The NY Times’ Dwight Garner on Paul Bowles and The Sheltering Sky:

Rereading “The Sheltering Sky” today is to be reminded of its dark, largely sublimated power; from its first pages the novel is like a pile of kindling to which a match is about to be applied. Bowles’s sun-baked prose, while never showy, is consistently and ruthlessly evocative. North African vegetation is described as “a tortured scrub of hard shells and stiff hairy spines that covered the earth like an excrescence of hatred.”

I’ve reread The Sheltering Sky more times than I can remember—more times, I imagine, than any other novel—and despite its darkness (or perhaps because of it) Bowles’s post-war novel of yanquis adrift in North Africa remains one of my favourites, top ten. For many writers, “darkness” is merely gratuitous, a vanity; for Bowles, darkness was the only way he could honestly examine lives:

If I stress the various facets of unhappiness, it is because I believe unhappiness should be studied very carefully . . . You must watch your universe as it cracks above your head.

With a worldview like that, you’ll never be let down.

Ford Madox Ford offers this unblinking view of human society in Parade’s End:

You look at a dozen men, each of them not by any means detestable and not uninteresting, for each of them would have technical details of their affairs to impart; you formed them into a Government or a club and at once, with oppressions, inaccuracies, gossip, backbiting, lying, corruptions and vileness, you had the combination of wolf, tiger, weasel and louse-covered ape that was human society.

Who dares disagree with that?

From John Buchan’s 1916 novel, The Power-House:

Take the business of Government. When all is said, we are ruled by the amateurs and the second-rate. The methods of our departments would bring any private firm to bankruptcy. The methods of Parliament—pardon me—would disgrace any board of directors. Our rulers pretend to buy expert knowledge, but they never pay the price for it that a business man would pay, and if they get it they have not the courage to use it. Where is the inducement for a man of genius to sell his brains to our insipid governors?

Sometimes it’s refreshing to read how things really haven’t changed one iota over the past century.