The Sheltering Sky by Paul Bowles

Readability:

Through the first 7/8 of the book, an easy read. Prose is spare and not overly complicated, although it must be said that most of what happens is internal to the characters and some might say that not a lot happens. So that's the first 7/8. Then all of a sudden the last bit shifts and really feels more like a dream than anything else, or what it feels like to be inside a nervous breakdown. Actually a lot of stuff happens during this last section, but it is pervaded by the feeling of detachment or dissociation (or is that just the way the desert feels?).

Enjoyability:

I really really liked this book. I love the way Bowles describes the landscape, the desert: "By the road sometimes were high clumps of dead thistle plants, coated with white dust, and from the plants the locusts called, a high, unceasing scream like the sound of heat itself." I like the way you can FEEL the dichotomy of being a traveler, simultaneously attracted and repelled by the strangeness and otherness of this foreign place. There's this wonderful scene when Kit is homesick for Europe and pulls out all these extravagant silk dresses and then just curls up in them on her bed. There are these moments of striking beauty and then moments where all they can focus on is the flies or the heat or the food. Plus I liked that I didn't really know what was going to happen - there were several moments along the way when I just thought 'What?!'
Definitely a book and a writer I will come back to.

Favorite character: Probably Turner, just because he's such a cheerful and genuinely good-hearted fellow. Of course he does sleep with his best friend's wife, but he means well (is that any excuse?). I liked Kit in a lot of parts too, but get frustrated because she is has such a tendency to be dependent on others. I had high hopes for her during Port's illness when she stepped up and got them away from the Typhoid epidemic in S'ba, and then was taking care of him, but the ending makes me feel like maybe that was only possible because she was about to have a nervous breakdown.

Most un-favorite character: Mrs. Lyle. It's very hard to be sympathetic to someone who is a wealthy writer/photographer who spends all her time gallivanting around Africa, and yet is utterly bitter, critical, and ungrateful. Here's what Port has to say about her: "Her life had been devoid of personal contacts, and she needed them. Thus she manufactured them as best she could; each fight was an abortive attempt at establishing some kind of human relationship. Even with Eric [her son], she had come to accept the dispute as the natural mode of talking. He decided that she was the loneliest woman he had ever seen, but he could not care very much." I can only care enough to hate her a little.

Best Quotes:

"But not here in this sad colonial room where each invocation of Europe was merely one more squalid touch, one more visible proof of isolation; the mother country seemed farthest in such a room."

"As she stared she found herself wondering why it was that a diseased face, which basically means nothing, should be so much more horrible to look at than a face whose tissues are healthy but whose expression reveals an interior corruption."

"... it occurred to him that a walk through the countryside was a sort of epitome of the passage through life itself. One never took the time to savor the details; one said: another day, but always with the hidden knowledge that each day was unique and final, that there never would be a return, another time."

" 'Before I was twenty, I mean, I used to think that life was a thing that kept gaining impetus. It would get richer and deeper each year. You kept learning more, getting wiser, having more insight, going further into the truth--' She hesitated.

Port laughed abruptly. 'And now you know it's not like that. Right? It's more like smoking a cigarette. The first few puffs it tastes wonderful, and you don't even think of its ever being used up. Then you begin taking it for granted. Suddenly you realize it's nearly burned down to the end. And that's when you're conscious of the bitter taste.' "

"At least you would learn not to be afraid of God. You would see that even when God is most terrible, he is never cruel, the way men are."

"What delight, not to be responsible - not to have to decide anything of what was to happen! To know, even if there was no hope, that no action one might take or fail to take could change the outcome in the slightest degree - that it was impossible to be at fault in any way, and thus impossible to feel regret, or, above all, guilt. She realized the absurdity of still hoping to attain such a state permanently, but the hope would not leave her."

Recommended for:

People who liked The Quiet American or are fond of Hemingway, travelers and expatriates, and people who don't mind books where (according to Bowles) "all the action takes place inside people's heads."