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matthewcpeck 's review for:
The Sheltering Sky
by Paul Bowles
2 1/2. An admirably libertine work of mid-century American literature that is also kind of a joyless slog.
Maybe I'm too harsh. Paul Bowles was an evidently fascinating figure, a New York-born composer and poet who rubbed elbows with folks like Aaron Copland, Orson Welles, and the godfathers of the Beat Generation before settling down in Tangier for the larger part of his life. "The Sheltering Sky" is his first and most famous work of fiction, a story of a mutually unfaithful American couple (snappily named Port and Kit Moresby) in post-W.W. II Algeria and their doomed vacation into the Saraha. The novel includes succession of scuzzy hotels; a horrible illness and protracted death; a bit of philosophy; and – in the last and strongest act – a character's attempt at self-erasure via entry and escape from a nomad's harem. At the end I was left strangely cold.
Perhaps it's the sense of misanthropy throughout. Like some real-life expatriates I've known, "The Sheltering Sky" has a valid skepticism about the U.S. and other Western powers, while simultaneously showing a disdain for the backwards, unhygienic "natives" of its chosen locale. I think that Bowles was probably more progressive than his contemporaries, and he resists romanticism, but some of the dismissively grotesque and stereotyped descriptions of North Africans and others may leave a bad taste in the reader's mouth.
Not that the American protagonists are portrayed flatteringly in comparison. But in a literary world where fiction is becoming increasingly democratic and diverse, another tale of wealthy, neurotic Caucasian travelers feels a touch less vital than it might have at one time. I found Bowles's prose, too, to be uneven: at its best, it conveys the strangeness of the Saharan landscape with details that could only come from firsthand experience. It constructs a convincing psychological landscape, too, portraying Kit's vertiginous mental state in the second half of the book. At its worst, it's clumsy, with characters' thoughts confusingly placed within quotation marks, and the aforementioned philosophizing. "The Sheltering Sky" may have something interesting to say about the existential dread suffusing the West during and after the Second World War, but it has nowhere the diamond-cut brilliance and clarity of "The Stranger", with which it has many parallels. Read that and then "The Mersault Investigation" instead.
Maybe I'm too harsh. Paul Bowles was an evidently fascinating figure, a New York-born composer and poet who rubbed elbows with folks like Aaron Copland, Orson Welles, and the godfathers of the Beat Generation before settling down in Tangier for the larger part of his life. "The Sheltering Sky" is his first and most famous work of fiction, a story of a mutually unfaithful American couple (snappily named Port and Kit Moresby) in post-W.W. II Algeria and their doomed vacation into the Saraha. The novel includes succession of scuzzy hotels; a horrible illness and protracted death; a bit of philosophy; and – in the last and strongest act – a character's attempt at self-erasure via entry and escape from a nomad's harem. At the end I was left strangely cold.
Perhaps it's the sense of misanthropy throughout. Like some real-life expatriates I've known, "The Sheltering Sky" has a valid skepticism about the U.S. and other Western powers, while simultaneously showing a disdain for the backwards, unhygienic "natives" of its chosen locale. I think that Bowles was probably more progressive than his contemporaries, and he resists romanticism, but some of the dismissively grotesque and stereotyped descriptions of North Africans and others may leave a bad taste in the reader's mouth.
Not that the American protagonists are portrayed flatteringly in comparison. But in a literary world where fiction is becoming increasingly democratic and diverse, another tale of wealthy, neurotic Caucasian travelers feels a touch less vital than it might have at one time. I found Bowles's prose, too, to be uneven: at its best, it conveys the strangeness of the Saharan landscape with details that could only come from firsthand experience. It constructs a convincing psychological landscape, too, portraying Kit's vertiginous mental state in the second half of the book. At its worst, it's clumsy, with characters' thoughts confusingly placed within quotation marks, and the aforementioned philosophizing. "The Sheltering Sky" may have something interesting to say about the existential dread suffusing the West during and after the Second World War, but it has nowhere the diamond-cut brilliance and clarity of "The Stranger", with which it has many parallels. Read that and then "The Mersault Investigation" instead.