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

[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).