The language is often one of negativity and despair. He wonders if "any American can truthfully accept a definition of life which makes it synonymous with suffering". People stare at him, talk about him in a language he can't understand, and he feels guilt at being well fed and healthy in a region where so few are.
Port suffers a cultural cringe as he walks around town. The emotional backdrop, too, is fiercely drawn. Their story, their unravelling if you like, is set against a backdrop of Arabs in fezzes drinking mineral water, shoeshine boys with their faces covered in flies, trams dinging their bells, idly plucked ouds, and waiters proffering declasse pastis. Or is it malaria? Typhus? Typhoid? Diptheria? Yellow fever? Kala azar whatever that is)? Or just the plain old plague? He's certainly sick, but then so is she and the sense of being aliens in a land they barely understand does not help with either of their convalescences. At one point Kit imagines Port has meningitis. They're forever moving from one place to another (places with evocative names like Ain Krorfa, Bou Noura, El Ga'a, and Sba) and yet this just seems to multiply their woes and maladies. Receiving praiseįrom the likes of Gore Vidal, Anthony Burgess, and William Burroughs. Novel, and soon he was the toast of the literary world. It took him a year, mostly in Tangier and Fez, to complete what became his first major Late thirties, he had the idea for the story of The Sheltering Sky. Studied under Aaron Copland and went on to receive considerable acclaim for his Ravel inspired piano improvisations as well as becoming an ethnomusicologial pioneer, specifically in North Africa. The author, Paul Bowles, is actually better known as a composer. For the most part I was glad I did because it was interesting and, occasionally enriching, if not always totally gripping.
I didn't even really expect to read it but over the next couple of years I caught it winking at me and, finally, in July of this year I grabbed hold of it and gave it a good seeing to. I put the book on my shelf and pretty much forgot all about it. I was vaguely aware of a 1990 film (directed by Bernardo Bertolucci and starring Debra Winger and John Malkovich) but I'd not even seen that. When my friend Dan gave me as a gift a copy of Paul Bowles' 1949 novel The Sheltering Sky I must admit I had no clue what it was about. "Alienation and existential despair" - now, they're themes I can get down with. "Each man's destiny is personal only insofar as it may happen to resemble what is already in his memory" - Eduardo Mallea. "From a certain point onward, there is no turning back that is the point that must be reached" - Franz Kafka.
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