lyles as the weasely, self-interested schemer who moves without the least interest in his people and culture around him. Porter fails to discover the Africa he has so naively romanticized and Kit fails to establish herself as an individual with a backbone. In different ways, both main characters sublimate themselves to a greater, amorphous entity called Africa that might as easily be called global culture.

Desert and sky also operate as characters in Bowles' novel. The desert is at once congenial partner and threatening horizontal abyss, both land and sea with its undulating waves of sand. The sky is, as the title suggests, and even greater presence, sometimes a blinding, blue-white, cloudless dome, other times a "violent blue" presence, as unforgiving as it is undifferentiated. Sun, moon, stars, day, night, dawn, dusk, light, darkness - all mark Porter and Kit by their presences. Yet at the same time, especially for Porter, the sky is also a shelter of sorts, a barrier between the confines and earth and the dark, limitless void of space. "A black star appears, a point of darkness in the night sky's clarity. Point of darkness and gateway to repose. Reach out, pierce the fine fabric of the sheltering sky, take repose." And each in his and her own way, both Porter and Kit do find their respective means of repose at last.

The scope of Paul Bowles' *The Sheltering Sky* is two-fold: on the outside it is the tale of three young Americans traveling around North Africa after the World War. In a deeper level it is really a terrifying, exhilarating journey into the depth of human existence. Kit and Port Moresby's marriage was jeopardized. They came to the desert to escape from civilization, to escape from one another. The couple had never settled down in any one place, but rather they casually intended to move from one place to another in Africa in order to avoid places that had been touched by wars. The couple was also joined by a mutual friend Tunner and with whom emarked on a journey into the forbidden Sahara. What this book strikes me the most is the way Bowles examines the ways in which Americans apprehend an alien culture (as well as alien land). The very same apprehension at the end in a sense destroyed these Americans. As they emarked on their journey, further and further away from civilization, we can see how the cultural superiority of these fellow Americans dominate their thoughts-how they not trust the locals, the Arabs, the porters of town, the butler at inns. The journey forced these Americans to push the limits of human life. Each one of them was touched by the unspeakableemptiness and impassive cruelty of the desert. I don't want to give away the ending of the tale but this is definitely not a page-turner as you, the reader, will have to emark yourself on this journey and think about the limits of human reason and intelligence, about the powerlessness in controlling our fate. Beautiful prose, challenging reading. 4.2 stars.

Read this to understand Sting's "Tea in the Sahara" reference for the first time, and to your very core. (We're all looking for the tallest sand dune--the place with the optimal vantage point--and we often lose our way in deserts of our own making.) What an amazing book. I'm so glad I believed Gore Vidal's cover blurb about Bowles' art far exceeding that of other contemporary American writers. Really, Vidal says it best: "Bowles has glimpsed what lies back of our sheltering sky...an endless flux of stars so like those atoms which make us up that we experience not only horror but likeness."

Beg, borrow, or buy at least a cheap paperback version: if you don't read The Sheltering Sky, you're missing out on greatness.

Bowles has a strange kind of status in America among the literate and illiterate, chiefly because his life style represents a little bit of everything for identity freaks. That he hung out in the Third World, had a lesbian wife, took drugs, liked his boys young and brown, all this and more contributes to his celebrity status and explains why his books rank high among the Tower Record set. "The Sheltering Sky" is his premier novel. It is well-worth a read and even deserves a close second read. It is in many ways a haunting book, because of its message which subverts expectation and undermines the popular desire for a happy ending, on a personal and on a cultural level. Kit is a wayward creature, a spoiled bohemian adventuress, who could easily be written off were it not for her final decision to return to the casbah, no doubt to serve out her time on this plane as a sexual object, a slave or a prostitute. We understand that she would prefer this to a life of leisure back in New York, with Tunner and his crowd back in the Village, or the Hamptons or wherever. Curiously, I don't believe feminists have embraced this text, although I can't say why. It serves as a radical denunciation of the leisure class, its pretensions and its hypocrisy. Kit is not terribly interesting, but then again neither was her now dead husband. She inherits from him her inability to make sense of life. There really is nothing for her to do. She cares about nothing. This is Bowles' radical vision of life in the West. The book has to be read; Bertolucci's film version is very thin and ultimately fails to capture this disorientating aspect of the book.

I just finished reading this book for a second time and was again struck by how effectively Bowles communicates his themes. We all have tensions and disappointments with our societies, countries, families and friends, but Bowles reveals the terror of complete alienation that happens when we leave it all behind. If you've ever wondered what it feels like when your protective bubble pops, you'll like this book. The plot, characters, and settings in this novel are merely vehicles for communicating this idea. Bowles is poetic: his impact grows within the reader as his words are absorbed.

In response to a previous review:

Bowles spent a great deal of time in North Africa and would have understood a typical American's perceptions at the time. Of course those perceptions are now outdated - would one expect otherwise? After all, the book was written only a few years after World War II ended. Good literature attempts to portray characters within their historical context, and to offer insights about the human condition - not to mold characters in accordance with someone's political views. I can't think of anything more boring and less literary than a novel portraying characters acting in ways that many university liberal arts faculty think they SHOULD act.

It's pointless to judge a novel written over 50 years ago by today's standards. It's as silly as a reviewer 50 years from now passing negative judgement on one of today's novels because a character kept a pet dog, a practice which was outlawed when animals were given full rights in 2030.

Someone gave me the book to read and I sort of read it on a whim not having any clue what it was about or who Paul Bowles is. Since that time this book has ignited a passion in me for Morocco and the Saraha desert as well as Paul Bowles' short stories that I have never know about anything else. I like what Gore Vidal had to say about the book "...Bowles has glimpsed what lies back of our sheltering sky...an endless flux of stars so like those atoms which make us up that in our apprehension of this terrible infinity, we experience not only horror but likeness." It is not an easy book to read and unless you are willing to spend time digging through the layers you probably will not find it that rewarding. The book challenges you in much the same way the desert challenges Kit and Port. It is not a product of the American pop culture meant to be consumed. I have not found a novel since where the desert itself is such an important protagonist. I truly found a new vigor and understanding for life upon completing this novel after experiencing what Kit and Port go through.

This is really two books bound into one - and appropriately it is made into one novel.

It starts out like Hemingway or Fitzgerald. The first half of the story line plays out like a Hemingway analysis of the Americans engaging with other Americans in a very foreign land. Or, like Fitzgerald, the main characters Kit, Port and Tunner are three adventurous Americans who have the wonderful ability of being young and wealthy as they dive into the depths of the Sahara to vacation for months among the Arabs.

Then the tide turns. Things are not so great. Unpleasantries erupt. And, Kit's life becomes a living hell. Typhoid, kidnaping, multiple rape, and theft. This half of the book is introspective, and unlike Fitzgerald or Hemingway we read not so much about the American in a foreign land, but learn about the foreigner in the foreign land. And, as I had a horrible flu and was bedridden when I read this book, I can well attest to his vivid detail of the pains of typhoid - it may have kept me in bed for an extra day as I truly had a hard time stomaching his details.

Bowles lived in Morocco and knew its Arabs well. And, this book is based upon his living in Morocco. This book's less-than-complimentary depiction of the Arab male's character is either a manifestation of his knowledge of the Arab male or a creation of a bias he acquired from living there. Probably the former.

Kit, in her twenties, learns in this book that she was a stranger in a very strange land. She was out of her element. It was a "jungle" out there. She ends up broke and broken. "There is something repulsive about an American without money in his pocket." But, she lived through the entire horror. Her survival is testimonial to her animal instincts. She persevered like a wild animal of the jungle.

This is not light reading. In fact, it is very heavy reading. Take your time in reading this prose. It is very rich and could be underappreciated.

With an air of smug narcissism, a trio of post-war Americans seek the exotic in North Africa. A love triangle develops, which progresses into a story about jealousy and betrayal, though without any traces of melodrama. Bowles' famous novel is beautifully composed; the vibrancy of the landscape is reminiscent of early Hemingway. In a way, the Sheltering Sky is a rewriting of the Sun Also Rises, though it is an inversion. We are faced with the inevitability of understanding and compassion, and the only natural consequent is destruction. This is a powerful and consuming novel written in elegant and lyrical prose. It is now something of a forgotten classic.

There's never been a better time to read a story about Americans confronting the strangeness of the arab world than now .... particularly when that book is' The Sheltering Sky', surely the most underappreciated masterpiece to come out of America in the 20th century. Bowles, unlike the people running US foreign policy today, has learned to understand and appreciate an alternative culture to his own, which is part of what gives the book its power. The Morroccans that people sheltering sky are not merely scenery. Their view of life is compelling contrasted with those of Kit and Port, the couple at the heart of the book. In fact it's so well drawn that when kit chooses to vanish into this newly discovered world, rather return to the comfort of the eastern seaboard, we can well understand her rejection of her own culture.

Like some other reviewers, I read "The Sheltering Sky" while in Morocco. Specifically, I read it while serving in Peace Corps on the border of Morocco and Algeria at the onset of another blistering Saharan summer. Having experienced a near-death illness that confined me to a mat on the floor in a sweltering concrete room the previous summer not far from the setting of the book, I identified strongly with the main character's predicament. It also sent me into a mental funk for the next few days dreading the coming months of 105+ heat in what was essentially a concrete oven of an apartment. That is just how impressive Paul Bowles' book is. Bowles spent the last half of his life in Morocco and captures North Africa skillfully. His description of a man spiraling down into his self-inflicted hell and a woman driven mad by the process is gripping. Though my own personal experience intensified the book's impact, it is quite accessible to anyone who has ever felt the urge of damn-it-all-to-hell self-destruction. If you are bothered by seemingly rational characters making irrational decisions, stay away. However, if you can't help but watch what happens when people push themselves to the edge, then this is the book for you.

The ubiquitous oppressiveness of the heat, the dryness, the wind and the burning sand seep into one's hands, arms, chest and mind as one absorbs the depth of this work. To anyone who's ever had a personal crisis, this book will speak to you. It depicts, to me anyway, what happens when you try to escape your troubles, and yourself. The further you run, the more lost you become. It is one of the few books I've read which left me searching out others who have read it to disect it to its purest, most profound message. (I want to invite the author to tea!)

Traveling by public bus through Morocco & Algeria in the early eighties, this book was getting as close to my experiences as it can get. Little had changed in the landscape, the cities and cafes apparently, since Mr Bowles had lived in the Maghreb. A giant time capsule with raw emotions, hidden yet ever present sexuality, friendliness and sudden hostility alternating in most relations, surprising calm of the Tuaregs when facing obvious dangers, near suffocating history everywhere, sights in the desert defying description of 'magical' or 'surreal'--it was all there.

The book is a feverish yet quiet masterpiece. The movie avoid at all cost even a John Malkovich can't save.

I have to admit that I was somewhat intimidated by the glorious blurbs about "The Sheltering Sky" on its cover and its reviews.

Anything this well-reviewed had to be dense and trying to read. But "The Sheltering Sky" is far from that. It moves like its restless characters, driving deeper into the Sahara and desperately shaking off any heavy identity. Bowles writes about this couple's journey to oblivion with economy and authority. Every detail and observation about Africa rings true and you can tell that Bowles spent most of his life there (according to the notes in the version I read, he wrote this novel fairly early into his Moroccan residency).

If you've seen the movie and it intrigued you, then definitely check out the book.

The ubiquitous oppressiveness of the heat, the dryness, the wind and the burning sand seep into one's hands, arms, chest and mind as one absorbs the depth of this work. To anyone who's ever had a personal crisis, this book will speak to you. It depicts, to me anyway, what happens when you try to escape your troubles, and yourself. The further you run, the more lost you become. It is one of the few books I've read which left me searching out others who have read it to disect it to its purest, most profound message. (I want to invite the author to tea!)

Traveling by public bus through Morocco & Algeria in the early eighties, this book was getting as close to my experiences as it can get. Little had changed in the landscape, the cities and cafes apparently, since Mr Bowles had lived in the Maghreb. A giant time capsule with raw emotions, hidden yet ever present sexuality, friendliness and sudden hostility alternating in most relations, surprising calm of the Tuaregs when facing obvious dangers, near suffocating history everywhere, sights in the desert defying description of 'magical' or 'surreal'--it was all there.

The book is a feverish yet quiet masterpiece. The movie avoid at all cost even a John Malkovich can't save.

I have to admit that I was somewhat intimidated by the glorious blurbs about "The Sheltering Sky" on its cover and its reviews.

Anything this well-reviewed had to be dense and trying to read. But "The Sheltering Sky" is far from that. It moves like its restless characters, driving deeper into the Sahara and desperately shaking off any heavy identity. Bowles writes about this couple's journey to oblivion with economy and authority. Every detail and observation about Africa rings true and you can tell that Bowles spent most of his life there (according to the notes in the version I read, he wrote this novel fairly early into his Moroccan residency).

If you've seen the movie and it intrigued you, then definitely check out the book.

I picked up "The Sheltering Sky" after years of knowing that it was the inspiration for the song, "Tea in the Sahara" by The Police. I'm very glad I did. At a little over 300 pages, I was prepared to spend a while on the book but I quickly read it within a week due to Bowles excellent way of not wasting time on unnecessary details. The book moves quickly and is very intriguing in the sense that you can easily relate to the struggles that the three Americans-- trying to cope in a foreign land-- are going through.

In terms of plot, The Sheltering Sky is principally about a collapsing marriage and the intrusion of "another man." But at its heart the book is about the loneliness of the desert, which is also the loneliness of individual human hearts, and about our attempts to break through the sky into what lies beyond, and our failures to do so caused by fear.
The plotting is simple and direct, but it's Bowles' insights into our fears and self-erected emotional barriers that drive the novel. The desert provides more than just imagery; it creates an atmosphere in which drama and tension thrive. The prose is beautiful throughout.
Yet the novel completely falls apart in the final section, in which Kit undergoes an emotional exile and (false?) return. The competency Bowles displays earlier in the novel in depicting human emotions and motivations completely disappears; the plot becomes an extended male fantasy of sexual imprisonment that cheapens the quality of the novel as a whole. Such truths as Bowles reveals in this section of the book could have been given much more powerfully and simply without this absurd detour into Arab sexual adventurism.

My introduction to this novel is kind of strange: One rainy day, many years ago, I went to the cinema to see what was on and there was this movie called 'The Sheltering Sky'. I walked out a few hours later, liking it alot, but kind of feeling alot went unexplained and so I immediately got hold of the novel...

That novel seriously changed my life. I was in my young twenties and desperately trying to find some meaning to life at the time. Well, to make a long story short, Bowles confronted me with all those sweet & scarey existential things about life that I had suspected. Life at the time seemed amazing and full of joy and promise, but also really terrifying and tragic, too. I guess I become a bone fide signed up member to Existentialism because of this book.

I am now in my mid thirties and whilst my rabid Existenitalism is now tempered by practical realities. The Sheltering Sky has become something of a bible of sorts to me. Here is why:

First of all, it's style of writing. Cold and clinical. It looks at the psychologies of these people like they are ants under a microscope (and in a sense they are, three people in a huge empty wide space (the desert = the world) under a, not so much merciless, but rather a 'benignly indifferent' (to borrow from Camus) 'Sheltering Sky. To me, these people in a strange land are really a metaphor/analogy for our place in the universe: How we are 'thrown' into existence with no objective reference. How we almost find ourselves in the world (surely a strange place at the best of times) and how we desperately try to connect with others (sometimes successful, sometimes not).

Anyway, it is a book that I read atleast once a year.

These are merely my subjective feelings - I'm certainly not going to say 'it is the best book ever', or something to that effect. But it is certainly my favourite book. Mostly because it demonstrated to me how another humans artistic endeavour can inform and help someone else to find their own answers. And because of that we are never really alone.

"The Sheltering Sky" gives a cool existentialist sheen to an otherwise pretty conventional Orientalist romance. The story of three Westerners trying to find their metaphysical way against the exotic (and ultimately horrifying) backdrop of Morocco reduces North Africa to a kind of movie set for the "real" characters--the American couple Kit and Port, along with their friend Tunner--to explore the nature of existence. Bowles is good at describing the trash, poverty, bad food, and illness his characters discover in Africa. Instead of sweeping that under the rug, he makes it a key part of the story: it's through learning to accept the third-world filth that Kit and Port free themselves of Western convention, and come to embrace the emptiness behind the sheltering sky. But I think the real force of the novel isn't so much in its philosophy--a fashionable `50s existentialism--or its spare descriptions of the East, where Arabs aren't much more than talking landscape, but in its portrait of Paul and Jane Bowles, the glamorous writers in fashionable exile in Tangier. I get the impression Bowles was trying to deliver great scary truths, but what I enjoyed most about the novel was its fantasy of privileged escape from modern ennui.

P.S. Does anyone else find that "P.S." marketing insert in Harper Perennial editions as annoying as I do?

The Sheltering Sky...the title lures you in with the promise of a reading experience both surreal and sensual. The book delivers on its promise.
Bowles' description of Northern Africa and the goings-on therein is atmospheric, haunting and it manages to frazzle the nerves. We see this exotic locale through the eyes of the psychologically involving characters Kit and Port. Even Tunner, who is unmistakably Kit and Port's inferior, isn't given short shrift. He's considered in his entirety and is not a caricature.
This book takes the reader to another place. Not to Northern Africa necessarily. It takes the reader into the inner recesses of complicated characters' psyches. The sojourn to this nebulous terrain is both terrifying and magnificent.
The effect of this trip is not that we love, loathe or even identify with Kit and Port. We become them. Although such a statement sounds nonsensical, I have no other way of describing the curious, powerful feeling aroused by reading "The Sheltering Sky".

The first chapter of this book is, in my opinion, one of the great pieces of twentieth century writing. It is no more than a couple of pages but it is so overwhelming that I had to put the book down after reading it. This book is gripping, terrifying and unsettling. It is unequalled in its portrayal of alienation and, indeed, depression. It is extraordinary its intuition. Paul Bowles should be recognised as one of the great writers in English and, I believe, in time he will be.

This is one of the best books I've ever read, along with "Of Human Bondage" by W. Somerset Maugham. It is a sweeping adventure that takes a long look at life, travel, adventure, trying to get away from it all, getting lost in the unknown, and more. I thoroughly enjoyed not only the characters (Port, Kit, Tunner) but also the descriptions of Morocco and the Sahara, where you can really feel that you are there. Bowles perfectly captures the time and the place-as he lived in Tangier for 50 years. I will definitely be looking for more of his books to read.

After having spent a night in Tangier, Morocco, I now admire Paul Bowles' attention to the eccentricities of Arab life for such naïve foreigner readers as myself. One can read The Sheltering Sky in a number of ways. To begin with there exists enough of a plot to read it straight through without considering the existential philosophies integrating into the narrative. I do not suggest such a bare reading. You will be left feeling both empty and partially disgusted by the novel. However, one may, with a deeper vision, uncover the extensive thought and emotion with which the book was written. There is substance, perhaps more than you are prepared for in your own reading of it. Bowles' language varies from the sparsest of descriptions to such heart-wrenching of psychological analyses that the reader may need to put the book down to contemplate the situations of the characters. Bowles' structure is supported by the subtle and affective repetition of themes. From the opening scene, he continually draws our attention back to characters while they are in or emerging from states of utter rest, and unconsciousness, even. The Sheltering Sky exists now as a classic of 20th century literature. If you are interested in the travels of such mid-century artistic renegades as Ginsberg, Kerouac, or Gysin, this novel is essential in understanding their fascination with the author and his setting. Indeed, one would be hard pressed to improve on Bowels' description of North Africa and its inhabitants. Although he doesn't bombard you with flowery prose, he captures the essence of the land and the people who he encountered there.

An intense and thoughtful novel with occasional flashes of brilliance, but I was expecting more from this "classic". The characters proved hard people to care about. I found the prose a little ponderous. And the final section about Kit and the camel-riders was unconvincing, even ludicrous (for some reason it brought to mind a terrible Wilbur Smith novel I once read). Disappointing: I finished it without regret.

Not nearly as good as I was expecting it to be. Their existential despair seems more like affectation. The characters are shallow, not very intelligent, and boring. There are some decent psycho-spiritual observations scattered throughout the book and Bowles is certainly an excellent stylist, but ultimately this rather tedious and uninspiring novel survives based on just these two things.

A strange and disconcerting book. Sometimes too removed, always visually descriptive, not wholly satisfying, occasionally heartbreaking.
Post-colonial Algeria presents the couple with a false sense of belonging in a strange place; and a feeling of arrogant entitlement which they are reluctant to acknowledge in themselves. At once, they view themselves as a part, and apart, of the environment. They distinguish themselves from boorish stereotypes, (Mrs Lyle and her son), by their liberalism, and validate their presence abroad, as travellers, who are exploring not imposing.
Landscape as a metaphor - its bleakness and aridity mirrors the state of love between the two protagonists. Its monotony of sky and sand dunes and dirt causes a gross discomfort (for the couple) - similarly, the familiarity of their relationship provokes insecurity. The sky does not shelter; nor what's beyond the sky (Port reaches here through death).
The slow breakdown of Kit and Port's relationship is recorded, through its absence, rather than its presence. Their isolation from each other, runs parallel to their alienation as westerners within north Africa.
Tunner provides a foil, of sorts, to this event (as well as being an object at which tensions are directed). He directly aids its destruction through his clandestine affair with Kit, but also, he remains the ubiquitous third party with whom one, or neither, of them side. By turns, he brings them together, and splits them further apart.
Port's death sees the renewal of Kit's life. It gives a release that she has presumed she would never find again. She abandons her superstitious outlook, realising that the only `omens' she discovers, are of her own making. She takes control. Previously, control was shared, and responsibilities dictated by this sharing.
However, her control is short-lived. Effectively, she's swallowed up by the Sahara. Stylistically, the third section of the novel, with its automatic and unconscious narrative, echoes this. Whilst the previous two parts are rooted in realism, the third gives over entirely to complete surrealism. The descriptions of place, become even more vivid - they take precedence, as the desert overpowers Kit.
Kit successfully loses herself - a strangely satisfying ending - to insanity, the desert, and anonymity, her aloneness (only compounded by grief), becoming unbearable. The novel consistently remains a subtle drama, allowing the reader only ever half way into the characters, at which point they become merely symbolic, often frustratingly so. Theme - the psychology of post-war existentialism - predominates characterisation.
Bowles' attempts to remove focus from the straightness of the plot can be skimmed, although all sub-events work towards, rather than against, expression of the former. Kit and Port's journey remains mostly unexplained - perhaps Bowles felt no explanation was necessary.

For Kerouac and the Beats, frenetic, directionless travel was proof of life - could even be held to "create" life. Bowles, in this slyly subversive book, reverses that. The three Americans who start out on this largely pointless journey into the North African desert, hope the mere fact of movement will resolve their deep spiritual lethargy - or at least delay their having to face it. They imagine themselves sophisticated, wearing their cynicism as a talisman in a cultural landscape of troubling strangeness. But they are simply unaware. Faced with an elemental vastness that cares nothing for their conceits, they dis-integrate. Only one survives and she is so utterly changed - physically and in spirit - that she can no longer recognise herself, nor see a future for herself in the world she formally inhabited. Although the prime characters are fundamentally unpleasant - at least for most of the book - the lasting impression is of an eerie, spectral beauty. It is a quiet masterpiece; I know of few books that are more subtly teasing - that more wisely poke at our arrogance in imagining that we know anything.

The title of this book gives one a sense of security. I fought my way through this book. Along the way several times I thought that it was a waste. The grit it left behind after reading it subdued any appreciation. Not until I was done did it seem a very good book. It ties up your emotions. The characters have such a hard time communicating with one another it makes you want to scream. I thought of their lack of communication versus mine. The frustration of the characters was the frustration we all feel

Upon reflection after reading The Sheltering Sky, I found the eccentricity of the characters, the haunting, dreamlike quality of their lives, and the way in which their dreams deteriorated into abject nightmare overwhelming. So much so, that I sat and cried for the better part of an hour.

Kit's desire to be close to Port leads her into the desert chasing his love of the desert, and her twin desire to be rid of all responsibilty whatsoever comes to pass as her captivity in the harem. I heard in my head the admonishment to be careful what you wish for as I read this book, and it seemed as if almost everything the character's wanted they were given, but the finer points which they failed to elucidate in their wishes were spelled out for them in lieu of further clarity on their parts as to what they wanted from their relationships to the world.

I identified strongly with Kit. Port was her connection to reality, and at one time, I had my own, which mired me within the ports of the sane. For a time, I took a trip on the road to insanity, and finally found the connection to reality within myself. Kit's passage on her own trip felt frighteningly familiar. I daresay, that the description of her descent into madness is neither facile, nor unbelievable. I found it very disquieting, and the memories it engendered were quite painful. The feeling of being at more than a loss for words that Kit's character describes at one point rang all too true. At a certain point you can feel as if your native tongue is like a foreign language that you do not know, and therefore you cannot give an accurate account of your tenuousness to bystanders.

All of this brings me to the point that if the ultimate journey to be made is into our own souls, then running and hiding from everything that surrounds us, looking for the exotic won't change the ultimate destination. We cannot get away from ourselves. The world is our house of mirrors. At the risk of sounding facile, we can be our own worst enemies, or own best friends.

And in the adventure to understand ourselves and others, the unrelenting, and often harsh world of nature will be none to happy and emotionless about helping us to find what it is we seek. Nature, represented by the desert in this harsh existentialist tale, is a demanding mistress. The presence of the desert as a character makes me wonder about the necessity of Tunner as a character on the trip with Port and Kit. More likely, he has the significance to the story of a fly on the nose, while the desert is the true third party in this 'love triangle'. The desert is almost a transferance and personification of Port's desire to be close to the love of his life, Kit, and her intellectuality not withstanding, Kit's emptiness, her vacuousness that lies at the core of her intelligence, her veneer of intelligence, is consuming.

Could not the 'sheltering sky' be like the veil of existence, or equally like the impenetrable mask of make-up that Western women apply to their faces, and which Kit obsessively does so often in the book, almost as if to keep up the barrier between what lies on the outside and what lies beneath?

And what lies beneath can be almost like a seperate identity, another side to oneself that is indifferent to misery and happiness, that just exists like the blackness behind the sheltering sky. Neither good nor bad, but simply malleable in either direction. Port's mistress as the desert, is really his desire to understand himself and his relationship with Kit. He cannot fathom it. Kit, for her part, attempts to understand his fascination with the desert in order to learn the truth of both her existence and Port's, and what she learns makes her appear to everyone else as if she has been robbed of her sanity. But who truly knows?

This novel is all about the unanswered and unanswerable questions of existence. More than just existential, it is a meditation on the meaning of life that refuses to give pat answers to the Hollywood crowd who wants a neat resolution in 120 minutes. Life is not like that, and neither is Bowles novel. This may deeply chagrin some who read it, and drive them to conclude that the novel is all pretention, while others like myself will read it and be bowled over by the frightening intensity with which Bowles holds the magnifying glass to the smoking insect of our lives...much as Kit does to a particular insect at a certain point in the novel. Need I mention that Bowles uses metaphor mercilessly. The glare of the sun on the truths of our lives is relentless, like the heat of the desert, and no amount of putting sheets over windows, or the locking of doors will ultimately be able to keep that out.

Bowles is exceptional as a writer for his ability to make the reader see where the doorway is into understanding their own existence. This novel was never meant to be purely "entertainment" or escapism. It cruelly leads you off on that path, and then turns, when your water has all run out, and the camel is tired, and lets you see the edginess behind its pupils that you somehow seemed to miss upon first glance. Some people cut out early on the journey, as did Port, while others finish it to the bitter end. The question is, ultimately, is it really bitter? I think the enigmatic quality of the ending only points up that nothing is ever really writ in stone.

I consumed The Sheltering Sky in one day. It was interesting and I had the time. The end left me very depressed and disturbed. I do not like being depressed and so my first impression was that I did not like this book. Then I read other reviews and decided that a book that can depress you is pretty powerful. On the whole, I got the impression that the Moresby's were procrastinating their life and merely subsisting. Bowles exposes their weaknesses in all areas, Kit's especially. Both the Moresby's lose their sanity at the end, if not more than that. I would give this book four stars except that it didn't give me the desire to read it again. Some passages were very hard to discern and some details seemed unnecessary. As I said before,a very disturbing read.

THE SHELTERING SKY invites you to drown yourself much like good music...a blissful suicide. If you romanticize "the abyss" and get a kick out of the dissolution of the ego, then do not hesitate to read this novel. And to maximize the experience, choose an appropriate setting: an empty beach, maybe some secluded spot in Montana, the desert (of course)...anywhere vast will do so that when you look up from the page, your head full, the environment surrounding you will swallow your state of mind and throw you for a whirl. Enjoy.

I just read this book for the second time. It's greatness, beauty, intelligence and wisdom took me by surprise, again. I think it stands equal to anything Joyce, Hemingway, Faulkner, Fitzgerald or Camus ever wrote.

There's a haunting scene where the surviving characters gaze up at teh full moon over the desert, and think of how rarely they truly notice the moon . . . and begin to wonder how many full moons they have left in their lives. All of Bowles' works make you confront your mortality in ways that are, ultimately, liberating.

With the death of Paul Bowles the world has lost one of its great authors. This book allows us to hold on to some of that greatness. As a rumination on the existential impact of place and space, the book opens up horizons of thought one may have never considered. When Port tells Kit his thoughts on the 'sheltering sky' one is asked to consider the implications of realizing - always and ceaselessly knowing - that the "sky" is a fiction that protects us from our very insignificance. In one short passage, Bowles has ripped the lid off our world as surely as he casts Kit into the desert, another grain of sand among countless others. This book is about more than an encounter with the Sahara, it is about - and is itself - an encounter with human existence.

I'm really wondering if I read the same book as everyone else here. I found the story ridiculous and the characters way too shallow to have the "deep thoughts" Bowles tries to cram into their heads. While it's clear Kit, Port and Tunner don't understand or much appreciate the native culture, the book really doesn't show how they impact it. We see it slightly through the ancillary characters but not with any great insight. We have no idea why Kit and Port have become estranged, but if they're too stupid to even think it through very clearly how is it they're going to analyze the meaning of life in the desert? Frankly, it's hard to really care about them at all. The blurbs and reviews paint the Lyles as some threatening presence that hangs over the story -- they're con artists who drop in and out of the book and are far less threatening than any of the various diseases our heroes decide to ignore. Even considering the post-WWII context, the story stumbles along in a way that is so totally unrealistic that the reader is wondering just what the point is. In the end, Port is dead, Kit appears to have become a nymphomaniac, and the sheltering sky continues to beat down on the timeless sands.

Bowles takes the reader into the deep desert and psyche of his characters. From the first incredible page, his images and characters are rendered in flawless prose. One of the most poignant, memorable books I've read. ]

Highly recommended.

Three Americans (a married couple and an acquaintance) wander around Northern Africa after the Second World War. They appear to have little emotional bond with each other and no connection to the exotic land and culture through which they move. Initially, I kept reading this book hoping for redemption - imagining that the alien environment in which the characters found themselves might somehow force them closer to each other.

There is no redemption. There is no hope. As my sense of foreboding grew stronger, I was increasingly tempted to put the book down. It is testament, at least, to Paul Bowles writing that his story was engaging enough to keep me reading through to the desolate final pages. We all know that the sky cannot shelter - it exposes people. Bowles attempts to do this, delving at length into the inner thoughts of his main characters. Unfortunately, all of this wordy introspection makes the characters seem self obsessed. The reader desperately wishes that they would just, for a moment, turn their gazes away from their belly buttons and see the people around them. They lack any grip on reality. They appear to have nothing to fall back on - no relationships, no beliefs, no community, no truth. To them, Northern Africa is not a land of real people, food, culture and languages - it is merely the backdrop to their personal existential crises.

The journey that Kit takes in the second half of the book does not ring true. It is perhaps too easy to attribute this to the fact that the author is a male, but I suspect it might be the case. Kit did not appear to want to be in Northern Africa. If anything could shake her out of her introspection and send her back to her homeland, surely it would be her husband's exit. Instead, she embarks on a journey alone into the desert that has consequences which for most females would be deeply traumatic, but which she seems to invite and at times even enjoy. It is deeply unsettling to read and ultimately I could not accept the way her character was crafted by Bowles. Perhaps this is what he wanted - seemingly happy to destroy the relationships between his characters and the characters themselves, perhaaps he is content also to break any bond with his readers.

its only days later after finishing this book yet somehow i keep ging back to it in my mind. The desolution in the desert and the sheer force bowles thrusts these characters upon you- love or hate them they are all there, so honest and intriguing in their personal journeys. this book is unlike any other i have read. pg 186 when kit and port sit beneath the maple trees is my favorite part in the book where port shares his philosophy on death and how we take it for granted how fragile life is. "Because we dont know when we will die we get to think of life as an inexhaustable well"... this scene and book makes me appreciate life more. rest easy mr. bowles and thank you.

(On behalf of the Revolving Door Book Club) In general, we are confused how this ended up on the top 100 list. Perhaps the members of the group are not into self-absorbed nihilism of which this is a fine example. The movie is a mess and perhaps more confusing than the book.

I fell in love with Paul Bowles' writing through this book. Can't get enough of him now. I thought I was throughly emersed with the Beat writers, Ginsburg & Kerouc. Now I've found a fellow, less known Beat. Wow.

The Sheltering Sky is a book that has everything--passion, love, disillusionment, pathos--you name and it's there. I hate to use the word, "masterpiece," but in this case, it applies. Bowles has done a perfect job in showing us the psychological depths of people who are deeply in love, yet lose their connections to and need for each other. The power of their plight is only reinforced by the unrelenting bleakness of the vast Sahara. It is a dark and often depressing book but one that is more than satisfying and memorable.

As I read more and more into the life of Jane Bowles, I thought I would benifit from reading some of her husband's work. It enrages me to think that he became the famous one, for he lacks all the wit and charm of his wife's writing. The only thing I feel I got out of this book was a small biographical view of his feelings for his wife (Kate/Jane, come on folks, it obvious). I you really are a fan of Paul, I recomend reading ' A Little Orginal Sin' the biography of Jane Bowles, just for a further understanding of him. A person always plays them self up, it is in through around him that was see who he truly was. He was a good man, but his story is not everything.

I am essentially a reader. I've spent countless hours reading in my life, and my my career is (can you guess?) librarian. Take my word for it, this book is fabulous. Bowles can transport you. You won't look at life the same way after reading this book. It's beautiful and searing, going straight to a truth like an arrow to a target. It's magic.

... having lived and loved in Morocco, I have been eager to find someone who can articulate the ferocious mystery of the places I loved.

But Paul Bowles -- who loved the desert, spent his life in Morocco -- gives his characters only disdain. They are people dulled by boredom, depression, loneliness... fascinating, probably, but we can't get into their heads. They speak over ours.

After the death of one character, the novel becomes something else entirely. Kit's journey through the desert, her captivity in the harem of a desert man, and her descent into madness felt made-up, tacked onto the end of another story, hype, laziness on the part of a talented writer who got bored with his own work.

"There is a certain point from which there is no posible return. That's the point where we have to get"
Kafka's sentence presides de third part of the book and the whole of it. Kit, Port and Turner adventure is that of lost people in the sand desert. They walk, and talk, and move without apparent goal. Death is behind, above and beyond. But inside there is a whole palnet to discover

This book is too flawed for me to consider it "great." It's a worthwhile book to read--unless you're a postmodernist--but Bowles' reach doesn't meet his grasp. When he pushes the narrative along, the book is effective and engrossing. When he strives for profundity, the reading becomes tedious. Some plot points seem ludicrous and factitious, and other points (and characters) are left unresolved. (Tobias Wolff overpraised this book using nonsense sentences like, "It has the inevitability of myth.") Eh...I recommend the book, but one must keep their expectations measured.

An unsatisfying book, recounting an implausible story of sheer fantasy with no/little pretensions of reality. I chose the book expecting to glean cultural insight of places (Algeria in this case) that I'll never visit, based on book-cover and online write-ups with remarks such as "devastatingly imaginative observer of the West's encounter with the East" and "Paul Bowles examines the ways in which Americans' incomprehension of alien cultures leads to the ultimate destruction of those cultures." The book attained none of this, it dwelled for pages on sheer fantasy, highly implausible events, characters of dubious sanity, and offered no cultural insights beyond recounting the heat and grit of African life, with both of which I'm already familiar.

A novel in the tradition of dissolute sojourns by privileged but dissatisfied figures, Bowles attempts to beautify desolate landscapes and repressive Saharan locales, but for this reader he fails. None of the characters are sympathetic, they are merely foils of the ugliest sort: ugly Americans, thieving and conniving Brits, scoffing French officers, amorphous Arab and African stereotypes. Read and enjoy this if you are or like alcoholic and licentious blue-bloods and enjoy suffering in yourself and others, because suffer you will as you read the painful travails of Kit, Port, Tunner, and the others. I can sympathize more with protagonists from Henry Miller, Ernest Hemingway, John Dos Passos, and even Fitzgerald, much more so than Bowles' agonists. The best book about being trapped in a sandy hell hole is Abe's "The Woman in the Dunes."

The Sheltering Sky aspires to be a sweeping, elegiac novel in which the protagonists' confrontations with the hostile, foreign elements of both nature and humankind provide a figurative structure from within which the author can make beautiful, momentous and pithy observations on our modern lives.
Put it another way: there aren't many funny bits. The Sheltering Sky takes itself very seriously indeed.
Alas, Paul Bowles' enterprise is completely undermined by the (actually fairly well observed) characters: the lead roles in this Saharan melodrama are played by a husband and wife who have fallen out of love with each other. If this were all, I think Bowles might have got away with it. But crucially, the couple - Port and Kit - are also two of the most dislikeable lead characters to be found anywhere in contemporary fiction.
Port is selfish, unfaithful, rude and arrogant. Kit is hardly better: duplicitous, similarly unfaithful, hysterical, and given to an annoying irrationality which, towards the end of the book veers inexplicably towards sheer lunacy. Another reviewer has described them as "innocents abroad". That may be how they're regarded in the author's homeland; people in other parts of the world would recognise them as something rather different and, I'm bound to say, less appealing: "Americans abroad".
Port and Kit have the most irritating, implausible conversations; the sort which could only be invented by an author trying to explore Important Things. Consider the following exchange:
"`Why don't you extend your good wishes to all humanity, while you're at it?' she demanded.
"`Humanity?' cried Port. `What's that? Who is humanity? I'll tell you. Humanity is everyone but one's self. So of what interest can it be to anybody?'"
Anyone conducting this conversation in real life is, I respectfully submit, asking to have their lights punched out.

It is thus extremely hard to give a damn about either of the characters. And when an author has lost (or in this case, never really gained) his audience's sympathy for his protagonists, then any message that might be embedded in their experiences is likely to remain buried (because the reader can't be bothered to look for it) or worse, to be rejected altogether. Instead, one can take perverse pleasure from their misfortunes (which are many and varied) - but this can hardly have been what Paul Bowles intended.
It is hard to understand what Bowles did intend, though: his writing at critical points is oblique enough to be completely meaningless. Again, take an example - a complete paragraph which arrives pretty much out of nowhere:
"His cry went on through the final image: the spots of raw bright blood on the earth. Blood on excrement. The supreme moment, high above the desert, when two elements, blood and excrement, long kept apart, merge. A black star appears, a point of darkness in the night sky's clarity. Point of darkness and gateway to repose. Reach out, pierce the fine fabric of the sheltering sky, take repose."
If you know what on Earth that's all about, you've done better than me. And if you care, then this may be the book for you. If not, consider exchanging days of irritation for two short hours of it: rent Bartolucci's film version instead.
Olly Buxton

It's very difficult to get a read on why any of the characters do what they do.
Kit getting raped by an Arab father son tag team, and thinking really nothing of it and in fact enjoying it, is bizarre. Sure she was in no position to complain but you'd think she'd be ever on the lookout to escape when she got to their home and town..... but instead her thinking is flaky and flat. She excepts everything as tho she knew no better. As tho her life before never happened. Plus how she got herself into this predicament was unbelievably crazy, she must be the weakest woman in the world. So I'm left to assume she was unstable to begin with. The only real thing we are told about her is that she is a person who is scared of everything, which doesn't jiv with her action of taking off alone into the desert on foot.
I think Bowles was being intentionally shocking to sell his stories. This was published in 1949. Kit's husbands actions were just as incongruous and reckless. And the mom-son team, jeez!, I don't know how they even survived, they belonged in the loony-bin.

Bowles writing is good it's just his story that's not engaging.

slow start but the prose weaves a spell, powerfully creates the mystery of travelling in a truly foreign culture, important themes of life and death too, worth reading through and then immediately rereading

Admittedly, I only got through 2/3 of this book but having read many of the reviews on this site, I knew what to expect and decided to stop reading. First, this is a classic work in the vain of other Beat generation writers such as Kerouac. However, this book did not work for me, possibly because of my South Asian heritage. While Bowles makes a worthy effort at portraying middle east culture as alienating and disorienting to the average American, I just couldn't buy the "mysteriousness" of Moroccan culture. The world is a much smaller, more cosmopolitan place than it was in 1947, so it was hard for me to relate to crucial elements of Sheltering Sky's main character, the desert.

I read this book while in Morocco. I remember my paranoia (which is already peaked at the time) increasing ten-fold. But still, it was engaging to read particularly because I was encountering the locations, people, and environment that is showcased by The Sheltering Sky. The plot is not the most compelling one though. So, I am unsure if this book is something I would have enjoyed if I wasn't already there.

Pointless, convoluted soul searching by irritating characters who could have sorted their problems with a straightforward chat over a cup of coffee. I can only think that Bowles was exploring what happens when already deranged Americans arrive in a foreign land.
The conversation is contrived. The thought processes near insane in their detachment from reality (were Port and Kit schitzophrenic?). The attempts to make the mundane seem mysterious irritating (the Lyles were just con artists and thieves - that's all).
Certainly Kit's inexplicable behaviour at the death of Port and her subsequent Heart of Darkness like journey into a Saharan erotic mental and physical imprisonment suggests there was a serious mental instability already lurking.
In short, they should have been seeking therapy in New York. They were too unbalanced and immature to take a train to Boston (let alone be married).

Three profoundly annoying American expatriates wander around Saharan Africa as, to our great delight, increasingly horrible things happen to them. Exhibit A in the case in favor of my Time Zone Rule, which posits that you should never leave the Eastern Time Zone of the United States.
This is a big time cult novel. Folks babble incoherently about how the desert & a "culture other than their own" force the characters to confront their inner selves. Yeah right.
GRADE: D

When I read a book, I generally try not to read any summaries of its contents so the experience can be new. Thus I picked up 'The Sheltering Sky' without any idea what it was about. I struggled through about half of its horrible content before deciding to flip it over and read the blurb to see if anything would ever develop. And according to the jacket blurb, this is a book about "Americans' incomprehension of alien cultures" and how that "leads to the ultimate destruction of those cultures". And right there you have, in one pretentious, smug sentence, a summation of the stupidity of this novel.

First, that is decidedly not what the book is about. The American characters are not the only non-natives in the novel, and they certainly aren't the most uncomprehending. The only non-native characters in the book are the main characters (three Americans), a pair of horrible traveling English people, and the colonial locals. And of this set, the American characters - while incredibly self-absorbed and tiresome - definitely come out the best. They are even the most admired in the story. We are repeatedly told how local characters enjoy their company or find them fascinating or are attracted to them.

Second, the actions of the main characters have aboslutely no cultural impact, because they're just shallow nobodies. They stumble about and whine about the horrible conditions and engage in pedantic bits of juvenile philosophical dialog and monolog, but they affect nobody around them.

Third, the journey they take and Bowles' interminable description of their journeys and inner thoughts are completely unremarkable, except in the stunning tone-deafness of the prose and bizarrely inhuman ways in which the characters act and react. The end of the novel in particular is quite laughable; to accept it as plausible one has to have the most ridiculous, early-20th-century chauvinistic 'literary' preconception of a female.

So what is the story really about? In a nutshell: three Americans decide to slum around Saharan Africa. Two of them, Port and Kit, pretend to be married (many claim they are actually married but this is not specifically stated, and it is repeatedly hinted that they are simply saying they are married to avoid any questions about cohabitation). The other, Tunner, is their caddish friend who secretly wants to conquer Kit. Incidentally, the ridiculous names should perhaps be a hint as to what's in store. They travel together for a while and have empty conversations. Then Tunner seduces Kit while she's drunk. Kit doesn't tell Port, but they work together to divert Tunner so Port and Kit can be alone. Then Port's passport is stolen (by one of the English couple) and Port gets typhoid. It takes him forever to die. Tunner comes to meet them right as Port dies, and Kit goes insane and walks off into the desert. Tunner waits for her to return. The last third of the novel describes Kit being abducted by desert nomads and repeatedly sexually assaulted until she can escape.

And that's it. It's nothing like the back summary (which sounds like the kind of thing book club members say to each other while nodding approvingly). In fact, if anything it's exactly the opposite: Bowles' entire point seemed to be that the desert, and its people, are permanent and enduring; those who come to conquer or even partake of its beauty go unnoticed and may not make it out alive. It's hubristic to think our mere existence is 'destroying cultures'. Unfortunately even this point is presented in such an incompetent fashion that it's just not worth the trouble.

There is precisely one good quote from the book, and Brandon Lee knew it by heart. Just search for that, save yourself the trouble of reading it.

I was really disappointed by this book. Maybe I'm old-fashioned, but I like a novel with a plot and with characters who are at least plausible if not interesting. This book has neither. Given the glowing reviews here on the store, I kept reading on, assuming that "this has got to take off soon." It never did. Nothing led anywhere, nothing mattered, nothing happened. Maybe, as some previous reviewers suggested, that's the point: this book is about nothingness, and thereby makes a statement about the twentieth century soul. But if that's what I wanted, I could just have stared at a blank piece of paper for fifteen minutes. When I read a book, I want to engage with the book on some level, and I did not engage on any level whatsoever with this book. Maybe it's me, but all I can say is "Reader Beware." When they say that the desert is the main character, THEY'RE NOT KIDDING. If you're interested in people or plot, look elsewhere.

Literally the worst book I have ever read. I received it as a gift from a friend who RAVED about it for months and when I finally read it all I could think was how the only good thing about it was that I didn't spend money on this garbage. Here's a quick plot summary; three entitled, rich, white folks parade around Northern Africa wreaking havoc with "the locals", all while stating over and over again how filthy, uncivilized, and barbaric said locals are. Key plot points; sexual violence, celebrating the perspective of the entitled white Western foreigner, dry and long-winded descriptions of landscapes (and the land is by far the most interesting character in the book). While I want to give away my copy of the book, I also would feel bad for passing along this sorry excuse for literature.

I *HATED* this book. There is nothing likeable about the characters, nothing to draw you in and care about what's going on in their heads. Rich, spoiled, selfish. Bah. I think Bowle's portrayal of Kit was shallow and unrealistic. He says she gets through her days balancing an internal dialog of omens and signs, yet after he mentions this, there's no evidence of her doing this. I think he got the female character way wrong, expecting her to validate her existence only if there was a man in the picture. And his portrayal of the "natives" of the various locales was incredibly unflattering. Why go deeper and deeper into the desert seeking a "real" experience if you're going to dis the people who live there? Alienation, existential angst, yadda yadda yadda. Yeah, we get it, but who cares with these people? I think this book is like The Emperor's New Clothes. Everyone talks about how great it is but in reality, it sucks.