Pax Nortona – A Blog by Joel Sax
From the Land of the Lost Blunderbuss
Book Review: The Sheltering Sky
Posted on December 15, 2008 in Reading
[amazonify]006083482X::text::::The Sheltering Sky[/amazonify] by Paul Bowles
My review
rating: 5 of 5 stars
To read this is to indulge in word-primed hashish, not laced in chocolate brownies to sweeten the bite, but hard and true. On every page I found myself in Africa, not the place where wildlife glide gently in game parks, but sere deserts and towns rough with human contact and flies. This is a novel about Americans abroad, not ugly Americans but clueless ones.
Bowles says that the traveler is someone who takes and leaves bits of culture as he goes. Here the two principle characters lose so much of what they are that they die in one instance and go insane in the other.
This a harsh book, a hallucinogenic book, one that should be read for its cold-walled telescope gazing upon the mottled, abrasive desert, the brusque, unfathomable natives and the souls of its protagonists. Do not expect a happy or a triumphant story, but enjoy an unfeigned one.
[amazonify]006083482X::text::::Buy The Sheltering Sky and make me rich[/amazonify]
