el cielo nos ampara

[rone]

There are two songs that refer to the book The Sheltering Sky that i know of: King Crimson's "The Sheltering Sky" and The Police's "Tea in the Sahara". So i've put the book on my "to read" list; has anyone read it? Any opinions?

Comments

[zadcat.livejournal.com]

Not to be a bummer, but it was the book I happened to be reading when I was called to come to the hospital when my dad was sick, and thus the book I was reading in distracted snatches until he died early the next morning. So, although I remember thinking it was quite good, its more despairing and depressing side sticks uppermost in my mind.

It was filmed in 1990 (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0100594/) by Bertolucci, so you could split the difference and watch the movie instead.

[wisn.livejournal.com]

The Bertolucci flick was fantastic on the big screen. As with most of his movies, they fall over entirely on pan-and-scan video, and even a proper widescreen TV might not convey the enveloping sense of the desert that I got in the theater - when I saw it on video, the prolonged open vistas and languid-to-comatose pacing became annoying and mockable.

Anyway, I haven't read that book, but I've made a fair effort at reading other of Bowles' work and they've always come up short for me. Maybe in 'The Sheltering Sky' he gets the pacing and the characters right. I'd say it's worth at try, because his descriptive prose is excellent and what he excels at is creating the associations between the desert and strange lands with the alienation people feel towards each other and themselves, the effect Bertolucci was striving for (and succeeded at, in the theater).

[elsibeth.livejournal.com]

I saw the movie but haven't read the book. I liked the movie a lot. It's about traveling, real traveling, not just touring.

[jeff2001.livejournal.com]

I too came to this from those two songs, but I saw the movie first. It's one of my favorites. Book? It's okay, I suppose.

[erikred.livejournal.com]

I read a collection of short stories by Paul Bowles called Midnight Mass. I was very impressed by it, although I should note that the stories were not, shall we say, uplifting. Half of the stories seemed to be from North Africa, and the rest were from the Far East. I'd be interested to hear how you like The Sheltering Sky.