The Sheltering Sky
This was a fascinating book. Paul Bowles was unknown to me until a couple of months ago, but as you can see from this cover image of his novel The Sheltering Sky, this is a 65th anniversary edition with “a new introduction by Tobias Wolff” as well as a blurb from Dave Eggers. The Sheltering Sky was initially published in 1949, but to me if felt very Hemingway-esque — probably because the plot centers around an affluent and aimless American couple that finds itself wandering Northern Africa after WWII.
Although Bowles himself fell in this category in a broad fashion — he lived in Tangier from 1947 until his death in 1999 — his writing tackles head-on the thing that make Kit and Port Moresby somewhat unlikable: a sense that they are the ultimate arbiters of class, order, and morality. (That said, a mother-son duo who they encounter along the way are waaaaay more caricaturish and cringey.)
Lost passports figure heavily in The Sheltering Sky...because who *are* we if we’re untethered from the very thing that gives us an identity, albeit a superficial one? Who *are* we — apart from all the markers and identifiers that signal who we *may* be? And then this passage, describing Port: “He did not think of himself as a tourist; he was a traveler. The difference is partly one of time, he would explain. Whereas the 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. Indeed, he would have found it difficult to tell, among the many places he had lived, precisely where it was he had felt most at home.” Well la-di-da-da! It’s like Amy Poehler’s “cool mom” bit: “I’m not a tourist; I’m a ~TRAVELER~”
I’m embarrassed to admit that song Somewhere Out There (yes, from An American Tail 😒🐭) popped in my head…you know, that line about “sleeping underneath the same big sky.” I mean, yes, it’s true that the same sky “shelters” us all, but a lack of awareness of how others function under different parts of it will always be our biggest downfall.
originally published on instagram