Sheltering Sky, The (The Classic Collection) MP3 CD – Unabridged, July 22, 2014

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.

Paul Bowles didn't write his first novel, The Sheltering Sky, until he was thirty-eight years old, but by that time he was a successful music composer, poet, essayist, and world traveler who was well known among the American expats of Paris and Berlin, as well as the most notable writers of the "Beat Generation" in the United States.Christopher Isherwood was so taken with Bowles that he gave his surname to his most famous fictional Berlin character, the cabaret singer Sally Bowles. Gertrude Stein, whom Paul Bowles met in Paris when he was twenty, encouraged him to travel to Northern Africa, which he did - and he fell in love with the Sahara and its environs and lived in Morocco for more than four decades. William S. Burroughs, a fellow resident of Tangier, was one of his many close friends.Bowles, a native of New York City, was living in Tangier, Morocco, in 1949 when he penned that first novel, a work that the American publisher, Doubleday, had given him a cash advance to write. Doubleday did not like the finished product and demanded that he return the advance, but Bowles soon found another publisher. By January 1st, 1950, The Sheltering Sky had made its way onto The New York Times best-seller list along with a review by Tennessee Williams which was steeped in heavy praise.The Sheltering Sky tells the fictional tale of three wealthy young Americans who are traveling together in Algeria without a set plan. Port and Kit Moresby are a married couple and their friend Tunner, who has a romantic inclination toward Kit, is traveling with them. They go by car and bus and train - and even produce truck - from one heat-drenched, dust-ladened, fly-infested town to another, with the author describing in great detail that oddities that they discover and the hardships they are forced to endure. The expansive Sahara in a very real sense mirrors their desolate lives as they wander about searching for meaning.Along the way the three also encounter an older English woman and her adult son who are driving about the desert in a large Mercedes. That couple cross paths with the Moresby's and Tunner on multiple occasions, and their interferences bring about major changes in the lives of the three central characters. One of the three eventually succumbs to typhoid, and another becomes subsumed in the Arab culture to a point that almost all self-identity is lost.The Sheltering Sky is an arid and pungent depiction of the landscape and culture of North Africa in the years just following World War II, but it is also a deep dive into the darkest reaches of the human soul. The novel illuminates the desert that lies within each of us - and asks what we are capable of bearing in order to survive.Life is a hard trek into the unknown that is defined by its challenges. Pack well.

This is an astonishingly good novel, powerfully imagined and rooted in the concrete realities of crumbling desert towns and the declining days of French power in North Africa.In a delicate portrait of a burnt-out marital relationship, a young American couple drift south in the Algerian Sahara in the late 1940s. They are lotus-eaters, he wilful and impetuous, she over-analytical and superstitious. Neither are willing to break out of their intimate but cold torpor for fear of losing the other; and both are unfaithful in casual, joyless ways.At one point in their wanderings, Port articulates what drives him: ‘I know why I’m disgusted,’ he called after her. ‘It’s something I ate. Ten years ago.’Later, much later, Kit sees her overwhelming fear of life embodied in the very fabric of the universe: ‘the sky hides the night behind it, shelters the person beneath from the horror that lies above… At any moment the rip can occur, the edges fly back, and the giant maw will be revealed.’What makes this great work stand out for me is the vivid and realistic evocation of the interior life of the various characters, and especially the central couple, Port and Kit. For example, Bowles brilliantly creates a sense of the inchoate logic of Port’s typhus-stricken mind as he lies in a remote room in a Saharan town. Kit’s evolving breakdown near the end of the story, as she flees into ever more exotic relationships with local Arab men, is utterly convincing. Bowles also creates an impressionistic awareness of the point of view of the various Algerians whom the protagonists encounter.Beneath it all, this is an un-judgemental, compassionate story of deeply entwined love - but neither party are alive to the depth of their feelings until too late, until they have drifted too far, geographically and emotionally.The 1990 film of the book by Bernardo Bertolucci is pale fare, in comparison, rather one dimensional and obsessed with sex, though the cinematography is magnificent.

Possibly one of the darkest novels I have ever read and one of the most brilliant. Bowles introduces us to some world weary Fitzgeraldesque characters. Kit and Port Moresby are laid back to the point of being at risk. Kit's wild eyed beauty and mental instability become pushed beyond endurance by Port's lack of attention, or at least, lack of the right attention. Her natural and her attractiveness which emanates from her vulnerability leads her to become easy prey to others in their group. Port's louche ennui and existential bitterness are like a death wish, and after he sleeps with a nomadic tribeswoman who is acting as a prostitute, his fate and that of Kit, is sealed.This is a novel which is partly about sex, not enough and then the wrong kind, and men who are about as base as it is possible whilst still walking upright in a society where a women are regarded as sexual chattels.Suffering described in amazing lucid language with an almost sadistic treatment of his characters, you will need a strong stomach and heart as you feel total pity and yet are enthralled by the horrors the characters endure.I admire this writer, and yet the book chills me to the bone.Modern writers have nothing in this guy,the book shocks today as it would have done when first published.It is so clever, and yet so cruel, there is no redemption for a stranger in a starnge land.

Has literary merit (very fine descriptions of North African locations of their time, and the experience of feverish delirium, for example), and quite an interesting plot in its way, but none of the main characters are likeable or even particularly interesting (they're pretty annoying) so I suspect a lot of readers would just give up on this novel. The ending's a real anti-climax after some of the most engaging events in the story, too. All this might be part of the author's intention in writing an existentialist novel, but that doesn't make it a better read.

A very moving and dramatic story of 3 soul searching young Americans in North Africa just after the end of WW2. They become lost in the desert and their personal quest subsequently ends in disaster. A very deep journey of existential questioning and culture shock. Written in the 1940s but still very relevant today. Possibly even more so. Highly recommended.

This is an intense character study of a marriage and the two people in it. Each is complex and flawed but oddly familiar. Some delightful writing, especially about the desert and solitude.