Meet to discuss - The Sheltering Sky by Paul Bowles

The Sheltering Sky - Paul Bowles
This is an astonishingly good novel, powerfully imagined and rooted in the concrete realities of crumbling desert towns and the declining days of French power in North Africa.
In a delicate portrait of a burnt-out marital relationship, a young American couple drift south in the Algerian Sahara in the late 1940s. They are lotus-eaters, he wilful and impetuous, she over-analytical and superstitious. Neither are willing to break out of their intimate but cold torpor for fear of losing the other; and both are unfaithful in casual, joyless ways.
At one point in their wanderings, Port articulates what drives him: ‘I know why I’m disgusted,’ he called after her. ‘It’s something I ate. Ten years ago.’
Later, much later, Kit sees her overwhelming fear of life embodied in the very fabric of the universe: ‘the sky hides the night behind it, shelters the person beneath from the horror that lies above… At any moment the rip can occur, the edges fly back, and the giant maw will be revealed.’
What makes this great work stand out for me is the vivid and realistic evocation of the interior life of the various characters, and especially the central couple, Port and Kit. For example, Bowles brilliantly creates a sense of the inchoate logic of Port’s typhus-stricken mind as he lies in a remote room in a Saharan town. Kit’s evolving breakdown near the end of the story, as she flees into ever more exotic relationships with local Arab men, is utterly convincing. Bowles also creates an impressionistic awareness of the point of view of the various Algerians whom the protagonists encounter.
Beneath it all, this is an un-judgemental, compassionate story of deeply entwined love - but neither party are alive to the depth of their feelings until too late, until they have drifted too far, geographically and emotionally.