Paul Bowles, reclining in bed with his paper and pen. It is not Port but Kit who achieves true isolation, one far greater than her husband’s lofty pretensions, as she glides through the desert, truly alone for the first time. Suffocating tension builds like a pulse, until the book’s audacious, haunting climax two thirds in.

They’re desperate to be satisfied, yet satisfied by nothing: every town they try, the Moresbys sniff at Arab culture and retreat to their unhappy shelter of hotel-room lunches and English speakers.Īs they flit across Algeria, Port becomes more and more thrilled by the idea of the remote, while Kit becomes increasingly hysterical as they move further from recognisable society. Indeed, would have found it difficult to tell, among the many places he had lived, precisely where it was he had felt most at home.īut for all his highbrow aspirations, Port is a bad traveller and his wife Kit no better two culturally-indifferent Americans with too much baggage (literally and emotionally), and no aims in life except their desire to not be wherever they are at the time. Whereas the tourist generally hurries back home at the end of a few weeks or months, the traveller belonging no more to one place than to the next, moves slowly over periods of years, from one part of the earth to another. I can’t fault Paul Bowles for sincerity though apparently he spent much of his life being bohemian in just this way, spawning many imitators, and died poor in Tangier in 1999.The first time I picked up Paul Bowles’s The Sheltering Sky, I was amused and embarrassed to find my unearned snobbery reflected back at me in the first few pages, where upon arriving in north Africa, the male lead Port Moresby loftily observes: I kind of enjoyed this book while reading it, but in retrospect I guess I sort of hated it. His wife then loses her mind and ends up getting raped and voluntarily joining a harem. He is too bohemian to have bothered to be vaccinated, so this is richly deserved. The protagonist dies of typhoid half way through.

Mine was hair-raising in its own way (how much is too much wine at the all-inclusive?) but theirs was pretty intense too (at one point the protagonist complains about being offered a seventeen year old sex worker (i.e., trafficked child), because she is ‘probably at least twenty-five’). I read it while in Morocco, so it was an interesting parallel kind of vacation. Three vaguely artsy Europeans parade around Morocco in the late 1940s, sleeping with each other and others, staying in really horrible rural hotels, and exploring their existential dread. This is a novel about what happens when you take bohemianism that bit too far.

The sheltering sky book summary