The Sheltering Sky
by Paul Bowles
Summary
Port Moresby and his wife Kit, a restless, unhappy American couple, travel deep into the Sahara after the Second World War with their friend Tunner, hoping the trip will somehow repair a marriage that has drifted into near silence at home. Bowles pushes the three of them steadily away from any comfortable French colonial outpost and further into the desert, tracking how completely unprepared they are, culturally and practically, for the landscape they insist on wandering into. Port grows increasingly ill without either of them recognizing the danger at first, and by the time Kit understands that he has contracted typhoid fever, proper medical help is impossible to reach in time; he dies in a remote desert outpost while Kit, who had briefly left him to spend time with Tunner, is not at his side. Alone and unmoored by grief in a landscape she never understood, Kit wanders off into the desert on foot and is found by a Tuareg caravan leader named Belqassim, who takes her back to his household, disguises her, locks her away in his household, and keeps her, for weeks, effectively as a captive far outside any structure that could rescue her. By the time Kit is eventually located and returned toward the coast, she has stopped speaking almost entirely, and the novel ends with her drifting, silent and psychologically unreachable, through the streets of Oran, slipping away from the friend sent to collect her, having traveled further from the life she started the novel trying to save than either she or Port ever intended.
Bowles, who composed music before turning to fiction, writes with a controlled, almost musical patience, letting the desert's emptiness and heat build across long unhurried passages before either character's crisis actually arrives. It reads slowly and unsettlingly, more interested in dread than in plot incident, and its refusal to soften what happens to either character, addiction to comfort, cultural blindness, and eventually complete psychological collapse, is exactly what readers who love it point to and what readers who find it bleak past usefulness object to.
Bowles had lived in Tangier for years and drew the novel's landscape from real travel through the Algerian Sahara. The actor Brandon Lee had a line from the novel inscribed on his own tombstone after his death in 1993, one more instance of the book's meditation on mortality outliving the fiction that first wrote it.
Historical Context & Significance
Bowles, an American citizen, was eligible for the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction when John Lehmann published The Sheltering Sky in Britain in 1949, ahead of its American edition; the 1950 prize went to A. B. Guthrie's The Way West, a very different kind of postwar American novel about westward expansion rather than about Americans coming apart abroad.
The novel built its reputation gradually rather than through prize recognition, later included in Time magazine's list of the hundred best English language novels published since 1923 and ranked ninety seventh on the Modern Library's own century list. Bernardo Bertolucci's 1990 film adaptation, starring Debra Winger and John Malkovich and shot on location across Morocco, Algeria, and Niger, brought Bowles's Sahara to a far larger audience than the novel alone had reached, though critics were divided on whether the film's visual grandeur served or overwhelmed the story's bleakness.