Rating: 
Summary: I hate to use words like "perfect", but...
Review: 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
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: if only paul bowles could have had condeleeza rice's job....
Review: 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.
Rating:
Summary: The effect of the Sahara Desert...
Review: 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...
Rating:
Summary: similar to *under the volcano*
Review: 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.
Rating:
Summary: There is no shelter under this dark sky
Review: 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.
Rating:
Summary: Worth a read
Review: I picked up this book by accident and found it surprisingly dark, deep, and intriguing. Recommended.
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