“The Sheltering Sky” – Tempered Terror and Cruelly Beautiful Prose

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An Undeniable Literary Masterpiece

This LitStack Rec from Lauren Alwan delves into the haunting allure and profound impact of the captivating and darkly remarkable novel, The Sheltering Sky, a world where the boundaries of reality blur, where the quest for solace and meaning echoes our own human longing. Explore the labyrinthine landscapes of desire and despair, woven with an exquisite tapestry of language that leaves an indelible impression. Join us in this LitStack Rec as we unravel the transformative power and enigmatic tapestry that is Paul Bowles’ undeniable literary masterpiece The Sheltering Sky.

The Sheltering Sky, A Novel By Paul Bowles

A Double-Edged Love Story

Paul Bowles is one of my favorite writers. His prose is stark yet rich, with a darkness so lush it draws you in no matter how unsettling the image. So when Bowles writes a love story, you can expect it’s bound to be double-edged, and perhaps not the kind you’d ever want to live out. As we’re soon told, “The soul is the weariest part of the body.”

The husband and wife at the center of Bowles’ novel are Port and Kit Moresby. They leave the U.S. during wartime in 1939, and arrive in north Africa to take up a peripatetic existence with a third wheel, an American friend, Tunner. 

Port and Kit have hit a rough spot in their marriage, but the triad never takes hold, since Tunner doesn’t have the power to permeate Kit’s detachment, or Port’s ego. Though with the arrival of the Lyles, a questionable English couple—well, a mother and son—the inciting event occurs, and the group is drawn further into the Sahara. The journey that takes place, to the center of a world and a soul, is as much interior as it is exterior.

How many more times will you remember a certain afternoon of your childhood, some afternoon that’s so deeply a part of your being that you can’t even conceive of your life without it? Perhaps four or five times more. Perhaps not even that. How many more times will you watch the full moon rise? Perhaps twenty. And yet it all seems limitless.

The Exotic and Barbaric, an Idealized Otherworldly

The Sheltering Sky is listed as number #97 in the Modern Library’s list of 100 Best Novels, and 2024 marked the seventy-fifth year since its publication—which in 1949 became a bestseller and brought Bowles fame and financial security. Edward Said famously dismissed the American ex-pat, who first arrived in Tangiers in 1931 and settled there in 1947, for the Orientalist tropes that populate his stories, reliant as they are on the exotic, the barbaric, and idealized otherworldly, and defined Morocco from the stance of an outsider.

Author Hisham Aidi (Tangier: Orientalism, Nostalgia and the Road to Oppression) wrote:

Although [Bowles] was well aware of the violence of French imperialism, he enjoyed its amenities—’the old, easygoing, openly colonial life of Morocco’—and as early as the 1950s, Bowles began to lament the loss of ‘colonial Tangier.’

A Place Far More Remote and Unfathomable

Despite those flaws, Bowles has an undeniable place, however unreliable, in Western literature. Even if you haven’t read the novel, some lines are likely familiar—as this one, “How fragile we are under the sheltering sky,” which became the source of one of Sting’s trademark ballads—and if you’ve yet to read any of Bowles’ celebrated short stories, collected in The Stories of Paul Bowles (Ecco, 10/31/2006) (including “The Delicate Prey,” “A Distant Episode,” and “Too Far from Home”) you have a discovery in store.

Bowles’ spare and cruelly beautiful prose, his sense of place, his tempered way with terror and delirium—all can be relished in this novel. And if it’s a love story you’re after, The Sheltering Sky is that yes, but it also uncovers an interior place far more remote and unfathomable than love.

~ Lauren Alwan

Other Titles by Paul Bowles

About Paul Bowles, Author of The Sheltering Sky

Paul Bowles (1910-1999) was an American composer, author, and translator, celebrated for his evocative works set in the exotic landscapes of North Africa. A native New Yorker with a cultured upbringing, Bowles displayed early talents in music and writing, studying under Aaron Copland and composing for theatrical productions.

His literary breakthrough came with The Sheltering Sky (1949), a critically acclaimed novel inspired by his 1931 travels in French North Africa. This success led him to make Tangier, Morocco, his home in 1947, joined by his wife Jane in 1948. The city became his muse and the backdrop for much of his later work.

Over the next five decades, Bowles became an iconic figure in Tangier’s expatriate community, his life and work reflecting the cultural complexities and allure of the region. Bowles’s legacy as a significant literary and musical figure endures, his work continuing to captivate readers and inspire artists with its haunting beauty and profound exploration of human nature.

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