The Sheltering Sky

Product Details

Author : Paul Bowles
Binding : Paperback
EAN : 9780141181912
Edition : New Ed
Number of Pages : 272
Product Group : Book
Publication Date : 2000-02-24
Publisher : Penguin Books Ltd

ASIN : 0141181915

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Customer Reviews

Loses the plot badly (2008-10-04)

Four fifths of this book are excellent, if a little ponderous and slow-moving. The characters are well drawn and we feel gradually drawn in to a web of intrigue and decay. But just when I expected the narrative to pick up the pace in the final fifth of the novel, something strange happens. What was a vividly portrayed, believable tale, turns into an almost stream-of-consciousness babble of highly unlikely and dreamlike scenes. Of course, this is partly to convey the inner machinations of our leading lady's mind, but the result is almost as if we've leapt out of one novel into another, entirely different one. So, the build up we patiently pay in for, never really pays off with any kind of satisfactory conclusion.

Splendid pictures of people and places (2008-06-29)

The three main characters in this story are nicely drawn in the first few pages and we stay with them throughout their journey across a part of Africa. The mood is a brooding one and relationships are never quite what they seem. The African scene is very accurately represented with much filth, darkness and brooding uncertainty that matches what is going on between the characters.I came to feel that the self obsession bordering on self pity of the married partners made them morally bankrupt and very unsympathetic characters. By the end I had a very precise picture of what I wanted to happen to them. It did..Shame on me for not finding Bowles' work before now but better late than never.

Character is Destiny (2008-06-14)

Initially, Kit and Port, the preppy primary characters in THE SHELTERING SKY, seem more like attitudes than people. The character Kit, for example, observes: "Other people rule my life." Early in his narration, Bowles adds: "The terror was already there inside her ready to take command."Meanwhile, Port, despite his charms, is a sadly isolated person. Bowles says: "Although it was the basis of his unhappiness, this glacial deadness, he would cling to it always, because it was also the core of his being; he had built the being around it."Early in TSS, these concept-driven characters have experiences of slightly bogus theatricality, with the insightful Bowles explaining the interaction between characters but not really bringing them to life. Kit and Port, in other words, have experiences that just don't ring true.But then Bowles takes his characters and puts them on a bus on a heedless journey into the Sahara. And, their adventure, a truly riveting tale, is the perfect vehicle to explore the wacko personalities that Bowles has defined. "Book Two, The Earth's Sharp Edge," starts in Bou Noura, a desolate outpost where the European influence is negligible. Thereafter, everything that happens to Kit and Port is frighteningly real. And the writing becomes first-rate. "The sun poured down on the bare earth; there was not a square inch of shadow, save at their feet. Her mind went back to the many times when, as a child, she had held a reading glass over some hapless insect, following it along the ground in its frenzied attempts to escape the increasingly accurate focusing of the lens, until finally she touched it with the blinding pinpoint of light, when as if by magic it ceased running, and she watched it slowly wither and begin to smoke. She felt that if she looked up she would find the sun grown to monstrous proportions.My daughter told me this book was great and she was right! Highly recommended.

well-worth reading (2008-03-15)

I really enjoyed this book.It gripped me from the start but i am not really sure why?It is a page turner and at the end of each chapter i wanted to read on but i wanted more to happen.

The Best Novel of the Twentieth Century (2008-01-24)

Having picked this book up in my mid twenties after an initial fascination with the beat writers (and thus coming to Paul Bowles in relation to them) I quickly became absorbed in the atmosphere and wealth of detail in the book. I kind of see the book as a master class in effective novel writing. The plot wends its way unpredictably, staying very close to its two main protagonists and the sights and sounds of the Morocco of its time. The main feeling I get, whether you like this book or not, is the confidence with which Paul Bowles creates his very distinctive and daring plot... I mean that there is a very strict moral and philosophical intention underpinning the book, something very distinct to Paul Bowles' writing. These characters imagine themselves as adventurers/free spirits and yet their drama is of their own making. Bowles' triumph is that, via these two free spirits, he provides us with tensions that are more widely indicative of questions of individual freedom in the twentieth century. This couple each find a certain freedom from the circumstances they are striving for and yet, ultimately, it only provides them with a kind of corruption of self... a kind of lostness. Bowles is also outstanding at writing complex character analysis, Kit's character particularly is very effectively drawn... she becomes unnervingly real by the end, in all her complexity (a female complexity that most new writers do not even attempt to aspire to).I've come back to this novel twice since then and I always get something new from this book. Without doubt it is a dark and, in some ways, tragic book but it is also deeply human.If readers are similarly impressed I'd also recommend Millicent Dillon's book on Bowles 'You Are Not I' along with Jane Bowles' books.

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