This is a terrific book by a writer who is not nearly as celebrated as he should be--and I mean Nobel Prize worthy. It's not true that a book grips you--when it's as good as "The Sheltering Sky," it's you that grips the book. That's what I literally found myself doing for big batches of pages at a time; the tension that Bowles creates is that intense. You take the story personally; like you're reading a letter about people you know.
If you haven't read this book, read it. If you've seen a movie based upon it, forget you ever saw it and read the book.
Now, if you don't mind, I'm going to ramble on a bit. You can stop reading here if you haven't got the time; I'm not really going to say anything more important than I've already said.
For instance. In the brief (2-page) preface of the edition of "The Sheltering Sky" that I read, Paul Bowles gives away what is the novel's most shocking turn--why, I can't imagine. Did he think everyone had seen the movie already (one with Debra Winger, apparently; thank God I missed it)? Did he think the novel was already so well-known that it was like revealing that the Greeks came out on top in "the Iliad" or that Ivan Illych dies in "the Death of Ivan Ilych"? Or was it just that he was 87 or so at the time and, like many 87 year-old people, figured he earned the right to do whatever the heck he felt like regardless of propriety?
Well, whatever made him do it, I wish he hadn't--it was like watching a blonde in a shower scene in a Friday the 13th movie (any of them)--you know what's coming, the question is when--and how.
That said, "the Sheltering Sky" is a fierce and uncompromising book that peels back a bit of what "shelters" us from the cold indifference of the cosmos. A husband and wife--Port and Kit--are on an extended and aimless tour of North Africa, traveling from one desert town to another in the company of their mutual friend, Tunner. Their marriage is on the rocks and the presence of Tunner, a man clearly not averse to pinch-hitting, isn't helping matters. Meanwhile, the relentless and pitiless desert is, if not a stage set in hell, then a room in Purgatory very close by.
The food's bad, the heat oppressive, the insects voracious, diseases innumerable and nasty, the natives inscrutable, hostile, devious, or all three--why would anyone voluntarily come here?
Why indeed?
Kit and Port. It takes some time, I found, to get beyond these silly names. A little too precious, in an F. Scott Fitzgeraldy way. What's Port short for, anyway? Porter? Porthole?
Well, you get the sense that Port--a rather misanthropic character, is attempting to shed his life of illusions--civilization, humanity, religion, science--all the shelters we hide under--and traveling towards some naked unadorned truth he hopes to find in the most stripped-down place there is on earth: the Sahara.
In this alien, inhospitable, virtually anti-human place, he'll get a glimpse of what he's looking for and it'll be every bit as terrifying as that butcher knife that emerges from the plastic shower curtain. Because even if you're expecting it, just like death, when it comes it's shocking all the same.
Paul Bowles is a great writer--easily one of the best American writers of the 20th century--perhaps because he removed himself from America altogether in mind and body. He writes with the concern for the deep philosophical concerns that usually seem to be the province of Europeans, especially the French. In his confrontations with the desert, Bowles, through his characters, confronts more than merely the social concerns--the "shelters," if you will--of any particular class, race, or nation--but portrays the individual in extremis beyond all these...at the very edge of the abyss.
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