Word: bowleses
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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THE SHELTERING SKY (318 pp.)-Paul Bowles-New Directions ($2.75).
When Author Paul Bowles finishes with them in The Sheltering Sky, his first novel, Port has slipped through his zero into death by typhoid, and Kit's zero has become a noose plaited from strands of nymphomania and insanity. All this may be taken straight as simply a lurid...
Author Bowles, 38, a composer and former music critic, has lived since 1947 in the casbah of Tangier. His little-magazine verse and a handful of short stories had already won him cheers from Manhattan's horizon-watching literati. The Sheltering Sky, with its mixture of emotional nausea, intellectual...
Yet for so able a writer, Bowles fails to give his story much significance. Both Port and Kit are neurotic intellectual playchildren so short on real character and appeal that they seem hardly worth saving. The death of one and the madness of the other seem appropriate but by no...
But Bowles scores cleanly with his minor characters: Arab pimps and prostitutes, French officers in garrison towns, a stupidly tiresome pair of tourists-mother & son. Above all, The Sheltering Sky is drenched with a fine sense of place, and it sketches Arab towns and the Sahara itself with sharp sureness...