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The Sheltering Sky / Let It Come Down / The Spider's House
Paul Bowles had already established himself as an important American composer when, at the age of 38, he published The Sheltering Sky and became widely recognized as one of the most powerful writers of the postwar period. By the time of his death in 1999 he had become a unique and legendary figure in modern literary culture. From his base in Tangier he produced novels, stories, and travel writings in which exquisite surfaces and violent undercurrents mingle.
This Library of America volume, containing his first three novels, with its companion Collected Stories and Later Writings, is the first annotated edition of Bowles’s work, offering the full range of his literary achievement: the portrait of an outsider who was one of the essential American writers of the last half century.
The Sheltering Sky (1949), which remains Bowles’s most celebrated work, describes the unraveling of a young, sophisticated, and adventuresome married couple as they make their way into the Sahara. In a prose style of meticulous calm and stunning visual precision, Bowles tracks Port and Kit Moresby on a journey through the desert that culminates in death and madness.
In Let It Come Down (1952), Bowles plots the doomed trajectory of Nelson Dyar, a New York bank teller who comes to Tangier in search of a different life and ends up giving in to his darkest impulses. Rich in descriptions of the corruption and decadence of the International Zone in the last days before Moroccan independence, Bowles’s second novel is an alternately comic and horrific account of a descent into nihilism.
The Spider’s House (1955), the longest and most complex of Bowles’s novels, is set against the end of French rule in Morocco. Its characters—ranging from a Moroccan boy gifted with spiritual healing power to an American writer who regrets the passing of traditional ways—are caught up in the clash between colonial and nationalist factions, and are forced to confront cultural gulfs widened by political violence.
Bowles—who once told an interviewer, “I’ve always wanted to get as far as possible from the place where I was born”—charts the collisions between “civilized” exiles and unfamiliar societies that they can never really grasp. In fiction of slowly gathering menace, he achieves effects of horror and dislocation with an elegantly spare style and understated wit.
This Library of America volume, containing his first three novels, with its companion Collected Stories and Later Writings, is the first annotated edition of Bowles’s work, offering the full range of his literary achievement: the portrait of an outsider who was one of the essential American writers of the last half century.
The Sheltering Sky (1949), which remains Bowles’s most celebrated work, describes the unraveling of a young, sophisticated, and adventuresome married couple as they make their way into the Sahara. In a prose style of meticulous calm and stunning visual precision, Bowles tracks Port and Kit Moresby on a journey through the desert that culminates in death and madness.
In Let It Come Down (1952), Bowles plots the doomed trajectory of Nelson Dyar, a New York bank teller who comes to Tangier in search of a different life and ends up giving in to his darkest impulses. Rich in descriptions of the corruption and decadence of the International Zone in the last days before Moroccan independence, Bowles’s second novel is an alternately comic and horrific account of a descent into nihilism.
The Spider’s House (1955), the longest and most complex of Bowles’s novels, is set against the end of French rule in Morocco. Its characters—ranging from a Moroccan boy gifted with spiritual healing power to an American writer who regrets the passing of traditional ways—are caught up in the clash between colonial and nationalist factions, and are forced to confront cultural gulfs widened by political violence.
Bowles—who once told an interviewer, “I’ve always wanted to get as far as possible from the place where I was born”—charts the collisions between “civilized” exiles and unfamiliar societies that they can never really grasp. In fiction of slowly gathering menace, he achieves effects of horror and dislocation with an elegantly spare style and understated wit.
940 pages, Hardcover
First published August 26, 2002
12 people are currently reading
490 people want to read
About the author
Paul Bowles
252 books866 followersPaul Frederic Bowles grew up in New York, and attended college at the University of Virginia before traveling to Paris, where became a part of Gertrude Stein's literary and artistic circle. Following her advice, he took his first trip to Tangiers in 1931 with his friend, composer Aaron Copeland.
In 1938 he married author and playwright Jane Auer (see: Jane Bowles). He moved to Tangiers permanently in 1947, with Auer following him there in 1948. There they became fixtures of the American and European expatriate scene, their visitors including Truman Capote, Tennessee Williams and Gore Vidal. Bowles continued to live in Tangiers after the death of his wife in 1973.
Bowles died of heart failure in Tangier on November 18, 1999. His ashes were interred near the graves of his parents and grandparents in Lakemont, New York.
In 1938 he married author and playwright Jane Auer (see: Jane Bowles). He moved to Tangiers permanently in 1947, with Auer following him there in 1948. There they became fixtures of the American and European expatriate scene, their visitors including Truman Capote, Tennessee Williams and Gore Vidal. Bowles continued to live in Tangiers after the death of his wife in 1973.
Bowles died of heart failure in Tangier on November 18, 1999. His ashes were interred near the graves of his parents and grandparents in Lakemont, New York.
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Displaying 1 - 23 of 23 reviews
November 5, 2015
Life needs no clarifying, no justification. From whatever direction the approach is made, the result is the same: life for life's sake, the transcending fact of the living individual. In the meantime you eat. And so he, lying in the sun and feeling close to himself, knew that he was there and rejoiced in the knowledge. He could pretend if he needed, to be an American named Nelson Dyar, with four thousand pesetas in the pocket of the jacket that lay across the seat in the stern of the boat, but he would know that it was a remote and unimportant part of the entire truth. First of all he was a man lying on the sand that covered the floor of a ruined boat, a man whose left hand reached to within an inch of its sun-heated hull, whose body displaced a given quantity of the warm morning air. Everything he had ever thought or done had been thought or done not by him, but by a member of a great mass of beings who acted as they did only because they were on their way from birth to death. He was no longer a member: having committed himself, he could expect no help from anyone. If a man was not on his way anywhere, if life was something else, entirely different, if life was a question of being for a long continuous instant that was all one, then the best thing for him to do was to sit back and be, and whatever happened, he still was. Whatever a man thought, said or did, the fact of his being there remained unchanged. And death? He felt that some day, if he thought enough, he would discover that death changed nothing, either.
December 5, 2019
Paul Bowles Novels In The Library Of America
The Library of America makes the best of American writing available to broad audiences in uniform, reasonably priced volumes. In 2002, the LOA published two volumes of the works of Paul Bowles (1910 -- 1999). Bowles seemed an unusual choice for a series of "American" writers. He lived as an expatriate in Tangier for the last 52 years of his long life and seldom looked back. Until mid-life, Bowles had been a composer and music critic in New York City. The reasons for his move to Tangier remain unclear but seem to be related to his unconventional lifestyle. Bowles' career as a writer began in earnest with his move to Tangier.
This volume is the first of the two LOA volumes of Bowles and includes three of his four novels, including his first and most famous book, "The Sheltering Sky" (1949). I read "The Sheltering Sky about ten years ago and recently went back to it. Upon rereading, I was hooked and determined to read more of Bowles. The three novels in this collection are each set in North Africa and each feature lonely, isolated American characters at odds with the environment and with the local culture. The novels are darkly introspective, sharply descriptive, and brooding.
Set in North Africa following WW II, "The Sheltering Sky" tells the story of two American intellectuals, Port and Kit Moresby, who are alienated from American life. They seek to find meaning and to resurrect their passionless marriage in the towns near the Sahara desert. The book describes Port's and Kit's inexorable deterioration to death and madness as they move restlessly into a series of ever more desolate desert locales. The book is a mixture of exoticism and philosophy and demands slow, careful reading. In an early review, Bowles' friend Tennessee Williams described the novel as "an Allegory of Man and his Sahara". Williams wrote:
"There is a curiously double level to this novel. The surface is enthralling as narrative. It is impressive as writing. But above that surface is the aura that I spoke of, intangible and powerful, bringing to mind one of those clouds that you have seen in summer, close to the horizon and dark in color and now and then silently pulsing with interior flashes of fire. And that is the surface of the novel that has filled me with such excitement."
The remaining two novels are less well-known. They share much of the introspective, lonely character of the "Sheltering Sky" but include more in the way of social description. Thus, Bowles' second novel, "Let it Come Down" (1952) is set in Tangier following WW II while it was administered as an International Zone by the allies. The book includes many scenes of local life, with both the expatriate and the local Moslem communities. But it focuses on the character of Nelson Dyar, a nondescript American who moves to Tangier for no clear reason other than his boredom with his job as a bank teller and unadventurous life. While in Tangier, Dyar quickly falls in love with a prostitute and becomes involved in several dubious activities. The dark and brooding novel shows the development of unanticipated evil and violence in Dyar's character.
"The Spider's House" (1955) is set in 1954 when local Moroccan insurgents rebelled against French colonialism. Bowles said later that he didn't want to write a political novel but was compelled to do so by the circumstances. "The Spider's House" is a long, many-faceted book which describes and meditates upon the war. It includes a large group of varied characters, American and British expatriates, local Moslems, and members of the insurgency. The two major characters are an American expatriate writer, John Stenham, loosely modeled upon Bowles himself, and a young religious adolescent Moslem, Amar. The book includes many reflections by the protagonists on competing views of life and religion. The agnostic Stenham is deeply sympathetic to the faith of the Moslem believers but is finds himself unable to support one side over the other in the war. This is a thought-provoking book with some beautifully written descriptive passages that does not cohere fully as a novel.
Shortly before his death, Bowles gave an interview about his philosophy of life which was reprinted in part in a long New York Times obituary of November 19, 1999. It is worth quoting to help understand Bowles and his books. The obituary recounts:
"" I live in the present", Bowles said, and added about the past: "I remember it as one remembers a landscape, an unchanging landscape. That which has happened is finished. I suppose you could say that a man can learn how to avoid making the same actions which he discovered were errors. I would recommend not thinking about it.'
For Bowles the point of life is to have fun, 'if there is any point at all.' Enjoyment, he said firmly, 'is what life should provide.'
When it was suggested to him that others might say that life should provide a greater moral purpose, he said: 'What is moral purpose? The word 'moral' sets nothing ringing in my head. Who decides what's moral and what isn't? Right behavior, is that moral? Well, what's right behavior?'"
Daniel Halpern edited this volume which includes a good chronological summary of Bowles' life, sparse notes, and a brief glossary of Arabic terms. The texts do not include the Prefaces Bowles wrote to subsequent editions of "The Sheltering Sky" and "The Spider's House." The latter preface is valuable. This is an excellent volume for readers wanting to get to know the works of an American loner and outsider.
Robin Friedman
The Library of America makes the best of American writing available to broad audiences in uniform, reasonably priced volumes. In 2002, the LOA published two volumes of the works of Paul Bowles (1910 -- 1999). Bowles seemed an unusual choice for a series of "American" writers. He lived as an expatriate in Tangier for the last 52 years of his long life and seldom looked back. Until mid-life, Bowles had been a composer and music critic in New York City. The reasons for his move to Tangier remain unclear but seem to be related to his unconventional lifestyle. Bowles' career as a writer began in earnest with his move to Tangier.
This volume is the first of the two LOA volumes of Bowles and includes three of his four novels, including his first and most famous book, "The Sheltering Sky" (1949). I read "The Sheltering Sky about ten years ago and recently went back to it. Upon rereading, I was hooked and determined to read more of Bowles. The three novels in this collection are each set in North Africa and each feature lonely, isolated American characters at odds with the environment and with the local culture. The novels are darkly introspective, sharply descriptive, and brooding.
Set in North Africa following WW II, "The Sheltering Sky" tells the story of two American intellectuals, Port and Kit Moresby, who are alienated from American life. They seek to find meaning and to resurrect their passionless marriage in the towns near the Sahara desert. The book describes Port's and Kit's inexorable deterioration to death and madness as they move restlessly into a series of ever more desolate desert locales. The book is a mixture of exoticism and philosophy and demands slow, careful reading. In an early review, Bowles' friend Tennessee Williams described the novel as "an Allegory of Man and his Sahara". Williams wrote:
"There is a curiously double level to this novel. The surface is enthralling as narrative. It is impressive as writing. But above that surface is the aura that I spoke of, intangible and powerful, bringing to mind one of those clouds that you have seen in summer, close to the horizon and dark in color and now and then silently pulsing with interior flashes of fire. And that is the surface of the novel that has filled me with such excitement."
The remaining two novels are less well-known. They share much of the introspective, lonely character of the "Sheltering Sky" but include more in the way of social description. Thus, Bowles' second novel, "Let it Come Down" (1952) is set in Tangier following WW II while it was administered as an International Zone by the allies. The book includes many scenes of local life, with both the expatriate and the local Moslem communities. But it focuses on the character of Nelson Dyar, a nondescript American who moves to Tangier for no clear reason other than his boredom with his job as a bank teller and unadventurous life. While in Tangier, Dyar quickly falls in love with a prostitute and becomes involved in several dubious activities. The dark and brooding novel shows the development of unanticipated evil and violence in Dyar's character.
"The Spider's House" (1955) is set in 1954 when local Moroccan insurgents rebelled against French colonialism. Bowles said later that he didn't want to write a political novel but was compelled to do so by the circumstances. "The Spider's House" is a long, many-faceted book which describes and meditates upon the war. It includes a large group of varied characters, American and British expatriates, local Moslems, and members of the insurgency. The two major characters are an American expatriate writer, John Stenham, loosely modeled upon Bowles himself, and a young religious adolescent Moslem, Amar. The book includes many reflections by the protagonists on competing views of life and religion. The agnostic Stenham is deeply sympathetic to the faith of the Moslem believers but is finds himself unable to support one side over the other in the war. This is a thought-provoking book with some beautifully written descriptive passages that does not cohere fully as a novel.
Shortly before his death, Bowles gave an interview about his philosophy of life which was reprinted in part in a long New York Times obituary of November 19, 1999. It is worth quoting to help understand Bowles and his books. The obituary recounts:
"" I live in the present", Bowles said, and added about the past: "I remember it as one remembers a landscape, an unchanging landscape. That which has happened is finished. I suppose you could say that a man can learn how to avoid making the same actions which he discovered were errors. I would recommend not thinking about it.'
For Bowles the point of life is to have fun, 'if there is any point at all.' Enjoyment, he said firmly, 'is what life should provide.'
When it was suggested to him that others might say that life should provide a greater moral purpose, he said: 'What is moral purpose? The word 'moral' sets nothing ringing in my head. Who decides what's moral and what isn't? Right behavior, is that moral? Well, what's right behavior?'"
Daniel Halpern edited this volume which includes a good chronological summary of Bowles' life, sparse notes, and a brief glossary of Arabic terms. The texts do not include the Prefaces Bowles wrote to subsequent editions of "The Sheltering Sky" and "The Spider's House." The latter preface is valuable. This is an excellent volume for readers wanting to get to know the works of an American loner and outsider.
Robin Friedman
August 30, 2013
The Sheltering Sky
------------------
Two twenty-somethings from New York, on a whim, arrive in North Africa and begin to travel south to smaller and smaller isolated locations. Why? The woman, Kit, believes in omens, signs., She regulates her life to the extent she exerts any control in an effort to avoid the horror she is sure awaits her. "Each escape merely made it possible for her to advance into a region of heightened danger." "All she could hope to do was eat, sleep and cringe before her omens."
Why are the here? Port, the main male in the story, "kept his head down, seeing nothing but the dust and the thousands of small sharp stones. He did not look up because he knew how senseless the landscape would appear. It takes energy to invest life with meaning, and at present this energy was lacking. He knew how things could stand bare, their essence having retreated on all sides to beyond the horizon, as if impelled by a sinister centrifugal force. He did not want to face the intense sky, too blue to be real, above his head, the ribbed pink canyon walls that lay on all sides in the distance, the pyramidal town itself on its rocks, or the dark spots of oasis below. They were there, and they should have pleased his eye, but he did not have the strength to relate them, either to each other or to himself; he could not bring them into any focus beyond the visual. So he would not look at them."
Kit has no need to work having inherited money so there is no occupation listed on his papers when he arrives in Africa. In order to get through the entry process, Kit volunteers that he is actually a writer, just modest. "Then for a few hours the idea of his actually writing a book had amused him. A journal, filled in each evening with the day's thoughts, carefully seasoned with local color, in which the absolute truth of the theorem he would set forth in the beginning -- namely, that the difference between something and nothing is nothing -- should be clearly and calmly demonstrated.
The story covers the encounter between these two people and Africa. Who will win?
Let It Come Down
-----------------
Mr. Dyar has left America, where he worked as an anonymous teller in a cage at a bank. "His own life was a dead weight, so heavy that he would never be able to move it from where it lay. He had grown accustomed to the feeling of intense hopelessness and depression which had settled upon him, all the while resenting it bitterly." He lives with his parents. One day, after gazing at the advertising pictures in a travel bureau window he writes to an acquaintance, whom he has heard is still living in North Africa after the war, and asks for a job. Things happen to Mr. Dyar. "Although he was not given to analyzing his states of mind, since he never had been conscious of possessing any sort of apparatus with which to do so, recently he had felt, like a faint tickling in an inaccessible region of his being, an undefined need to let his mind dwell on himself. There were no formulated thoughts, he did not even daydream, nor did he push matters so fr as to ask himself questions like: "What am I doing here?" or "What do I want?" At the same time he was vaguely aware of having arrived at the edge of a new period in his existence, an unexplored territory of himself through which he was going to have to pass."
How will Mr. Dyar and North Africa, the main characters in this story, get on?
The Spider's House
------------------
A writer, Mr. stenham has been living in Fez, a city in Morocco, controlled by the French for some time. We are never told what he writes but to him it is of no consequence. He is a student of the Moslem character. "Unaccountable behavior on the part of Moslems amused him, and he always forgave it, because, as he said, no non-Moslem knows enough about the Moslem mind to dare find fault with it." Mr. Stenham speaks schoolroom Arabic and visits with Moslems in their homes.
The other big character in the novel is Amar, a Moslem boy who decided not to go to school and therefore does not know how to read or write. He works and hustles for a living while residing with his parents. He is a little different from any of the other Moslem's we meet. "They think they know once and for all what the world is like, so that they don't ever have to look at it again." Amar makes all his decisions in real-time based on his understanding of the tenets of Islam and custom. At one point he is being interrogated. "He would offer no information except that explicitly demanded by Benani, and then he would confuse him by telling the truth. Nothing could be more upsetting, because one always judiciously mixed false statements in with the true, the game being to tell which were which. It was axiomatic that a certain percentage of what everyone said had to be disbelieved."
Will these two insightful people be able to bridge the cultural and religious gap? In the background for this story is the simmering nationalist desires of some Moroccans and the feeling of entitlement felt by the ruling French.
The Spider's House was my favorite. I would like to know what a Moslem reader thinks of the characterization of Amar.
NOTE: The spelling in the book was Moslem rather than Muslim.
------------------
Two twenty-somethings from New York, on a whim, arrive in North Africa and begin to travel south to smaller and smaller isolated locations. Why? The woman, Kit, believes in omens, signs., She regulates her life to the extent she exerts any control in an effort to avoid the horror she is sure awaits her. "Each escape merely made it possible for her to advance into a region of heightened danger." "All she could hope to do was eat, sleep and cringe before her omens."
Why are the here? Port, the main male in the story, "kept his head down, seeing nothing but the dust and the thousands of small sharp stones. He did not look up because he knew how senseless the landscape would appear. It takes energy to invest life with meaning, and at present this energy was lacking. He knew how things could stand bare, their essence having retreated on all sides to beyond the horizon, as if impelled by a sinister centrifugal force. He did not want to face the intense sky, too blue to be real, above his head, the ribbed pink canyon walls that lay on all sides in the distance, the pyramidal town itself on its rocks, or the dark spots of oasis below. They were there, and they should have pleased his eye, but he did not have the strength to relate them, either to each other or to himself; he could not bring them into any focus beyond the visual. So he would not look at them."
Kit has no need to work having inherited money so there is no occupation listed on his papers when he arrives in Africa. In order to get through the entry process, Kit volunteers that he is actually a writer, just modest. "Then for a few hours the idea of his actually writing a book had amused him. A journal, filled in each evening with the day's thoughts, carefully seasoned with local color, in which the absolute truth of the theorem he would set forth in the beginning -- namely, that the difference between something and nothing is nothing -- should be clearly and calmly demonstrated.
The story covers the encounter between these two people and Africa. Who will win?
Let It Come Down
-----------------
Mr. Dyar has left America, where he worked as an anonymous teller in a cage at a bank. "His own life was a dead weight, so heavy that he would never be able to move it from where it lay. He had grown accustomed to the feeling of intense hopelessness and depression which had settled upon him, all the while resenting it bitterly." He lives with his parents. One day, after gazing at the advertising pictures in a travel bureau window he writes to an acquaintance, whom he has heard is still living in North Africa after the war, and asks for a job. Things happen to Mr. Dyar. "Although he was not given to analyzing his states of mind, since he never had been conscious of possessing any sort of apparatus with which to do so, recently he had felt, like a faint tickling in an inaccessible region of his being, an undefined need to let his mind dwell on himself. There were no formulated thoughts, he did not even daydream, nor did he push matters so fr as to ask himself questions like: "What am I doing here?" or "What do I want?" At the same time he was vaguely aware of having arrived at the edge of a new period in his existence, an unexplored territory of himself through which he was going to have to pass."
How will Mr. Dyar and North Africa, the main characters in this story, get on?
The Spider's House
------------------
A writer, Mr. stenham has been living in Fez, a city in Morocco, controlled by the French for some time. We are never told what he writes but to him it is of no consequence. He is a student of the Moslem character. "Unaccountable behavior on the part of Moslems amused him, and he always forgave it, because, as he said, no non-Moslem knows enough about the Moslem mind to dare find fault with it." Mr. Stenham speaks schoolroom Arabic and visits with Moslems in their homes.
The other big character in the novel is Amar, a Moslem boy who decided not to go to school and therefore does not know how to read or write. He works and hustles for a living while residing with his parents. He is a little different from any of the other Moslem's we meet. "They think they know once and for all what the world is like, so that they don't ever have to look at it again." Amar makes all his decisions in real-time based on his understanding of the tenets of Islam and custom. At one point he is being interrogated. "He would offer no information except that explicitly demanded by Benani, and then he would confuse him by telling the truth. Nothing could be more upsetting, because one always judiciously mixed false statements in with the true, the game being to tell which were which. It was axiomatic that a certain percentage of what everyone said had to be disbelieved."
Will these two insightful people be able to bridge the cultural and religious gap? In the background for this story is the simmering nationalist desires of some Moroccans and the feeling of entitlement felt by the ruling French.
The Spider's House was my favorite. I would like to know what a Moslem reader thinks of the characterization of Amar.
NOTE: The spelling in the book was Moslem rather than Muslim.
March 25, 2017
Slow to start but builds to a thunderous conclusion. Bowles' unlooked-for insight into colonial Moroccan society is on full display here.
“I did have respect for you, much respect, because I thought you had a head and were working for the Moslems. But whatever you make for us will be a spiderweb, an ankabutz, and may God who forgives all hear my words, because it’s the truth.”
“I did have respect for you, much respect, because I thought you had a head and were working for the Moslems. But whatever you make for us will be a spiderweb, an ankabutz, and may God who forgives all hear my words, because it’s the truth.”
August 31, 2023
I had high expectations going into this and was disappointed by what I found. Paul Bowles writes very well, and the stories had interesting premises. All three of the novels within this book create a new Lost Generation following World War II, focusing on American’s abroad without any real purpose but to leave home. In this way, it reminded me of The Sun Also Rises. But like The Sun Also Rises, the stories were boring and I didn’t care for the characters. There wasn’t anything that I felt drove the stories in a meaningful way. Let It Come Down did have moments of suspense and The Spider’s House had the background conflict between the Morrocans and French colonizers, but it became a chore to get through the huge blocks of internal thoughts and drama. The structure of thede stories is hard to define, as I’m not sure sometimes what the conflict is, where the climax occurs, what the resolution points to. There was the critique of American ignorance and cultural insensitivity when travelling abroad that I felt was worth considering. I just wish more was done with it.
Overall, it’s not something I would recommend, nor am I interested in rereading it.
Overall, it’s not something I would recommend, nor am I interested in rereading it.
March 4, 2018
This review is only for The Sheltering Sky
…the sky here’s very strange. I often have the sensation when I look at it that it’s a solid thing up there, protecting us from what’s behind. ~ Port Moresby from The Sheltering Sky
This is the second time I’ve read The Sheltering Sky and the only work I’ve read by Paul Bowles. It is an existential novel, set in post-colonial, Northern Africa sometime after WWII. It is the third-person narrative of Americans Port and Kit (Catherine) Moresby, their friend Tunner, and their journeys throughout North Africa.
My full review: http://100greatestnovelsofalltimeques...
…the sky here’s very strange. I often have the sensation when I look at it that it’s a solid thing up there, protecting us from what’s behind. ~ Port Moresby from The Sheltering Sky
This is the second time I’ve read The Sheltering Sky and the only work I’ve read by Paul Bowles. It is an existential novel, set in post-colonial, Northern Africa sometime after WWII. It is the third-person narrative of Americans Port and Kit (Catherine) Moresby, their friend Tunner, and their journeys throughout North Africa.
My full review: http://100greatestnovelsofalltimeques...
October 19, 2013
I first came across Bowles’ before a trip to Morocco. His world and the detached realism of his travel writings were very attractive, as were the equally detached but disturbing short stories I read before going. I am still fascinated by the person of Paul Bowles, and I am still wishing to be at Bab Doukkala in the Medina of Marrakech, the nexus of the most sensational foreign love of my life.
Now I own the Library of Congress edition (Bowles ironically not being published in America for lengthy periods during his own lifetime) Volume I, which collects his three early novels in the Maghreb. This is my fourth Library of Congress series book, and I really love the way these books feel on a tactile level.
I found a quiet masterpiece in Sheltering Sky, Bowles first novel that would permanently place him as the talented detached ex-pat he remained to the end in Tangier (personally, professionally, and throughout his body of work). Bowles is with stunning ability to insert existential query into place and movement, perfect pacing. It serves as critique of representations of the foreign, a literary break in tradition of the generation by teasing out that generation’s anxieties, phobias and perceptions of self in sparing and tight prose.
Character descriptions, both explicit and implicit (as is more often the case with Bowles) are especially permissive of a necessary “independence” for the characters as the stories play to their manifest strengths and weaknesses. Dialogue here is precise and appropriate, interspersed with Maghrebi, French, and other languages. In the post WWII period, the three young-American-travellers (“travellers”, which Bowles makes cynically distinct from the concept of the “tourist” through brilliant dialogue) embark on the sort of trip Beatniks and other movements that followed romanticised about, but ultimately this sense that the social and cultural malaise of post war America could be escaped by travel to those places “untouched” brings each of three main characters into peril through the brutal and totalizing geographic and social realities of the Maghreb. In intense passages invoking the sparse geography and sensory deprivation/overload, Bowles teases out the “Sheltering Sky” motif, as the sky above is the fiction we ourselves hold that protects us from our own insignificance in the great dangers of the unknown. It is to the unknown that the characters are first enchanted, and it is to the unknown they owe their respective stories and endings. This is Bowles’ finest achievement, in his near “wallflower” authorial disavowal of intent, he allows the characters their space to bring this novel to its inevitably intriguing close. When I can say “to the unknown they owe their respective stories”, Bowles did his work just fine.
In Let It Come Down, Bowles is crafty, too crafty. If he were a martial artist, he would have been knocked out while he was practicing his finest spinning hook kick. Somewhat aimless wandering prose. Though brightly and precisely crafted and often at a dizzying metaphysical level, each sentence is musically constructed throughout (Bowles was actually a composer before a novelist, and went to Tangier first with Aaron Copland). Yes, like a hypothetical Bruce Lee at a modern day Mixed Martial Artist competition, good technique and form, but he saves his best narrative moves too late and wouldn’t make it through the fight. I felt like I was slugging through the middle third, the initial excitement of Tangier and its characters gave way to a benign but thoughtful(less) process where protagonist Dyar more and more resembles the vacant Muersalt of Camus, but fully rendered by Bowles as incapably caught in the torrent of commotion and adventure around him, none of which he perceives as his own projection or any mimesis of action. It makes perfect sense for the novel’s trajectory, the intrigue of Tangier, “The International Zone”, where gossip determines gossip and you can do almost anything you like with money is intrigue manifest, the senselessness of main character (a traveler, from New York of course), and finally the real meat in the final chapter, which also traces the development and ending of Dyar himself, when he becomes more manifestly human in disgrace than through his spacious pensive presence in the first couple hundred pages.
I can’t help but love the final book in this collection (Spider’s House) though it clearly takes Bowles out of his comfort zone into a kind of political thriller (think Pontecorvo’s La Bataille d’Alger but with a greater depth of astute cultural understanding and expression). This final book in the collection was written in the context of the post-colonial period amidst the geopolitical concerns of the Cold War period. Amazingly, Bowles retreats not only from these overarching and potentially limiting themes for the greater narrative, but as well from a perspective that seemingly removes the narrator from the narrative, allowing these greater macro-concerns and the thoughts and actions of its main characters a more autonomous space whereby a more dynamic work is produced.
Bowles remains one of my favourite American writers, but I don’t think I could say that if I didn’t have such a fascination with the parts of the world he covers.
Now I own the Library of Congress edition (Bowles ironically not being published in America for lengthy periods during his own lifetime) Volume I, which collects his three early novels in the Maghreb. This is my fourth Library of Congress series book, and I really love the way these books feel on a tactile level.
I found a quiet masterpiece in Sheltering Sky, Bowles first novel that would permanently place him as the talented detached ex-pat he remained to the end in Tangier (personally, professionally, and throughout his body of work). Bowles is with stunning ability to insert existential query into place and movement, perfect pacing. It serves as critique of representations of the foreign, a literary break in tradition of the generation by teasing out that generation’s anxieties, phobias and perceptions of self in sparing and tight prose.
Character descriptions, both explicit and implicit (as is more often the case with Bowles) are especially permissive of a necessary “independence” for the characters as the stories play to their manifest strengths and weaknesses. Dialogue here is precise and appropriate, interspersed with Maghrebi, French, and other languages. In the post WWII period, the three young-American-travellers (“travellers”, which Bowles makes cynically distinct from the concept of the “tourist” through brilliant dialogue) embark on the sort of trip Beatniks and other movements that followed romanticised about, but ultimately this sense that the social and cultural malaise of post war America could be escaped by travel to those places “untouched” brings each of three main characters into peril through the brutal and totalizing geographic and social realities of the Maghreb. In intense passages invoking the sparse geography and sensory deprivation/overload, Bowles teases out the “Sheltering Sky” motif, as the sky above is the fiction we ourselves hold that protects us from our own insignificance in the great dangers of the unknown. It is to the unknown that the characters are first enchanted, and it is to the unknown they owe their respective stories and endings. This is Bowles’ finest achievement, in his near “wallflower” authorial disavowal of intent, he allows the characters their space to bring this novel to its inevitably intriguing close. When I can say “to the unknown they owe their respective stories”, Bowles did his work just fine.
In Let It Come Down, Bowles is crafty, too crafty. If he were a martial artist, he would have been knocked out while he was practicing his finest spinning hook kick. Somewhat aimless wandering prose. Though brightly and precisely crafted and often at a dizzying metaphysical level, each sentence is musically constructed throughout (Bowles was actually a composer before a novelist, and went to Tangier first with Aaron Copland). Yes, like a hypothetical Bruce Lee at a modern day Mixed Martial Artist competition, good technique and form, but he saves his best narrative moves too late and wouldn’t make it through the fight. I felt like I was slugging through the middle third, the initial excitement of Tangier and its characters gave way to a benign but thoughtful(less) process where protagonist Dyar more and more resembles the vacant Muersalt of Camus, but fully rendered by Bowles as incapably caught in the torrent of commotion and adventure around him, none of which he perceives as his own projection or any mimesis of action. It makes perfect sense for the novel’s trajectory, the intrigue of Tangier, “The International Zone”, where gossip determines gossip and you can do almost anything you like with money is intrigue manifest, the senselessness of main character (a traveler, from New York of course), and finally the real meat in the final chapter, which also traces the development and ending of Dyar himself, when he becomes more manifestly human in disgrace than through his spacious pensive presence in the first couple hundred pages.
I can’t help but love the final book in this collection (Spider’s House) though it clearly takes Bowles out of his comfort zone into a kind of political thriller (think Pontecorvo’s La Bataille d’Alger but with a greater depth of astute cultural understanding and expression). This final book in the collection was written in the context of the post-colonial period amidst the geopolitical concerns of the Cold War period. Amazingly, Bowles retreats not only from these overarching and potentially limiting themes for the greater narrative, but as well from a perspective that seemingly removes the narrator from the narrative, allowing these greater macro-concerns and the thoughts and actions of its main characters a more autonomous space whereby a more dynamic work is produced.
Bowles remains one of my favourite American writers, but I don’t think I could say that if I didn’t have such a fascination with the parts of the world he covers.
July 16, 2020
Sorry, it just would not click. I wanted to appreciate The Sheltering Sky as I recently visited Tangier and witnessed a Paul Bowles friends reunion concert there ... but the text is so orientalist and whimsical about the local inhabitants I had so stop. Honestly, I did not much like the film version either.
March 8, 2018
Gift for description. Colors. Heat. Arid. Women get's raped. The waning of colonialism. Absentee "landlords".
March 9, 2023
One star for the edition. It's pretty, of course, but the end material consists of a Chronology any grad student could've cobbled together, a Note on the Texts that could have been reduced to "We reproduced what was first published in the USA", a Glossary, and Notes. The Glossary indexes, by my count, somewhat less than half of the Arabic and/or Maghrebi words and phrases that appear in the novels. Highly unsatisfactory. The Notes take care of, equally desultorily, the white-boy languages. Why there should be a distinction between Glossary and Notes utterly escapes me except as a form of colonialism.
As to The Sheltering Sky, 2 1/2 stars. We can start with the title, which is superbly ironic. The narrative tells us that the sky shelters us "from the horror that lies above"; every page demonstrates precisely the opposite. Most of the irony, however, subsists in the obvious assumption (for why else does this novel exist at all?) that we should care about the three strikingly uninteresting main characters. First there is Port, an utter drone who lives on an inheritance. There really are only two ways of successfully handling drones in literature. One is to hold them up to scorn, although this risks lapsing into a certain kind of two-dimensional socialist realism; the other, more successful way is Bertie Wooster. No such luck here. Instead we get a character who is "unhealthily preoccupied with himself", as one of the French officers will note, wrapping himself in existential angst that is neither original nor even interesting. What sets the novel in motion is the manner in which he indulges his existential angst: by traveling to desolate places and dragging the other two characters with him. Somewhat less than existentially, he slips out with prostitutes more or less whenever possible. By the time he's deeply stricken with typhoid fever, it's difficult if not impossible to care whether he lives or dies. Then there's his estranged wife Kit, the most interesting things about whom are the traces of obsessive-compulsive disorder in her character, such as it is, and who ends up caroming from one local to another, losing in the process whatever meager vestiges of personality or identity she'd ever had in the first place. Finally there is some grinning nonentity called Tunner (I wonder if it's significant that he gets two whole syllables), with whom Kit has, more out of boredom than anything else, her apparently first extramarital affair. Before long Port and Kit start taking pains to avoid and/or dump Tunner, because his being a nice guy is just not an acceptable way of being boring, and besides, Kit finds his post-coital presence embarrassing. A couple of Brits provide meager comic relief, as does Kit's wandering the Sahara in pumps and lipstick. Things pick up a little at the beginning of Part 2, when we're presented with a French garrison lieutenant who has to deal with real matters, but that doesn't last for long, because Port soon arrives whining about the theft of his passport, and of course he accuses the wrong person. I'd hate to think any of this was in the least autobiographical. Bowles probably should've stuck to writing those delicate impressionistic Glass Menagerie soundtracks; he did have a real talent for that.
It utterly escapes me how anyone would think of making a movie out of this, but indeed it happened. Most of the awards it garnered were, not surprisingly, for the cinematography.
Didn't bother with the rest.
As to The Sheltering Sky, 2 1/2 stars. We can start with the title, which is superbly ironic. The narrative tells us that the sky shelters us "from the horror that lies above"; every page demonstrates precisely the opposite. Most of the irony, however, subsists in the obvious assumption (for why else does this novel exist at all?) that we should care about the three strikingly uninteresting main characters. First there is Port, an utter drone who lives on an inheritance. There really are only two ways of successfully handling drones in literature. One is to hold them up to scorn, although this risks lapsing into a certain kind of two-dimensional socialist realism; the other, more successful way is Bertie Wooster. No such luck here. Instead we get a character who is "unhealthily preoccupied with himself", as one of the French officers will note, wrapping himself in existential angst that is neither original nor even interesting. What sets the novel in motion is the manner in which he indulges his existential angst: by traveling to desolate places and dragging the other two characters with him. Somewhat less than existentially, he slips out with prostitutes more or less whenever possible. By the time he's deeply stricken with typhoid fever, it's difficult if not impossible to care whether he lives or dies. Then there's his estranged wife Kit, the most interesting things about whom are the traces of obsessive-compulsive disorder in her character, such as it is, and who ends up caroming from one local to another, losing in the process whatever meager vestiges of personality or identity she'd ever had in the first place. Finally there is some grinning nonentity called Tunner (I wonder if it's significant that he gets two whole syllables), with whom Kit has, more out of boredom than anything else, her apparently first extramarital affair. Before long Port and Kit start taking pains to avoid and/or dump Tunner, because his being a nice guy is just not an acceptable way of being boring, and besides, Kit finds his post-coital presence embarrassing. A couple of Brits provide meager comic relief, as does Kit's wandering the Sahara in pumps and lipstick. Things pick up a little at the beginning of Part 2, when we're presented with a French garrison lieutenant who has to deal with real matters, but that doesn't last for long, because Port soon arrives whining about the theft of his passport, and of course he accuses the wrong person. I'd hate to think any of this was in the least autobiographical. Bowles probably should've stuck to writing those delicate impressionistic Glass Menagerie soundtracks; he did have a real talent for that.
It utterly escapes me how anyone would think of making a movie out of this, but indeed it happened. Most of the awards it garnered were, not surprisingly, for the cinematography.
Didn't bother with the rest.
September 24, 2015
He opened his eyes. The room was malignant. It was empty. “Now, at last, I must fight against this room.” But later he had a moment of vertiginous clarity. He was at the edge of a realm where each thought, each image, had an arbitrary existence, where the connection between each thing and the next had been cut. As he labored to seize the essence of that kind of consciousness, he began to slip back into its precinct without suspecting that he was no longer wholly outside in the open, no longer able to consider the idea at a distance. It seemed to him that here was an untried variety of thinking, in which there was no necessity for a relationship with life. “The thought in itself,” he said – a gratuitous fact, like a painting of pure design. They were coming again, they began to flash by. He tried to hold one, believed he had it. “But a thought of what? What is it?” Even then it was pushed out of the way by the others crowding behind it. While he succumbed, struggling, he opened his eyes for help. “The room! The room! Still here!” It was in the silence of the room that he now located all those hostile forces; the very fact that the room’s inert watchfulness was on all the sides made him distrust it. Outside himself, it was all there was. He looked at the line made by the joining of the wall and the floor, endeavored to fix it in his mind, that he might have something to hang on to when his eyes should shut. There was a terrible disparity between the speed at which he was moving and the quiet immobility of that line, but he insisted. So as not to go. To stay behind. To overflow, take root in what would stay here. A centipede can, cut into pieces. Each part can walk by itself. Still more, each leg flexes, lying alone on the floor.
There was a screaming sound in each ear, and the difference between the two pitches was so narrow that the vibration was like running his fingernail along the edge of a new dime. In front of his eyes clusters of round spots were being born; they were the little spots that result when a photographic cut in a newspaper is enlarged many times. Lighter agglomerations, darker masses, small regions of uninhabited space here and there. Each spot slowly took on a third dimension. He tried to recoil from the expanding globules of matter. Did he cry out? Could he move?
The thin distance between the two high screams became narrower, they were almost one; now the difference was the edge of a razor blade, poised against the tips of each finger. The fingers were to be sliced longitudinally.
There was a screaming sound in each ear, and the difference between the two pitches was so narrow that the vibration was like running his fingernail along the edge of a new dime. In front of his eyes clusters of round spots were being born; they were the little spots that result when a photographic cut in a newspaper is enlarged many times. Lighter agglomerations, darker masses, small regions of uninhabited space here and there. Each spot slowly took on a third dimension. He tried to recoil from the expanding globules of matter. Did he cry out? Could he move?
The thin distance between the two high screams became narrower, they were almost one; now the difference was the edge of a razor blade, poised against the tips of each finger. The fingers were to be sliced longitudinally.
October 9, 2014
Review of The Sheltering Sky only.
Post WWII? Deserts of North Africa? I'm so in! It's interesting to note that Bowles was a composer, his ability to paint a sense of place is exceptional. Unfortunately he was not able to draw me into caring what happened to ANY of the characters. If he had succeeded in that, it would have made the entire novel brilliant since everyone is so terribly unlikeable. Getting the reader to care about their fates would have been remarkable indeed.
My favorite part of the narrative was the tale of the three sisters, it is just stunningly beautiful and sad. I can see why Sting was inspired to turn it into a song.
Post WWII? Deserts of North Africa? I'm so in! It's interesting to note that Bowles was a composer, his ability to paint a sense of place is exceptional. Unfortunately he was not able to draw me into caring what happened to ANY of the characters. If he had succeeded in that, it would have made the entire novel brilliant since everyone is so terribly unlikeable. Getting the reader to care about their fates would have been remarkable indeed.
My favorite part of the narrative was the tale of the three sisters, it is just stunningly beautiful and sad. I can see why Sting was inspired to turn it into a song.
November 28, 2012
"Sheltering sky" is absorbing, I couldn't put it down and not for the "what-will-happen-in-the-end" reason. Compared with Bertolucci's movie, the novel is much darker and sinister. Like in the south, where the darkness comes so quickly that you often feel like you missed the moment when it happened, the many horrific, dark episodes appear to be more shocking a few pages after you read about them.
November 18, 2010
All three of Bowles novels: while his portrait of life in the Moslem countries is certainly of interest today, the quality of the novels as fiction seems to lose something with each new book. "The Sheltering Sky" is a wonderful novel. "Let it Come Down" is fine. "The Spider's House" is a chore until almost the last hundred pages.
November 4, 2013
I'm trudging through this one for some reason. Maybe a third of the way through The Sheltering Sky and I just can't get enthralled with it again.
Read
December 24, 2008THE SHELTERING SKY by PAUL BOWLES (1968)
March 25, 2009
strange story but beautiful writing.
Read
January 11, 2010Much better than the movie. Gripping !
June 7, 2012
See my reviews of the individual novels in this collection.
September 21, 2014
I only read "The Sheltering Sky." I know this is a classic, but I found it to be kind of a slog.
August 14, 2018
Didn't know much about Paul Bowles until these three novels. Interested in post WWII North Africa and expats living there these are a good intro.
November 5, 2016
The Sheltering Sky is remarkable. Looking forward to the rest.
Read
December 28, 2008Dude can write a sentence. Now let's see what he does with it.
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