Splendid pictures of people and places
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The three main characters in this story are nicely drawn in the first few pages and we stay with them throughout their journey across a part of Africa. The mood is a brooding one and relationships are never quite what they seem. The African scene is very accurately represented with much filth, darkness and brooding uncertainty that matches what is going on between the characters.
I came to feel that the self obsession bordering on self pity of the married partners made them morally bankrupt and very unsympathetic characters. By the end I had a very precise picture of what I wanted to happen to them. It did..
Shame on me for not finding Bowles' work before now but better late than never.
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Character is Destiny
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Initially, Kit and Port, the preppy primary characters in THE SHELTERING SKY, seem more like attitudes than people. The character Kit, for example, observes: "Other people rule my life." Early in his narration, Bowles adds: "The terror was already there inside her ready to take command."
Meanwhile, Port, despite his charms, is a sadly isolated person. Bowles says: "Although it was the basis of his unhappiness, this glacial deadness, he would cling to it always, because it was also the core of his being; he had built the being around it."
Early in TSS, these concept-driven characters have experiences of slightly bogus theatricality, with the insightful Bowles explaining the interaction between characters but not really bringing them to life. Kit and Port, in other words, have experiences that just don't ring true.
But then Bowles takes his characters and puts them on a bus on a heedless journey into the Sahara. And, their adventure, a truly riveting tale, is the perfect vehicle to explore the wacko personalities that Bowles has defined. "Book Two, The Earth's Sharp Edge," starts in Bou Noura, a desolate outpost where the European influence is negligible. Thereafter, everything that happens to Kit and Port is frighteningly real. And the writing becomes first-rate.
"The sun poured down on the bare earth; there was not a square inch of shadow, save at their feet. Her mind went back to the many times when, as a child, she had held a reading glass over some hapless insect, following it along the ground in its frenzied attempts to escape the increasingly accurate focusing of the lens, until finally she touched it with the blinding pinpoint of light, when as if by magic it ceased running, and she watched it slowly wither and begin to smoke. She felt that if she looked up she would find the sun grown to monstrous proportions.
My daughter told me this book was great and she was right! Highly recommended.
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well-worth reading
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I really enjoyed this book.It gripped me from the start but i am not really sure why?It is a page turner and at the end of each chapter i wanted to read on but i wanted more to happen.
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The Best Novel of the Twentieth Century
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Having picked this book up in my mid twenties after an initial fascination with the beat writers (and thus coming to Paul Bowles in relation to them) I quickly became absorbed in the atmosphere and wealth of detail in the book. I kind of see the book as a master class in effective novel writing. The plot wends its way unpredictably, staying very close to its two main protagonists and the sights and sounds of the Morocco of its time. The main feeling I get, whether you like this book or not, is the confidence with which Paul Bowles creates his very distinctive and daring plot... I mean that there is a very strict moral and philosophical intention underpinning the book, something very distinct to Paul Bowles' writing. These characters imagine themselves as adventurers/free spirits and yet their drama is of their own making. Bowles' triumph is that, via these two free spirits, he provides us with tensions that are more widely indicative of questions of individual freedom in the twentieth century. This couple each find a certain freedom from the circumstances they are striving for and yet, ultimately, it only provides them with a kind of corruption of self... a kind of lostness.
Bowles is also outstanding at writing complex character analysis, Kit's character particularly is very effectively drawn... she becomes unnervingly real by the end, in all her complexity (a female complexity that most new writers do not even attempt to aspire to).
I've come back to this novel twice since then and I always get something new from this book. Without doubt it is a dark and, in some ways, tragic book but it is also deeply human.
If readers are similarly impressed I'd also recommend Millicent Dillon's book on Bowles 'You Are Not I' along with Jane Bowles' books.
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'Heart of Darkness' for the twentieth century
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'TSS' by Paul Bowles is the story of Kit and Port Moresby, who are travelling around North Africa in the years preceding World War II, accompanied by their friend Tunner. Kit and Port are married but estranged, a couple who are as close to perfection for the other as their personalities allow, but who share a love of isolation and secrecy that means that there will always be a chasm between them. Tunner is a fly in the ointment, a sexual rival for Port, an irritant for Kit. On their travels they stay in increasingly hellish places, each more alien than the last, and encounter the nightmarish inhabitants, both European and African, of that remote landscape.
This book has been described as 'African Gothic', and this seems as good a label as any. A dark, brooding atmosphere persists throughout, although there is no horror in the traditional sense. Port and Kit are travelling through their own personal heart of darkness, weighed down by the metaphorical baggage the carry with them, and by each other. They attempt to escape this ever-decreasing circle by sexual liaisons that are both erotic and grotesque in equal measure, and by running as far from westerners and the western way of life as possible. However, their fear of the new, frightening, world they encounter, and their inability to rid themselves of the influences of their past lives lead them ever closer to their own personal hell.
'TSS' is brilliantly written, conjuring strong visual images of the world the Moresby's find themselves plunging into. The powerful writing style reminded me of Malcolm Lowry, and I recommend that fans of one try the other. Bowles' writing is less well structured, but just as successful at bringing the nightmare to life. It isn't an especially easy read, both because of Bowles' occasionally meandering prose and the grimness of the events being recounted. I was also a little bemused by the finale, which seemed to take Kit's African horror a little too far. Despite this, it was still an excellent book to have read, and one I can recommend to anyone interested in great writing.
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