The Sheltering Sky

Rating:
Summary: The Loneliness of the Individual
Review: "The Sheltering Sky" is a very interesting novel, set in French North Africa just after the end of World War Two. The Americans Port and Kit Moresby are in North Africa, with the intention of travelling around - but more importantly their marriage is in trouble and they are attempting to breathe life into it. Tagging along with them is another American, Tunner, who, along with various North Africans, French colonial officials, and the appalling British woman Mrs Lyle and her son, all get in the way of Port and Kit's attempts at reconciliation.

The novel conveys a continual sense of frustration and powerlessness: getting away from conventional Western society should have eased Port and Kit's problems, but people, random events and their own desires and needs contrive to foil their plans, to ruin their best intentions.

I thought that Bowles was exploring the idea of the essential powerlessness of human beings to control their fates and to redirect their nature. There is a futility behind every attempt to bring some kind of spiritual or emotional order to what in essence is a meaningless and orderless world. The Western characters in the novel are all lacking in a sense of direction and are lonely - the more they try to take control, the worse their problems become. Rather than accepting reality, they fight against it.

This is a challenging novel - however its pace is not as slow as I thought it would be. Bowles's writing is fine, capturing the inner feelings of his characters. The descriptions and mood of the locations he uses felt authentic. Well worth taking the time to read.

Rating:
Summary: Innocents abroad
Review: "The Sheltering Sky" pries into the mysteries of the Sahara using three American "travelers" (as opposed to "tourists", they claim) as the focus of the story -- a married couple, Port and Kit Moresby, and their friend Tunner. Port and Kit's marriage is shaky, made more so by the sly presence of Tunner, who has his eye on Kit. (This love triangle is vaguely redolent of the trio of safari hunters in Hemingway's "The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber.") These three widely-traveled Americans are so bored with the refinement of their lives back home and the predictability of more popular tourist attractions that they feel an itinerary through the exotic, if often filthy and diseased, land of the Sahara will provide an exhilarating change of pace. What they find is that they cannot escape their own personal demons.

The novel begins in Oran, Algeria, from which the trio plan to travel more or less aimlessly from city to city throughout northern Africa, by bus or train, seeing the sights and staying in the hotels. At a hotel bar, Port meets an odd and sneaky young English man named Eric Lyle who is traveling with his querulous, overbearing mother. As the Moresbys and Tunner arrive in different towns, the Lyles have a tendency to turn up again like a bad penny without much purpose to the plot or effect on the main characters. The Lyles offer a lot of interesting plot potential which Bowles unfortunately does not bother to explore.

I was puzzled by the last third of the novel, which seems strangely detached from the preceding events. Port eventually comes down with a fever and dies, and Kit inexplicably runs off into the desert. She gets picked up by two native merchants traveling by camel, and continuing southward through the desert, they ravish her on a regular basis, which she does not entirely resist. One of the merchants takes her to his home and holds her captive in his harem. This descent into a symbolic hell seems to signal the end of her carefree life of innocence and luxury, a life to which she can no longer return.

The book is beautifully written; Bowles depicts the Sahara's geography, people, and cultures with the kind of rich detail such a story deserves. I just wish Kit's motives at the end of the novel were a little more comprehensible.

Rating:
Summary: Worth a read
Review: I picked up this book by accident and found it surprisingly dark, deep, and intriguing. Recommended.

Rating:
Summary: a study in "awayness".
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: The Loneliness of the Individual
Review: "The Sheltering Sky" is a very interesting novel, set in French North Africa just after the end of World War Two. The Americans Port and Kit Moresby are in North Africa, with the intention of travelling around - but more importantly their marriage is in trouble and they are attempting to breathe life into it. Tagging along with them is another American, Tunner, who, along with various North Africans, French colonial officials, and the appalling British woman Mrs Lyle and her son, all get in the way of Port and Kit's attempts at reconciliation.

The novel conveys a continual sense of frustration and powerlessness: getting away from conventional Western society should have eased Port and Kit's problems, but people, random events and their own desires and needs contrive to foil their plans, to ruin their best intentions.

I thought that Bowles was exploring the idea of the essential powerlessness of human beings to control their fates and to redirect their nature. There is a futility behind every attempt to bring some kind of spiritual or emotional order to what in essence is a meaningless and orderless world. The Western characters in the novel are all lacking in a sense of direction and are lonely - the more they try to take control, the worse their problems become. Rather than accepting reality, they fight against it.

This is a challenging novel - however its pace is not as slow as I thought it would be. Bowles's writing is fine, capturing the inner feelings of his characters. The descriptions and mood of the locations he uses felt authentic. Well worth taking the time to read.

Rating:
Summary: Americans abroad
Review: 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

Rating:
Summary: Turn off your conscious mind!
Review: There's no other way to read Paul Bowles. Just tell the inner critic to shut up for a while, let yourself fall into his dark shadowy prose, and he will take you over...

Rating:
Summary: Sentimientos encontrados (Review in spanish)
Review: (Review in Spanish).Como muchos seguramente, emprendí la lectura de este libro tras haber visto la película del mismo nombre de Bernardo Bertolucci. Encontré que el film es bastante fiel a la novela en algunos puntos, mientras que partes importantes de la novela (como la narración de la historia de las hermanas que querían tomar el té en el Sahara) fueron omitidos de la película.
Pero, ¿Cómo es el libro? Por el lado bueno, la prosa de Bowles es intensa y precisa, transportando al lector al calor, la basura y el encanto particular de Africa .Algunas frases son memorables. Por el lado malo, Bowles tiende a alargar demasiado ciertas situaciones (la enfermedad de Port, el viaje personal de Kit), haciendo con ello difícil y tediosa la narración.
En suma, el libro tal vez es para aquellos que ya conocen a Bowles o los que estudian Letras, aman la literatura, etc. Los lectores casuales pueden rentar la película y acabar con el asunto en un par de horas, ahorrandose tiempo y dinero, y quedar igualmente satisfechos.

Rating:
Summary: The reality of being an traveler
Review: The book is well written in that I felt I was traveling in the hot, humid desert to the mysterious North African cities with the 3 American characters, and was able to get into the interior of their minds and how they comprehended being in an alien culture. The beginning was slow but once you get going into the book the more interesting the journey becomes. The three American's are not very sympathetic people in the book, except maybe Port who seems to want to try to understand the native people and have relationships with them such as Marhnia, but her story of having Tea in the Sahara is as imcomprehensible as her and frusturating because I wanted to connect to Marhnia and understand her story like Port but could not. I also like the way the author writes about the minds of other people like the Lieutenant d'Armagnac;"His overt attitude toward the people of Bou Noura was that they were an acessible part of a great tribe from whom the French could learn a great deal if they would only take the trouble." What's interesting about Lieutenant d-Armagnac is that he wanted to communicate and understand the local's but also failed to do so despite his best intentions. Overall The Sheltering Sky is an excellent story about how Three American travelers are tragically link to a culture that they, like most travelers do not know very much about in that they failed to take in the realities such as the heat, food, disease, and the native people intil it was too late. Maybe being just a tourist is not such a bad idea after all.

Rating:
Summary: Patience is a virtue
Review: 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.