5/22/2023 0 Comments The sheltering sky book summary![]() It is not Port but Kit who achieves true isolation, one far greater than her husband’s lofty pretensions, as she glides through the desert, truly alone for the first time. Suffocating tension builds like a pulse, until the book’s audacious, haunting climax two thirds in. They’re desperate to be satisfied, yet satisfied by nothing: every town they try, the Moresbys sniff at Arab culture and retreat to their unhappy shelter of hotel-room lunches and English speakers.Īs they flit across Algeria, Port becomes more and more thrilled by the idea of the remote, while Kit becomes increasingly hysterical as they move further from recognisable society. Indeed, would have found it difficult to tell, among the many places he had lived, precisely where it was he had felt most at home.īut for all his highbrow aspirations, Port is a bad traveller and his wife Kit no better two culturally-indifferent Americans with too much baggage (literally and emotionally), and no aims in life except their desire to not be wherever they are at the time. ![]() Whereas the tourist generally hurries back home at the end of a few weeks or months, the traveller belonging no more to one place than to the next, moves slowly over periods of years, from one part of the earth to another. ![]() The first time I picked up Paul Bowles’s The Sheltering Sky, I was amused and embarrassed to find my unearned snobbery reflected back at me in the first few pages, where upon arriving in north Africa, the male lead Port Moresby loftily observes: ![]()
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