Thursday, June 4, 2009

The Sheltering Sky

The Sheltering Sky The Sheltering Sky by Paul Bowles


My review


rating: 5 of 5 stars
Paul Bowles was a writer, composer, traveler, translator, icon, historical figure, friend and destination to many around the world. I had just finished reading “The Sheltering Sky” several years ago, and my paperback showed many turned-over corners that I used to mark interesting passages or prose. On everyone’s list of the 100 Greatest English Novels, it is an engaging and hypnotizing view of the edge of civilization in North Africa, set in the period just after World War II, as seen through the eyes of a world-weary and disenchanted American couple and their friend. That period in Europe and North Africa following World War II is such fertile ground for expression; the post-war despair amid the growing tide of nihilism in regards to all things human, that is rich soil to plant a seed in. There is the life we know, and the life out there in the desert, just beyond our horizon and experience, the one in which all things are possible. As for the life out there, (in which we may find the meaning of ourselves, or in which we may lose everything), that life awaits us if we seek it. As for the life we know, that is moving inexorably to its end, along with us and our possibilities.



“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. Perhaps not even that. How many more times will you watch the full moon rise? Perhaps twenty. And yet it all seems limitless.”

Paul Bowles

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