It's a commonplace about travel writing that it ultimately reveals more about the traveller's psychology than the locales they travel in. Well, guess what: it's a commonplace because it's often true! Which is my way of saying, I guess, that The Sheltering Sky not really being "about" Northern Africa and being incurious about its natives isn't really (at least at first) a fault or "the point"--it's about these odd Americans and their compulsions.

Right at the start, you get kicked into a trio: Port and his wife Kit, who have been travelling together for years and are in an uneasy romance, and then Tunner, a compulsively friendly, sunny guy attached to them like a lamprey. One mark of Bowles' artistic intelligence is that even though this could have easily been made formulaic, this dynamic is rendered realistically with sympathy for all participants, who each have some signal virtue and are each in some kind of battle with their dissatisfaction. That dissatisfaction--especially Port's--is also what motors them and us through the greater part of this book, ever deeper into Africa.

As for this Africa, though it doesn't need to be the "real" Africa, it certainly does play an absolutely crucial role. As given to us in the dry, elegant writing, it's a kind of sensory deprivation landscape, a place where by degrees more and more elements of ordinary life are removed and the physiological effects on these three Westerners (and us!) are observed. One of these elements is the hum-and-thrum of social life. In its absence, the pleasures and frustrations of sociality are felt more intensely: how irritating to be at the edge of the Western world and have some fucking asshole hitting you up for a lunch date! Another element is just plain physical comfort. This book is a cook's tour of discomfort and exhaustion--heat, sand, bad food, bad smells, crowding together, the pain of illness--that we nevertheless receive with pleasure, like the pains of an inititation ritual.