The Sheltering Sky by Paul Bowles
In The Sheltering Sky, protagonist Port Moresby, husband of Kit and friend of George Tunner, thinks of himself in this way:
In He did not think of himself as a tourist; he was a traveler. The difference is partly one of time, he would explain. Whereas the tourist generally hurries back home at the end of a few weeks or months, the traveler, belonging no more to one place than to the next, moves slowly, over periods of years, from one part of the earth to another. Indeed, he would have found it difficult to tell, among the many places he had lived, precisely where it was he had felt most at home.
The rootless Moresbys and their friend Tunner drift from one North African town to the next, never comfortable where they are, never sure where they are going. They know only that things will be better somehow once they cross the Sahara, with its power to burn and cleanse. Unlike the Alexandria Quartet, with its rich community of ex-pats and natives struggling to find connection and meaning, The Sheltering Sky is a novel of alienation. The Moresbys are continually led astray by their inability to connect to each other or to the land around them; Africa remains a dark continent for them no matter how far they travel. Eventually they lose everything — health, life, self-respect, sanity — to that darkness.
Even the style of narrative is a study in alienation. Despite the book’s omniscient point of view, the Moresbys remain a blank to us, the Arab and African natives are incomprehensibly foreign, even the landscape is an ominous labyrinth. Only the impersonal sky offers shelter.
It’s quite an uneasy book: I could hardly bear the Moresbys, but the story remains in my mind even years after finishing the book. Even though Port Moresby likes to think of himself as a traveller, as opposed to a tourist, he fails at being one in the end, don’t you agree? I didn’t make sense of the title, as for me there is no shelter in this book, even in the desert sky.
“…[T]he traveler, belonging no more to one place than to the next” — this description seems to try to make a virtue of rootlessness. Paul’s answer to everything in the book is, We’ll just keep going. I think he and Kit both found the ultimate end of that kind of philosophy.
I was mildly obsessed with Paul Bowles some years back. I read a biography that was written sometime in the 1980s and was fascinated. I did read “The Sheltering Sky” and I think at least one other novel of his. I have a thick book of his collected stories if you want to borrow it.
[...] a link to the Google Books entry for The Sheltering Sky. I get quite a few hits on this blog for The Sheltering Sky — maybe it’s something people read in school? I don’t know. Anyway, I followed [...]