The Sheltering Sky

Rating:
Summary: Brilliant Novel of People and Place
Review: In The Sheltering Sky, Paul Bowles has written a wonderfully evocative novel of Westerners in Africa in the years after World War II. My experience with Africa amounts to a day spent in Morocco at the turn of the century as a chaperone to a group of students. I loved the experience but many of the students were uncomfortable. I think this was because the culture there is so very different from anything most Americans ever experience in their lives. I am amazed at how well Bowles is able to bring to life this land and culture in his novel.

Interwoven with his portrait of this desert culture is the story of a couple, Port and Kit, who are traveling through the region with a friend named Tunner. Port and Kit are the main characters here. They are a pair of well-off Westerners who travel with no itinerary or time limit. They indulge themselves not only in the pleasures of the places they travel but also in their knowledge of the other's nature. They desire closeness with each other but create distance in their denial of their own knowledge and wants. They try to escape in their travels but they have arrived in a land that will force them by its harshness and beauty to look more closely at themselves. They are incredibly interesting characters who undergo very moving tragedies.

On top of that there are a number of wonderfully drawn minor characters in this novel. Besides Tunner, there is the horrible and yet comic mother/son pair, the Lyle's. There is the sick French commander, Lieutenant d'Armagnac, as an example of a man who has made his peace with Africa and enjoys it. There is the Jewish merchant, Daoud Zozeph, as well as Belqassim who adds Kit to his harem of three other wives. All of these, and more, populate the novel with intriguing takes on what it is to survive in this world. I recommend this novel to anyone.

A final note for fans of the band The Police and their album Synchronisity. The song "Tea on the Sahara" from this album is drawn from this novel. If you like the song, I suggest you read this novel. It will add to your experience of it.

Rating:
Summary: Give It A Whirl
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: Bowles, Travel Writing Virtuoso
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: The night behind the sky
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: mesmerizing
Review: 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".

Rating:
Summary: A Dissenting Voice
Review: 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!

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: The desert of the soul
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: Well Written But Not Much Substance
Review: Above all this novel is a well written account of Americans with too much time and money travelling through post-WWII Africa. While reading this book I felt as if I was in the deserts of northern Africa. I could feel the scortching sun and see the endless dunes of sand. However, I could also feel the lethargy and boredom of the travellers. These well-to-do Americans seem to roam the continent with little purpose or insight. There is not enough background information given as to the motivation of the travellers. How I wish I could have the time and money to just travel the world at will! The biggest turnoff was the fact that given the exotic locales these characters did nothing more than sip tea at cafe's or lay in bed all day and night. The only reason I would reccomend this novel is that it is written so well that you can actually picture being exactly where the characters are, which is a place and culture very different than the United States.

Rating:
Summary: profoundly annoying
Review: 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