Dream and Realty: A Critical Appreciation of Paul Bowles’s The Sheltering Sky

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Introduction
Shortly speaking, The Sheltering Sky (1949) – hereafter is referred as TSS – is an existential novel by the American writer Paul Bowles in which a married couple (Port and Kit) originally from New York along with their friend (Tunner) travel to the North African desert shortly after World War II to resolve their marital difficulties. But by their ignorance of local culture and imminent dangers around them they soon fall prey and the trip becomes treacherous. It is a fiction of post-colonial alienation, culture clash and existential despair that was a great success and sold well. Time magazine introduced the novel in its TIME 100 Best English-language Novels from 1923 to 2005. In 1990 the novel was adapted by the stellar director Bernardo Bertolucci into a notable film with the same title.
Paul Bowles was an “American novelist, poet, [classical music] composer, translator, short-story writer,” and film scorer who married the novelist Jane Auer (Birch and Hooper 82). He was a harsh critic of western civilization, Americanization, technology, “mechanization, pollution, noise – all the things that twentieth century has brought and scattered over the world” (Caponi, Conversations 184). This made him to remove himself physically and psychologically from America (Perlow 189) and establish himself in 1947 in Morocco, because it seemed to be more aloof from the modern world. After 1948 the couple lived intermittently in Tangier and thus the place changed to a spiritual zone for hippies and members of Beat Generation1 because Bowles’s version of existentialism was central for them.
Author Norman Mailer once wrote in Advertisement for Myself that “Paul Bowles opened the world of Hip. He let in the murder,...

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...anca, 2001. Print.

Perlow, Lawrence S. Out of Africa and South of the Border: Paul Bowles’ Literary Work in the Western Tropics. Diss. Drew University, 2008. Ann Arbor: UMI, 2011. AAT 3352195. Print. Google Books. 10 Oct. 2011. .

Sawyer-Lauçanno, Christopher. An Invisible Spectator: A Biography of Paul Bowles. New York: Grove Press, 1999. Print.

Stewart, David and H. Gene Blocker. Fundamentals of Philosophy. New Delhi: Pearson Education, 2008. Print.

Williams, Tennessee. An Allegory of Man and His Sahara. New York Times Book Review 4 Dec. 1949: Sec. 7.

Web Sources:
“I Never Liked to Raise My Voice.” The Authorized Paul Bowles Website. Web. 1 Apr 2014.
“Beat Generation.” The Literature Network. Jalic Inc., 2000 - 2014. Web. 18 Apr 2014.

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