The Sheltering Sky (Paperback)

by Paul Bowles (Author) "HE AWOKE, OPENED his eyes..." (more)
Key Phrases: Bou Noura, Daoud Zozeph, Captain Broussard (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review
American novelist and short-story writer, poet, translator, classical music composer, and filmscorer Paul Bowles has lived as an expatriate for more than 40 years in the North African nation of Morocco, a country that reaches into the vast and inhospitable Sahara Desert. The desert is itself a character in The Sheltering Sky, the most famous of Bowles' books, which is about three young Americans of the postwar generation who go on a walkabout into Northern Africa's own arid heart of darkness. In the process, the veneer of their lives is peeled back under the author's psychological inquiry. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Review
"[The Sheltering Sky] is one of the most original, even visionary, works of fiction to appear in this century." -- --Tobias Wolff

"It stands head and shoulders above most other novels published in English since World War II." -- --The New Republic

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Product Details

• Paperback: 368 pages
• Publisher: Harper Perennial (April 1, 1998)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0880015829
• ISBN-13: 978-0880015820
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 5.8 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12.6 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars See all reviews (109 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #522,709 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

191 of 217 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Polished To Perfection, July 11, 2000

By A Customer

In Paul Bowles' The Sheltering Sky, three still-young Americans travel to the post WWII North African desert in search of themselves and new experiences.

Port and Kit Moresby, in the tenth year of marriage, have become both sexually and emotionally estranged, and Port hopes their sojourn into the desert will bring them closer together and restore the love they once shared. Kit, not so keen on either the desert or Port, has nevertheless agreed to Port's wishes, albeit reluctantly. The third person in their party, their friend, George Tunner, accompanies them more on a whim than anything else.

Seeking the exotic, the trio really doesn't know what to do with it when they find it. The sun is too bright, the labyrinth of city streets too dark, the excess of sensual delights a surfeit that imprisons rather than frees.

Becoming more and more dissatisfied with both themselves and with those around them, they decide to leave the restrictiveness of the city behind and venture farther south, into the wild, harsh, dazzling beauty of the Sahara. They meet the Lyles, ostensibly mother and son, who claim to be writing a travel book but whose real business appears to be far more sinister, much like the duo's own obsessive Freudian tangles.

Port, who at first, found himself drawn inexorably to the beauty and remoteness of the Sahara, soon becomes violently ill and dies, and Kit, grateful to be rescued by a passing, enigmatic Arab, finds that things are not always as they seem. Her rescuer becomes her imprisoner, and as the sun grows ever brighter, the shadows grow deeper. The bizarre eventually becomes so real that Kit gradually and terrifyingly loses what fragile grip on reality she once possessed.

Although The Sheltering Sky may, on the surface, seem like a lurid and melodramatic tale, it is anything but. A masterpiece of understatement, plot is always secondary to theme in Bowles' writing; the real changes take place in the minds of the characters who must face an immensity of experience they cannot even hope to understand much less prepare themselves for.

The indifference of nature and the unforgiving quality of the desert also play a huge part in this story. The book could be a metaphor for the meaninglessness of most 20th century relationships. Port and Kit's journey into the heart of the Sahara mirrors our own journey into the depths of the soul and we either come back altered forever (Kit) or we don't come back at all (Port). It is significant that Tunner, more superficial in both his outlook and psychological makeup, fails to make the journey into the depths of the desert and, as such, he remains untouched by it. He emerges essentially the same as he was when the story began.

The Sheltering Sky could have been a character study, but Bowles wisely eschews this venue. Although we gain flashes of insight into each character, we really don't get to know them in-depth. An existential novel, the characters in The Sheltering Sky are more symbolic than fully-formed, fleshed-out people. In a highly thematic book, however, this is exactly as it should be, and Bowles never fails to manipulate his characters with anything less than sheer perfection.

The inner emptiness of the characters is emphasized by the incompleteness of their emotional experiences. Every time Port or Kit seem to be on the verge of discovering a deeper connection, to themselves or to each other, Bowles pulls the chair out from under the reader. The scene that best typifies this lack of depth is Kit's as she spends her final moments with Port following his death: "Softly she laid her cheek on the pillow and stroked his hair. No tears flowed, it was a silent leave-taking. A strangely intense buzzing in front of her made her open her eyes. She watched fascinated while two flies made their brief, frantic love on his lower lip."

Although The Sheltering Sky is, for the most part, written in beautifully understated prose (the vivid place descriptions are the exception), there is nothing subtle about its message. And, while one emerges from this strange and complex novel as if from a dream, a little reflection makes it clear that our dreams can so easily become our nightmares.

The real setting of The Sheltering Sky is not the vast, uncharted Sahara, but the vast, uncharted reaches of the modern soul. Like Bowles' characters, we won't find the journey to the depths an easy one, but if we are going to do more than live on the periphery of life we should, however, find the journey necessary.

Polished to perfection in every way, The Sheltering Sky is the strangest, and most strangely familiar, book I've read in a long, long time.

42 of 44 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Book to be Traveled through, November 19, 1999

By	Mitchell Jones (Baltimore, MD) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

With the death of Paul Bowles the world has lost one of its great authors. This book allows us to hold on to some of that greatness. As a rumination on the existential impact of place and space, the book opens up horizons of thought one may have never considered. When Port tells Kit his thoughts on the 'sheltering sky' one is asked to consider the implications of realizing - always and ceaselessly knowing - that the "sky" is a fiction that protects us from our very insignificance. In one short passage, Bowles has ripped the lid off our world as surely as he casts Kit into the desert, another grain of sand among countless others. This book is about more than an encounter with the Sahara, it is about - and is itself - an encounter with human existence.

53 of 57 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Dreams on a road to ruin, January 4, 2000

By	hugh riminton (Sydney) - See all my reviews

For Kerouac and the Beats, frenetic, directionless travel was proof of life - could even be held to "create" life. Bowles, in this slyly subversive book, reverses that. The three Americans who start out on this largely pointless journey into the North African desert, hope the mere fact of movement will resolve their deep spiritual lethargy - or at least delay their having to face it. They imagine themselves sophisticated, wearing their cynicism as a talisman in a cultural landscape of troubling strangeness. But they are simply unaware. Faced with an elemental vastness that cares nothing for their conceits, they dis-integrate. Only one survives and she is so utterly changed - physically and in spirit - that she can no longer recognise herself, nor see a future for herself in the world she formally inhabited. Although the prime characters are fundamentally unpleasant - at least for most of the book - the lasting impression is of an eerie, spectral beauty. It is a quiet masterpiece; I know of few books that are more subtly teasing - that more wisely poke at our arrogance in imagining that we know anything.