The Sheltering Sky is so many things and yet nearly nothing...much like its Saharan setting. So where the Sahara can appear to be a vast and endless nothing of sand, closer examination reveals all sorts of life and stories. And so Paul Bowles tells the story of Port and Kit Moresby as they travel with Tunner deep into the African desert.

And yet, this is no simple travelogue novel. Everything has a surface story and then reveals itself later to have far-reaching consequence. As a minor character points out later in the story, The desert's a big place, but nothing really ever gets lost there...Things turn up sometimes months later. There is little that goes on in this novel that does not have consequence in some manner later. For arrogant travelers who have not had a genuine human encounter in years, this is a double-edged sword.

Bowle's depictions of the Sahara are beautiful, even as you see the damage that can be inflicted to the physically and spiritually unprepared. But his greater talent seems to be in presenting you three characters who are rather unlikable at first and transforming them not into different people, but into characters in a story you want to finish. ( )

Twentieth century existential angst set in postwar French North Africa. The ending is a protracted male rape fantasy which starts as offensive, but is so misogynistic it actually becomes funny. A first, our heroine, escaping the guilt she feels about her husband's death and a one-nighter with his friend (also a mini-rape; she yearns to do men's will) hitches a ride with an Arab caravan. Right away, she is raped by the two leaders. She puts up a weak resistance, accepts passively and promptly begins to enjoy herself--this is the first rape! Shortly she falls in love with the younger one and passively endures the other. The younger one takes her home, imprisons her in a tiny room and rapes her for weeks and weeks and she " lives" for his "visits." Finally, realizing the other wives are slowly poisoning her, she escapes, only to run to the arms of another strange man, who rapes and robs her and with whom she falls in love. Finally, her weak little brain can't take it and she goes completely insane.
The Arab characters seem stereotypical, as do the French colonialists. On the good side, the writing style is fine, and until we get to the rape fantasy, the plot is interesting, and I suppose the book presents some sort of picture of the time and place (never having been there). However, I would only recommend this as a case study: a look into the mind of a man who really believes women enjoy being raped. ( )

Three young Americans with enough money to do whatever they want but with no ambition to do anything in particular bumble into the unforgiving North African desert, where one of them loses his innocence, another his life, and the third her soul and sanity. The harsh beauty of the desert, the hopeless naïveté of the clueless adventurers, and the symbiotic rhythms of the Arab and black African peoples accustomed to this environment are beautifully evoked (even in this Spanish translation). The mostly strongly felt character is the young woman, Kit (Catherine) Moresby, whose sensual yearnings lead her deeply into sexual bondage and a will to become part of desert life. We also saw the 1990 film by Bernardo Bertolucci (John Malkovich and Debra Winger are wonderful as Port and Kit Moresby), which alters the story by bringing in Bowles himself as "narrator" and, regrettably, dropping several of the novel's most memorable secondary characters, including the two French military officers, the hotel-keeper Abdel Kader, and the humble and generous Jewish shopkeeper Daoud Zozeph. But the Tuareg who takes Kit into his harem is thoroughly convincing, and the camerawork effectively conveys the terror and the beauty of the desert and the cities, saloons, hotels and markets. ( )

A trio of Americans take an unforgettable journey into North Africa where they will confront the mystery of a foreign culture, alienation, and ultimately, death. ( )