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.