In fact, she lifts her arms to him, as if he were going to swoop down and carry her off somewhere grand just because she’s pretty.

She even expects a strange man riding past on a white horse to save her as if he’s her Prince Charming. She falls in love with every male that gives her attention. She finds people to make decisions for her in exchange for sexual favors, so all she has to do is exist. Stupid woman, who has a passport, runs into the desert instead of deciding to return home to the United States. She’s in shock and wants nothing nearby that reminds her of a faithless, failing marriage and a body she doesn’t know how to properly dispose. What woman does that? I can go only so far in rationalizing her actions. Spoiler Alert! She leaves his corpse there to rot, locked in that room, for the authorities to find. She avoids her husband, Port, despite passionate proclamations of love has sex with the family friend, Tunner, despite said proclamation that was made to him and even locks Port in a room while he’s on his deathbed. Kit gives women everywhere a bad reputation. I wouldn’t be surprised if he thought women were all irrational, flighty, weak, stupid, and overly emotional.

Through her actions, Bowles reveals that he knows nothing about wome. The two men are unremarkable and unmemorable, but it’s the woman, Kit, who really pissed me off. I couldn’t care for or about any of them nothing in their lives made me feel sympathetic toward them. Every character is selfish, naive, conceited, pompous, spoiled, and pretentious. I’m all for existentialist fiction, but not when characters contemplate their existence only because the author seems to demand it, instead of developing existential crises on their own. All that is fine, because it’s enough to make anyone ask, “Why the hell am I here?” and find a way to escape, which establishes a good story.īut, it belabored the existential theme to the point that I had to ask: “Why the hell am I listening to this?”

There are culture clashes, international conflicts, and sickness. The story includes a love triangle within a faithless marriage, set in the vast expanses of North African deserts during post-WWII. It’s also about detachment from the world and loved ones, and nihilistic tendencies that leave characters both empty and dumb. The landscapes are magical, the characters are questioning so much–it’s haunting in a very beautiful way.” In addition, it is “a landmark of 20th century literature, a novel of existential despair that examines the limits of humanity when it touches the unfathomable emptiness of the desert.” Most literature doesn’t evoke the rage in me that resulted from this book I’d consider burning it if I hadn’t only listened to its audiobook.Īccording to the blurb, “Paul Bowles’s writing is so extraordinary, so special. “The Sheltering Sky” by Paul Bowles is an agonizing 10.5-hours-long piece of existentialist fiction.

The sheltering sky novel