"He did not think of himself as a tourist; he was a traveler. The difference is partly one of time, he would explain. Whereas a tourist generally hurries back home at the end of a few weeks or months, the traveler, belonging no more to one place than to the next, moves slowly, over periods of years, from one part of the earth to another."Before meeting Port Moresby, I always thought of myself as a traveler, but after one particular late night discussion accompanied by inebriation, interrupted by a frolic in an exotic bordello conveniently located nearby, and then reconvened over tankards of yet more alcoholic concoctions, he managed to convince me that I was merely a tourist. I was at a disadvantage, you see. I was not independently wealthy. I was still building a living for myself. I had three women I was seeing, all interviewing for a more permanent position as my wife. So yes, I was never able to linger while traveling, due to the fact that I always had a pressing need to return to my life, to shore up my business interests, and to keep my social relationships growing. I was, without a doubt, a tourist. Shamefully so. Despite knowing this about me, Port did stop in one evening to ask me if I wanted to go with them to North Africa. I was disappointed that his wife Kit was not with him. I guess I might as well confess this now. I was in love with Kit. It was quite awkward actually. A psychologist might make a case that my inability to pick one companion from the available women in my life actually stems from a deep seated belief that eventually Kit would come to her senses, divorce Port, and fling herself into my arms. ”The head is like the sky. Always turning around and around inside. But very slowly. When you think, you make it go too fast. Then it aches.”I don’t really know how it happened. I thought I had the inside track. I grew up with her. I watched the moth morph into a beautiful butterfly. We exchanged books and thoughts about those books. We hung out together to the detriment of our individual studies. We occasionally kissed with something more than friendly affection. I was on the verge of asking her to marry me when she abruptly disappeared on a whirlwind tour of the world. She came back with Port. It didn’t take me long to discover that my ship had sailed and Port’s had docked. I was always watching (analysing) him whenever I was around him, trying to discover what exactly it was about him that had so quickly convinced Kit that he was the one for her. I was more shattered than I could ever reveal. It was only later that I realized that my life or at least the thought of a life with me was something she would have found horribly confining. Port’s attraction was his shiftlessness. His lack of roots. His avoidance of responsibilities. Anytime anything became TOO REAL. He moved on to somewhere else. His money was a buffer between himself and dealing with any of the tedious expectations that others may have for him. He was free. I was burdened. I was still considering the North Africa trip. It would have been a perfect opportunity to spend some time with Kit because invariably Port would disappear on some side trip in search of greater meaning. I didn’t say yes right away. I’d assumed I’d have more than a few minutes to give Port an answer, but as usual I underestimated his impulsive nature. They left with a fellow named Tunner. I had met Tunner, only in the most casual sense. We’d once occupied the same space at a party of mutual friends. I’d logged his presence only because of the way he looked at Kit. It was probably much the same way as I looked at her as well. I only received one letter from Kit while they were in North Africa. "She was content to watch the soft unvaried landscape going by. To be sure several times it occurred to her that they were not really moving at all, that the dune along whose sharp rim they were now traveling was the same dune they had left behind earlier, that there was no question of going anywhere since they were nowhere. And when these sensations came to her they started a slight stirring of a thought ‘Am I Dead?’"Needless to say the letter was disconcerting to me. It reeked of disassociation and had me wondering if those vast endless horizons of the African desert were beginning to inspire some form of mental illness. My worst fears, as it turned out, were mere childish angst compared to the trials and tribulations she actually suffered. I blame Port, of course, but I also can’t help but blame her as well. After all, she chose the wrong man. The family, Kit’s kin, came to me and asked me to go fetch her in North Africa. They didn’t know anyone else with the connections to Kit or anyone possessing the wherewithal to make the journey. I guess a part of me thought this was finally my chance to be with her, but seeing the way she looked at me when I reached out to greet her was distressing. It was as if I were just part of the background of her life...a chair for instance that doesn’t exist until she has the need to sit. ”she tried to break away from him. In another minute life would be painful. The words were coming back, and inside the wrappings of the words there would be thoughts lying there. The hot sun would shrivel them; they must be kept inside in the dark.”She told me everything on the journey home. The death of Port. The rape and worse, the acceptance of rape. She allowed herself to become a possession, a man’s plaything. For a while she even enjoyed it because she didn’t have to make decisions about anything. She traded sex for some semblance of peace. She tried a couple of times to crawl into my bunk on the way home, but I would only hold her against me, trapping her hands when they ventured near my groin. She found that particular solace with one of the young sailors or maybe more than one. I went through all the stages of grief: fear, anger, depression, but by the time we arrived in New York I’d finally reached some level of acceptance. The last I heard Kit was in New Mexico, but by the time a letter would reach her, she’d be somewhere else. I often wondered, late at night, with a warm snifter of cognac in my hand and a good book close to hand, whether if I’d agreed to go on the trip, would Port still be alive, and would Kit be a less fractured version of herself. If you wish to see more of my most recent book and movie reviews, visit http://www.jeffreykeeten.comI also have a Facebook blogger page at:https://www.facebook.com/JeffreyKeeten
This is an ambitious novel about alienation, isolation and despair. The story revolves around the character of Port Moresby, who, in disillusioned response to WWII, rejects America and Europe, leaving NY for Africa with his wife Kit as well as an acquaintance named Tunner, whom they both dislike.Port feels Africa is less marred by war, and aims to spend a long period of time there. It’s not that he would fit in, he just wants to escape, or disappear. He may hope to flee his emptiness, but unfortunately it’s a very clingy travelling companion. While his grudge against his culture propels him abroad, removing whatever external irritations Port might find in New York, the desert confronts him with his own inner emptiness. Port seems to relish wallowing there, while dragging his wife along. She isn’t one to protest – despite her unhappy state Kit seems devoted to Port, she bends to him, she bites her tongue and she packs her bags and comes. Other than facing the landscape’s reflection of one’s inner desolation, you can’t help but wonder what appeal Africa holds. Port, Kit and Tunner find mostly squalor – ferocious flies, pink hairless dogs, wailing babies covered in sores, garbage in hotels, and cafés that smell of urine. But Port doesn’t care about sight-seeing or how many stars a hotel has: he’s a “traveller,” not a “tourist.” And he is the engine for the whole unfortunate story, even though he does manage to take his leave midway through the book. At the end of Book 1, Port visits a teahouse, where he gets the hots for a blind prostitute/dancer. Her expressionless face while dancing says to him, “A dance is being done. I do not dance because I am not here. But it is my dance.” That peace is very much what Port seems to want. He is also attracted to this particular dancer because her blindness means she cannot see him. She erases him.It all goes downhill from there. In general, I thought the writing of The Sheltering Sky was good and the themes were interesting and important and are generally themes I like. I would have taken a philosophical point of view if the offensive handling of Kit as a woman hadn’t pushed my feminist button so hard it still hasn't popped back out. First off, I realize the book was written in that late 1940s, but the use of the word “girl” to describe Kit grated on me immediately. I could have chalked it up to the times and shrugged it off. Even her attachment to clothes and wearing lipstick didn’t seem to me unrealistic. And ... here comes the SPOILER so stop here if you don’t want to know more about the plot... When Port dies, Kit’s own “sheltering sky” collapses and she is confronted with herself pure and unmitigated. Again here I’d be inclined to read this as an existential story if it weren’t for what Kit turns out to be. I found it too much to take that after Port’s death she waves down a caravan to save her and goes on to enjoy being raped by two men, soon becoming a contented sex slave to one of them. Coming to her senses briefly, she escapes that fate too, only to screw the next available guy. I don’t like the message here – woman as neurotic, male-defined nymphomaniac. I disliked the double standard throughout the book, e.g. after Port stumbles home from sleeping with a prostitute he’s outraged when he suspects Kit slept with Tunner. I could rave on and on about this, but suffice it to say at this point, as a woman I was offended.
What do You think about The Sheltering Sky (2007)?
The first time I read this book I was in my 20's, and though it made a deep impression on me, and I loved it passionately, that was so long ago that I was amazed and somewhat dismayed to find that I remembered nothing of the detail. Only towards the end, when I was not surprised by the bizarre events that unfolded, did I have any sense even of deju vu. It was as if I was reading it for the first time. Once again I was swept up in the lyrical writing and scope of the story.Bowles is a brilliant storyteller, moving the pace along with a swift and variable perspective. He slips with ease between the disparate conciousnesses of his characters, creating for the reader a kind of psychic overview that allows us an intimacy with characters who, regarded from the outside, may not be all that appealing in their manner or even comprehensible in their actions. Cerainly, in their utter preoccupation with themselves and in their callous disregard of their travelling companion, apathetic Kit and the imperious Port are certainly more anti-heroes than intrepid travellers. Their attempts to achieve equilibrium and their private thoughts as they navigate the foreign landscape somehow endeared them to me. That they were doomed from the start only intensified my care. I wanted to reach out, from behind my safe vantage point as a reader, and nudge them to a softer outcome. The logic of their story is relentless however, a styalized descent into the underworld of consciousness. The harsh conclusion takes on the inevitability of a dream.
—Magdelanye
Rating: A craven, self-preservationistic 2* of fiveBkC8: Tedious twaddle.When I'm right, I'm right.The Book Report: Kit and Port Moresby (get the Australia/New Guinea colonial joke, huh? huh? How clever is Paul Bowles, right?) are not gonna make it as a couple. They just aren't. So, in time-honored rich-couple-in-over-relationship fashion, they Travel. They don't take a trip, or a vacation, oh perish forbid, they Travel. North Africa, they think, no one we know will be there so we won't have to confront how little is left of what was a marriage.So, this being midcentury fiction, while they Travel, they pick up a guy named Tunner who is also Traveling with his Mama. (Code of the day for "he's a fag.") I would say "hijinks ensue," but they really, really don't.My Review: Tunner and Kit. Tunner and Port. Port and Kit. Find me some sexual heat in any of these variations. G'wan g'wan double-dog dare ya.Arab as Wily Native. Murrikin as Rich Rube. Okay, been there done that, even in 1949...sixty-three years ago this wasn't an under-used trope, and by now it's a dreary cliche when used without irony or other meta-element to waft away its corpse-like odor.Books told in dialogue. Really now. Robert Pinget did it better.So "tedious twaddle" remains my judgment. Gay rights have swept away the shock, shock! of Port and Tunner's implied affair. Kit's a dreary stereotype of the Bored White Woman Seeking Dusky Lover. Whatever value the book still has, it's in the language, which I myownself found very close to intolerably dull and lifeless.I suppose I have to give this Ambien-between-covers two stars because there will be lynch mobs of admirers outside my door anyway, but if I gave it the 1/2 star I think it actually deserves, there'd be snipers and Inquisitionists too. But god, I feel hypocritical doing it.Run Away! Run Away! Don't even accept a copy as a gift! This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
—Richard Reviles Censorship Always in All Ways
I rarely don't finish a book. This is a personal tendency (obsessiveness) which cemented itself during forays into such tomes as Les Miserables (5th grade) and Tess of the D'Urbervilles (10th grade) in which the endeavor seemed like it would be fruitless, and then, ahoy! A beautiful gem on the sparkling sea surfaces, a hundred or so pages in, and I was rewarded for my patience...So it pains me to report that not even the chance of such a obscured jewel could keep me interested in A Sheltering Sky, which struck me as a poor man's Hemingway...make that a starving baby's Hemingway...in which the racism and misogyny are never once eclipsed by original prose. Nor did there seem to be much of a story...or if there was one, I couldn't give less of a shit about it. As Virginia Woolf once wrote, "All old men have their India." I'm going to leave this one to the old men.
—Jessica
