The Sheltering Sky tells the story of three American travelers, a married couple and their friend, as they explore the vastness of Algeria. The word travelers is an important distinction, as I think I'd do Port Moseby a disservice if I made him out to be otherwise.
"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 where he had felt most at home." (Bowles 6).
The book features infidelity, disease, death, deception, indecency, decay and distrust. From those adjectives, you'd except the story to be quite an exciting escape from reality. Unfortunately, I found the first half of the novel to move rather too slowly.
It was not until (spoilers) the illness and death of Port and Kit's disappearance and descent into madness that I really came to enjoy the story. I already knew of these two essential facts - this was in the author's own foreward - but this major preemptive reveal did not diminish my reading experience. If anything, I kept waiting for the other shoe to drop when Port first fell ill with typhus.
The last third of the book, detailing Kit's complete abandonment of the sum of her being was by far the best part. Bowles masterfully almost writes an entirely new character that is still so familiar to us as the Kit of the first half of the novel. The detail to which he describes her thought process and total embrace of insanity made the reading worth while. I do not feel like this last third of the book redeemed the rest of it - I recall Kurt Vonnegut's G-d Bless You Mr. Rosewater and after reading the final lines of the book just smiled - but this was not a struggle in the same way The Ginger Man was.
Days Elapsed: 218
Books Completed: 4/100
Pages Read: 1056
Money Spent: $27.97
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