The Sheltering Sky by Paul Bowles

Two weeks of vacation was a good chunk of time for me (Chris) to start and perhaps finish a book. For this trip to Morocco, my selection was this classic – The Sheltering Sky by Paul Bowles, published in 1949.

I knew about this book first from the soundtrack for the 1990 movie made by Bernardo Bertolucci starring Debra Winger and John Malkovich, which I never saw. The movie won awards for best cinematography (Vittorio Storaro). It is now on my to-watch list.

The film’s soundtrack was composed mostly by Ryuichi Sakamoto, which won the Golden Globe for best original score. The piano version of the main theme is popular and has appeared in several compilations. I prefer the richer orchestral version, however.

I enjoyed the book and it added another dimension to the trip.

The Sheltering Sky is the cautionary tale of a New York couple trying to find happiness and themselves intellectually, through adventure in a post-World War II North Africa that was politically unstable and disease-ridden. Their fate of losing everything is a warning about the naive, romantic notions of exotic travels and modern nomadism.

Wikipedia summed up the book as a work about alienation and existential despair.

The writing is dark and relentless about the characters’ moods, as was its description of the emptiness and ruthlessness of the desert. Some of the observations on the idea of death are quite apt. For example,

Death is always on the way, but the fact that you don’t know when it will arrive seems to take away from the finiteness of life. It’s that terrible precision that we hate so much. But because we don’t know, we get to think of life as an inexhaustible well.

The title of the book probably came from this idea. We also observed that for most days, the sky was cloudless with an even shade of blue.

the sky here’s very strange. I often have the sensation when I look at it that it’s a solid thing up there, protecting us from what’s behind . . . [from] nothing, I suppose. Just darkness. Absolute night.

The attitude of the book’s characters towards everyday tourists surfaces in various degrees in many travel blogs (not ours too ?):

… 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. … [A]nother important difference between tourist and traveler is that the former accepts his own civilization without question; not so the traveler, who compares it with the others, …

The author, Paul Bowles, a 20th century literary cult figure was born in 1910 Queens. He was also well known as a composer, as well as a translator of French literature.

He studied in 1930’s with Aaron Copeland, I liked his Ravel-like piano pieces. His music is bright and dreamy which is totally different from his writing. Try the piece “6 Preludes: No. 6, quater note =54” on this album (track 27).

In a 2009 NY Times article, citing his biography,

… he sat in his room one day as a freshman in Charlottesville and flipped a coin. Heads, he would leave for Europe as soon as possible. Tails, he would take an overdose of pills and leave no note. The coin came up heads.

He started writing The Shelterig Sky in Fes, Morocco and traveled in the Sahara regions of Morocco and Algeria.

Over the years since its publication, he met many cultural elites at the time in the US and Europe, and traveled continuously around the world. He settled in Tangier, Morocco in the 50’s, continuing writing and composing, and lived there until he died in 1999.

I did manage to finish the book in Marrakech on our last day in Morocco.