The Sheltering Sky Paul Bowles

The Sheltering Sky  Paul Bowles

Overview:

The Sheltering Sky is a landmark of twentieth-century literature. In this intensely fascinating story, Paul Bowles examines the ways in which Americans' incomprehension of alien cultures leads to the ultimate destruction of those cultures.

A story about three American travelers adrift in the cities and deserts of North Africa after World War II, The Sheltering Sky explores the limits of humanity when it touches the unfathomable emptiness and impassive cruelty of the desert.

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..

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.

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

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

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And Blessed Are The Ones Who Care For Their Fellow Men!