The pages ooze atmosphere and tension, the desert and it’s people reluctantly hospitable and unforgiving.

Accompanied by a friend from home, Tunner, whose presence prevents them from addressing the deteriorating state of their marriage. The story begins with them in Morocco and follows their journey deep into the Sahara. Port and Kit Moresby are a young couple from New York in the post war years of the 1940s. I found it hard to really care about them despite the dramatic turns their story took. I could have loved the book if the characters had been more likeable. A vast journey in a beautiful setting along with the spiritual transformation of the characters. There were things about the story I really liked. I finished it last weekend and have spent the past few days thinking about it. Paul Bowles was an American author who spent many years living in North Africa and this was the setting he chose for The Sheltering Sky. How many more times will you watch the full moon rise? Perhaps twenty. 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. Yet everything happens a certain number of times, and a very small number, really. But because we don’t know, we get to think of life as an inexhaustible well. It’s that terrible precision that we hate so much.

“Death is always on the way, but the fact that you don’t know when it will arrive seems to take away from the finiteness of life.

The sheltering sky book analysis