Word: sahara
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...Bowles has dropped several John O'Hara characters into a Prokosch setting and used them to establish the fact that the human race is going into a moral Sahara fast. It is difficult to picture these people going any other way, but at the same time it is unfair to use them to symbolize all of humanity...
...Paul Bowles finishes with them in The Sheltering Sky, his first novel, Port has slipped through his zero into death by typhoid, and Kit's zero has become a noose plaited from strands of nymphomania and insanity. All this may be taken straight as simply a lurid, supersexy Sahara adventure story completely outfitted with camel trains, handsome Arabs, French officers and a harem. Nonetheless, The Sheltering Sky is a remarkable job of writing, with a craftsmanship that makes it the most interesting first novel to come from a U.S. writer this year...
...Bowles scores cleanly with his minor characters: Arab pimps and prostitutes, French officers in garrison towns, a stupidly tiresome pair of tourists-mother & son. Above all, The Sheltering Sky is drenched with a fine sense of place, and it sketches Arab towns and the Sahara itself with sharp sureness. Bowles may have missed the center of the target with his central characters, but he has given them a supporting cast and an exciting setting that a good many more practiced novelists can honestly envy...
Princeton University just unexpectedly from the New Jersey plains like a caravan of Gothic camels on the Sahara. The whistle-stop location has its good and bad sides...
They turn up on the Sahara, where all good Legionnaires belong, get lost in that old sandstorm you remember from several other pictures, and wind up in mysterious Atlantis, Maria Montez rules this land with an iron bosom. She kills people right and left and has their bodies encased in metal for an interesting trophy room. Although she ensnares Jean Pierre Aumont, he manages to escape, and then tries to return for no better reason than to follow the "Lost Horizon" plot...