I finally finished The Sheltering Sky on Monday. We’ve been busy over the last two weeks showing the Sieverts around Chicago and meeting up with the Forbes clan for a little Reds-bashing in Cincinnati, so my reading literally went on the shelf for a bit (hopefully I’ll update Flickr with some pics soon). But getting Harry Potter 7 in the mail on Monday (I’m already half-way through) lit a fire under me to finish Paul Bowles exquisite novel. As I mentioned in a former post, Bowles prose and dialogue are extremely compelling, but the deeper I got into the text, the deeper Bowles seemed to penetrate into his characters subconscious. This internal excavation dovetails nicely with the protagonists’ drive into the heart of the Sahara, a move mirrored by the psychological drama that unfolds. Thematically, this text would be an excellent addition to a reading list on colonialism or madness. Published in 1949, the book definitely belongs on the Time 100 list and I am proud to say that’s another one off the list. And now that I know it’s a feature film starring Debra Winger and John Malkovich, there’s a new number 1 in my Netflix queue.
Below are a few excellent excerpts from The Sheltering Sky, of which there are many:
“The meaningless hegemony of the involuntary.” – description of a sick man
“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. Yet everything happens only a certain number of times, and a very small number, really. How many more times will you remember a certain afternoon of your childhood, some afternoon that’s so deeply a part of your being that you can’t even conceive of your life without it? Perhaps four or five more times more. Perhaps not even that. How many more times will you watch the full moon rise? Perhaps twenty. And yet it all seems limitless.”
“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.”
Posted by lefttowrite 
