Rating: 
Summary: Beautiful starkness cheaply undone
Review: 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.
Rating: 
Summary: how a boring book becomes great:
Review: 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.
Rating:
Summary: Great Read
Review: This is a page-turning read about 3 naive, self-involved American "travelers" who run into disaster in the Saharan desert. For the first 3/4 of the book, the plot moves swiftly and the characters are developed tremendously. Add the existentialist theme and you've got a perfect recipe for great literature. My only problem was that the book went off on a bit of a tangent toward the end, when Kit ran off with a band of Moroccan camel-riders and became one's concubine/wife. This part of the story was not believable to me and therefore it gets 4 stars instead of 5. Nevertheless, it's a great read and I would recommend it to anyone. By the way, the movie starring John Malchovich and Debra Winger is also pretty good for the scenery alone.
Rating: 
Summary: transports you
Review: 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.
Rating:
Summary: A Challenging and Poetic Novel
Review: 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.
Rating:
Summary: Fine writing; challenging reading
Review: 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.
Rating:
Summary: evocative
Review: 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
Rating:
Summary: Special stock of the soul.
Review: 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.
Rating:
Summary: raw human emotions expressed as words...
Review: 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.
Rating:
Summary: Fear from above
Review: "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
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