As you see, a tourist comes to a place to have a nice experience of being elsewhere for a moment a traveler comes to find, or lose himself there, and draw spiritual succor from the landscape. They are not, however, tourists as Port famously explains, “ 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 the next, moves slowly, over periods of years, from one part of the earth to another.” Of course, it is a truism of pleasure travelers that none of them ever wants to be considered a tourist this is a cliche dating back to the French Romantics who pioneered pleasure travel to North Africa, and by the time of Flaubert and Nerval were regularly sneering at the (generally English) touristes.

The Sheltering Sky focuses on another complex married couple, Port and Kit Moresby, who have also traveled to the North African desert to fix their marital problems, and perhaps to flee their home. Through his work in Broadway, he met Jane Bowles, a fiercely creative presence in his life Paul undoubtedly wrote The Sheltering Sky because she had already published Two Serious Ladies, a novel that was well ahead of its time.* The two of them met on the level of intellect and creation and were devoted to each other emotionally, if not necessarily sexually- both of them were bisexual, if not gay, and they lived close, but did not cohabitate. His pieces are beautiful compositions in miniature, gaining him work in the theater and for films, but never made enough money. He was born into wealth, although cursed with a heartless father, and made his name first as a a composer.

Paul and Jane Bowles were certainly an elegant couple and exert a certain fascination even after their deaths. He let in the murder, the drugs, the incest, the death of the Square…” This is characteristically overstated, but there is a cold and formal elegance to the novel that dispenses with sentiment altogether, leaving it to die in the desert. Norman Mailer wrote that “Paul Bowles opened the world of Hip. It was also one of those books that seems a rupture– positioned at nearly the century’s halfway point, it is not quite like anything that came before it, but its mark can be found in a great deal that came afterwards. The novel marked Bowles’s debut in fiction at age 38. Now, they could buy a Cadillac and hire a driver and entertain their assorted friends, lovers, and fellow litterateurs. When The Sheltering Sky was released in 1949, it was an immediate success and brought Paul Bowles and his wife Jane’s restless wandering to rest in Tangier where they had already lived for a few years, continually running out of money.

The sheltering sky book summary