Paul Bowles

The Sheltering Sky (eBook, ePUB)

• Format: ePub

Produktbeschreibung

Set in the aftermath of WWII and infused post-war existential angst, The Sheltering Sky (1949) tells a story of three Americans whose lives come unraveled in the harsh and unforgiving desert of North Africa. The manuscript was initially rejected Doubleday, which claimed it was "not a novel." And indeed the story and its characters look unconventional even today, more than fifty years after its original publication.

While students may be attracted to the novel's exotic desert setting and intrigued by the daring lifestyle of its two protagonists, Port and Kit, they may also be baffled by The Sheltering Sky's larger meaning, if it may be said to have one. Within the novel itself, Kit and Port represent two poles of

meaning, or the impulse to find or create meaning in their experience. For Kit, the world is suffused with significance, which reveals itself to her in signs and omens, and she tries to order her life according to her interpretation of these omens. For Port, the world has been drained of meaning. He sees the sky as sheltering, protecting them from what lies behind it, but when Kit asks him what does lie behind it, he replies: "Nothing. Just darkness." For Port, there is no God in the sky and no revelation lurking beneath the surface of things.

Readers of the book are thus given two examples of interpretive strategies: to find meaning in everything or in nothing.

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Produktdetails

• Verlag: HarperCollins
• Seitenzahl: 352
• Erscheinungstermin: 6. Dezember 2011
• Englisch
• ISBN-13: 9780062119339
• Artikelnr.: 38007633

Autorenporträt

Paul Bowles was born in 1910 and studied music with composer Aaron Copland before moving to Tangier, Morocco. A devastatingly imaginative observer of the West's encounter with the East, he is the author of four highly acclaimed novels: The Sheltering Sky, Let It Come Down, The Spider's House, and Up Above the World. In addition to being one of the most powerful postwar American novelists, Bowles was an acclaimed composer, a travel writer, a poet, a translator, and a short story writer. He died in Morocco in 1999.