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"It stands head and shoulders above most other novels published in English since World War II." -- --The New Republic --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
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HE AWOKE, OPENED his eyes. Read the first page
Concordance
Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Back Cover
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Most helpful customer reviews
5.0 out of 5 stars
Special stock of the soul.,
By Jorge Escolan-Suay (Vancouver, Canada) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Sheltering Sky 2e Pa (Paperback)
Paul Bowles was a genius. Along Maurice Ravel, Saint-Exupery, Debussy and Buñuel...Bowles is a distinguished memeber of The Club. The sky above us is like a shelter which protect us from what is beyond...the obscurity of the universe, the obscurity of the soul. It happens in the same place where the plane of Saint-Exupery failed and was forced to land to find the little prince. But The Sheltering Sky is the total treaty of the soul. The face to face stand with fate and fortune -at once- when we discover that loosing our companions can lead us to the point of no return, the point which Bowles understood from Kafka, the poin to be reached, where the streetcar makes a wide turn...the end of the line, when we realize that our lives will never be the same it used to be a minute ago. Until we can avoid or cheat destiny we tend to believe life as an endless, limitless well, but here comes the powerful point of Bowles: how many more times we'll see the fullmoon rise? Perhaps quite few -surely very few as a matter of fact- and folishly we think life will never ends!Bowles himself gave a sublime review to this matter: our soul is the weariest part of our being. No special stock collection of the soul is compleate without this masterpice. Get it, you will not regret the cost, it will be surely an invesment with the great return of deeply apreciated knowledge.
4 of 4 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars
A Challenging and Poetic Novel,
By momwith2kids (Chicago, IL United States) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Sheltering Sky 2e Pa (Paperback)
Beautifully-written novel about the cruelty of that which we do not know or understand. There were unbelievable descriptions of the filth and abject poverty in the some of the North African cities. At these times, it was difficult to see the beauty that the main traveler, Port, was searching for, and also laid to waste a lot of the glamor attached to the "world traveler" in third-world countries. The entire story was filled with poetic imagery of the desert, death, the sky, the sun and heat. Also many characters along the journey; the descriptions of the Lyles were incredible: A wonderful picture of such a disgusting and despicable pair. There were many other characters like the menacing Captain Broussard, the frightening yet intriguing Belqassim. For the first part of the book, we met Kit and Port, who supposedly went to North Africa to rekindle their marriage, although I didn't get that impression simply because a) Port invited his friend Tunner and b) Kit didn't seem to share Port's interest in North Africa and c) neither Port nor Kit seemed interested in each other once they got there. At some point, all three of them had cheated on each other, betraying each other's trust, friendship, and love, though the issue was never confronted by any of them. In fact, these characters' personalities and relationships to each other were the most bewildering issues of the book. There was a constant criss-crossing between a desperately strong sense of duty (without knowing why) to utter complacency and indifference between Kit and Port. They, along with Tunner, seemed rich, spoiled and ignorant. I couldn't understand their reactions to certain situations; such as Tunner's thoughts as to how his friends at home would interpret Port and Kit's disappearance, or Kit's reaction to Port's death, or Port's overreactions to Kit! Then again, the three of them were in an extreme environment. They wandered aimlessly in another world, void of Western reason, void of Western fairness, powerful, unyielding, and wholly unsympathetic. I loved Bowles' constant symbolism throughout the book; such as Marhnia's retelling of the story of the women who wished for tea in the sahara, for which they got more than they bargained. Then there was the train dream that was so important for Port to interpret: "one's hesitation was an involuntary decision to refuse participation" in life. I think that this sentence pretty much described Port, Kit and Tunner. Again, they drifted much of the time, making decisions very much on a whim, living moment to moment, refusing to face the feelings deep in their conscience: Guilt, regrets, fear, etc. Finally, Port's stolen passport was a wonderful symbolism of his inevitable erasure from existence. The last section of the novel was fantastic. Kit was forced to stop living according to omens in the sky, forced to stop living in fear. Up until this point, most of her living was vicarious through Port. Her journey with the men in the caravan was frightening and savage, yet it completely opened a long-hidden facet in her character. The irony was that it took her to the point of no return. Once she was "saved," it was sadly clear that no Westerner could possibly understand what she experienced, so it seemed fitting that Kit would just disappear into her own madness, or was it even madness? Yes, I loved this novel--a gorgeous illustration of the cruel beauty of the desert and its culture. Such a seemingly benign environment was powerful enough to bring any arrogant Westerner physically and psychically, to his knees.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars
transports you,
By
This review is from: Sheltering Sky 2e Pa (Paperback)
There's a haunting scene where the surviving characters gaze up at teh full moon over the desert, and think of how rarely they truly notice the moon . . . and begin to wonder how many full moons they have left in their lives. All of Bowles' works make you confront your mortality in ways that are, ultimately, liberating.
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