The unhappy couple at the center of the book, Kit and Port Moresby, care about each other, but only in terms of what Kit gives Port or Port gives Kit. The native tale of “ tea in the Sahara” is a warning, a cautionary tale, that the main character, Port Moresby, fails to heed at his peril.īut The Sheltering Sky really isn’t about the quotes or the metaphors or the apostrophied Sahara. It’s really a book about selfishness – and what selfishness does to people. And Bowles takes full advantage of the idea of how we misunderstand the vastness within through his presentation of the vastness without. The Sahara Desert, which dominates the landscape (both outside and inside the characters) of this novel is, of course, a character itself, much like the heath in Hardy’s The Return of the Native or the river in Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Because The Sheltering Sky is nothing if not a meditation (the characters spend a LOT of time meditating) on the angst that is – well, life. And for some readers, I suspect, it encapsulates – and excuses – the existential angst that is this novel. Yet everything happens only a certain number of times, and a very small number really. How many more times will you remember a certain afternoon of your childhood, some afternoon that is so deeply a part of your being that you can’t even conceive of your life without it? Perhaps four or five times more, perhaps not even that. How many more times will you watch the full moon rise? Perhaps twenty. Here’s the most famous:īecause we don’t know when we will die, we get to think of life as an inexhaustible well. And it is a book with some memorable quotes.

Paul Bowles’ The Sheltering Sky is one of those books that gets quoted often, and referred to oftener by its admirers. It’s in that spirit that I added the book which is the subject of this essay to the 2014 reading list.

Such, such is the nature of a certain kind of literary OCD. You know what I mean: we look over one or another of those lists of “greatest books” or “books everyone with a functioning brain should read” and note a work that makes us say, “How have I overlooked that book?” If you’re like me (and I hope your neuroses don’t extend, as mine do, to thinking you should have read every writer mentioned in, say, The Norton Anthology series), you then find yourself scrambling to address your perceived gaps in your literary education. The Sheltering Sky by Paul Bowles (image courtesy Wikimedia)Īnyone who has devoted him/herself to reading and writing whether as vocation (as I and some others have) or as avocation (as many more others have) occasionally has those times of reflection when we look back over our pursuits and spot occasional gaps in our literary educations.

The sheltering sky novel