I recently picked up Paul Bowles’ The Sheltering Sky (1959). I got this book mainly because Dave Eggers had a blurb on the front cover, and I read everything that Eggers writes. But I was actually very interested in exploring Bowles, a fine writer from the 20th century that I had only a little experience with. (There are so many authors from the 20th century American scene! Especially pre- and post- World War II authors like James Agee.)

This work picks up on Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises, and gives it a new twist: these are expatriates in Oran, Algeria. The main character, Port, experiences some malaise as his wife is enticed by a man during their train ride to Tangiers. Port is an interesting character because he neither typifies the American expatriate, nor the tourist. He likes to think of himself as the “traveller” instead of a “tourist” (12). This makes him thoroughly uprooted from his native country, the United States.

The main issue in this particular work is that the characters are ‘deracinés’ which is a French word for people who are no longer tied to the land. This uprooted quality of the text is what makes it hypnotic. You can never tell whether the characters are actually American or North African. Because they aren’t ‘natives’ in any sense of the word. But Bowles skillfully weaves this aimlessness into the narrative: “[The bar] was full of the sadness inherent in all deracinated things” (49).

Then there is the hypnotic magical realism at work in this novel: “Reach out, pierce the fine fabric of the sheltering sky, take repose” (229). At times, Bowles is at pains to express the danger inherent in the Sahara. There seems to be only some comfort in the sky. In some sense, we see the sky “le ciel” (in French) as the “sacred canopy” that is described in Peter L. Berger’s work of the same name.

We have a ‘Sheltering Sky’ in which a hole is torn into it. When men and women used to trust in God, they have now an existential universe that is plagued by secularism. For this reason, it is necessary to “re-enchant” the cosmos, as Charles Taylor argues in his A Secular Age (101).

Works Cited:

Berger, Peter L. The Sacred Canopy. Anchor Books, 1969, p.102.

Bowles, Paul. The Sheltering Sky. Ecco, 1959, pp. 2-229.

Taylor, Charles. A Secular Age. Belknap, 2010, p.101