The Sheltering Sky by Paul Bowles is the sort of book that as you are reading it, you just know that there is more to the story than what is on the surface. Superficially it is a sort of adventure story of an American couple and their friend who travel to North Africa. Kit and Port Moresby hope to find the spark that has left their ten-year marriage. Their friend Tunner, who accompanies them, seems to be a bit of a "hanger-on". The further they go into the desert the more they seem to lose themselves and their identities--both literally and figuratively. Bowles gives the most amazing descriptions of the place and time--you can feel the heat of the day, the flies on your face, the wide expanse of blue sky above, and the endless sea of sand. This quote is from later in the book:
"During the middle of the day it was no longer the sun alone that persecuted from above--the entire sky was like a metal dome grown white with heat. The merciless light pushed down from all directions; the sun was the whole sky. They took to traveling only at night, setting out shortly after twilight and halting at the first sign of the rising sun. The sand had been left far behind, and so had the great dead stony plains. Now there was a gray, insect-like vegetation everywhere, a tortured scrub of hard shells and stiff hairy spines that covered the earth like an excrescence of hatred. The ashen landscape as they moved through it was flat as a floor. Day by day the plants grew higher, and the thorns that sprouted from them stronger and more cruel. Now some reached the stature of trees, flat-topped and wide, and always defiant, but a puff of smoke would have afforded as much protection from the sun's attack. The nights were moonless and much warmer. Sometimes as they advanced across the dark countryside there was the startled sound of beasts fleeing from their path."
As I was reading this I knew that there was more to the story, but I read it in such a disjointed fashion (I started it earlier in the year, but I kept grabbing other books from the nightstand) that I felt like I was missing out on what Bowles was ultimately trying to achieve with this novel. I have seen Bowles's name in association with Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus, who were existentialists (yet another topic I am not well versed in), so I suspect there is a deeper meaning along this philosophy. In any case it is the sort of book you need to read more than once to really appreciate, I think. I would love to have read this with a group of friends and have discussed it, but I may have to satisfy my desire to understand it better by doing a little library research and finding some good criticism of it.
I did find it helpful to read the essay included in my edition of the book, which was written by Tennessee Williams and published in the New York Times in 1949. As a sort of introduction (for me) to really understand the novel--he writes:
"In this external aspect the novel is, therefore, an account of startling adventure. In its interior aspect, "The Sheltering Sky" is an allegory of the spiritual adventure of the fully conscious person into modern experience. This is not an enticing way to describe it. It is a way that might suggest the very opposite kind of a novel from the one that Paul Bowles has written. Actually this superior motive does not intrude in explicit form upon the story, certainly not in any form that will need to distract you from the great pleasure of being told a first-rate story of adventure by a really first-rate writer.
I suspect that a good many people will read this book and be enthralled by it without once suspecting that it contains a mirror of what is most terrifying and cryptic within the Sahara of moral nihilism, into which the race of man now seems to be wandering blindly."
I read this thanks to the Modern Library list, which I am pulling book ideas from. This has been yet another excellent novel, which I doubt I would otherwise have picked up even though I have been aware of it for a long time. Next in line is Sophie's Choice, by William Styron, an author I have long wanted to read.
