The Sheltering Sky — Beautiful Prose, Unconvincing People
The Sheltering Sky (1949) by Paul Bowles follows three American travelers—Port, his wife Kit, and their friend Tunner—as they journey through post‑WWII North Africa. It’s often read as a novel of cultural alienation and existential disintegration, set against a vast, indifferent desert landscape. The story traces their increasing isolation and personal collapse, culminating in Port’s death and Kit’s psychological unraveling.
I can’t remember who or what recommended this book to me. It may have been my Libby app while I was looking for a novel that was both strange and exploratory. I listened to the audiobook rather than reading it, which is unfortunate—Bowles is clearly a master stylist, and I’m sure the sentence‑level construction would shine more on the page.
Midway through, I already felt uneasy about the novel—not because it was bleak, but because its understanding of human relationships struck me as thin. I had read glowing reviews beforehand, but it became clear that those readers likely hold a very different worldview than I do. Still, I withheld judgment until I finished.
I completed the book on 1/18/2026, and my misgivings hardened into disappointment.
This is a novel of ideas, and I generally love novels of ideas. But I also need realism. I need characters who act like people rather than chess pieces on an exquisite board of ideology. In The Sheltering Sky, the characters feel engineered to demonstrate despair rather than to live convincingly within it.
What lies behind the “sheltering sky” is meant to be terrifying, but the horror isn’t the desert or the foreignness—it’s the characters’ willful detachment from life and from one another. With the exception of Tunner, they seem intent on getting lost. And lost they get: Port loses his life through a sort of rugged carelessness, and Kit loses her mind, but this seems like a choice, not an unfortunate accident.
Port, in particular, is a deeply unpleasant character. His death inspired little sympathy in me. He is monstrously self‑involved—unfaithful, predatory, and disturbingly drawn to dependence and control. His late‑stage declarations of love and ownership ring hollow. He doesn’t truly care for Kit, and his presence feels less like a partnership than a self‑serving arrangement.
Kit is more complicated, and for much of the novel she’s understandable. She’s privileged, educated, withdrawn, and emotionally constrained, but she does try—especially when Port falls ill. Her selfish thoughts during his sickness are all too-human, and her exhaustive attempts to nurse him back to health feel sincere. But once Port’s death becomes inevitable, she acts like a set piece/a pawn and simply drifts—walking away from everything, latching onto a new man as if he were a life preserver. She simply embraces the violations and degradation that are thrust upon her. And though I'm not a woman, I can't imagine a woman embracing being repeatedly raped in any such fashion. This is where Bowles loses me entirely. At that point, I stopped caring. These are people who don’t care for others or themselves, and the novel treats that emptiness as profound rather than pathological.
Tunner, oddly, is the character I had the most sympathy for, though he’s often framed as a dolt. I didn’t read him that way. He struck me as relatively normal—selfish at times, yes, but also decent. He repeatedly goes out of his way for Port and Kit. Kit shows flashes of decency toward him as well, particularly in her resistance to abandoning him. What I never understood was Port’s relationship to Tunner at all. There’s no sense of real bond or affection. Why insist on bringing him along? Was it simply safer to travel with another man?
Bowles’ prose is unquestionably beautiful. But the novel isn’t as strange, or terrifying as I expected. The true horror isn’t existential—it’s moral. To discard love and responsibility so casually, to drift into oblivion without resistance, is not an inevitability. These are choices.
Rating:
A for the beauty of the language
C - for believable human behavior
Overall: B -
Overall, I found The Sheltering Sky disappointing. It’s not particularly interesting or inspiring to me as either a reader or a writer. Can I learn from it? Yes—the balance between characters is skillful, and Tunner’s quiet normalcy stands out in a world of cultivated despair. But as a vision of humanity, the novel feels narrow, faithless, and ultimately unconvincing.
