The Sheltering Sky, by Paul Bowles

It has taken me a long time to get to The Sheltering Sky. I spent many years a little afraid of the book. I knew only the barest outlines of the plot -- that a husband and wife go to Morocco and into the Sahara and terrible events ensue. The events were worse than I imagined.

I don't remember a time before I was aware of The Sheltering Sky. We had a copy at home when I was growing up. It was a different edition; I remember the title was written in an Arabesque font that I found appealing as a kid. I also remember being drawn to the title itself. It seemed to suggest something I almost understood. 

Later, the book took on an even greater apparent significance for me. In the late 1990s, when I was in my early 20s, I spent three months living in Morocco with my then-boyfriend (now ex-husband). I remember contemplating and deciding against reading it before we left. I think I had been (half?) jokingly counseled against reading it at the time. I did read a short story by Paul Bowles somewhere in the weeks before I left the States, but it turned out to be set in Central America. 

The second reason I had avoided reading The Sheltering Sky is also, funnily enough, the reason I own a copy. I have been working for many years, with varying levels of intensity and long stretches of not working at all, on a book loosely based on my time in Morocco with my ex. During the period when I was working on it most diligently – the summer of 2013, when I was unemployed – I got it in my head that I should read The Sheltering Sky and that's when I picked up this copy. But I didn't read it at the time. I was afraid of how it might influence me. 

Recently, for the Mini 1000 I wrote about in my previous post, I went back to writing about Morocco. I suspect eventually what I wrote more recently will merge with what I've written previously, but I decided to start completely fresh and it went really well. It was in the wake of this that I decided I should finally just read The Sheltering Sky and boy am I glad I did. For one thing, it was an incredible book. The last section was really rough – enough that it did cast a bit of a shadow on my enjoyment of the first 80% of the book. But I'm also glad I read it because, without entirely knowing it, I had been in conversation with it. I knew it on some level, but reading the book was a sometimes strange experience because it felt familiar. I have a hard time explaining this. Did I know more about the book than I was consciously aware of? Possibly. When you try to put into words the immensity of the Sahara, and the sense of alienation one experiences there, are there only limited words and analogies available to you? Perhaps. 

At the end of writing about it for a week, I found myself wondering why I've been trying to write about my time in Morocco for so long, and specifically about the time I spent while there at the very western edge of the desert, a few miles from the Algerian border. Is this the strangest place I've ever been? The most remote? The most affecting? Or has writing about it over and over, across a period of years, given it an outsize proportion in my mind? I'm really not sure anymore. 

Last Night in Nuuk, by Niviaq Korneliussen

Last week, I participated in Jami Attenberg's Mini 1000, the winter edition of 1000 words of summer, writing at least 1000 words a day for 6 days. The timing was good, as I had finished American Spy on Sunday and the Mini 1000 started Monday. Mostly, I didn't read during the week while I was writing. When I did, I read essays from Alexander Chee's How to Write an Autobiographical Novel. Yesterday was a weird day and for a while I thought I wasn't going to get my 1000 words. I read the titular essay in the Chee book in the morning, because I wasn't really sure where I was going with my writing and I thought it might help. But when I finished, I still wasn't feeling much like writing. Instead, I went out to run an errand that I thought would take an hour or so. I ended up running into a friend and talking with her for a long time and when I got home it was four hours later. I had planned to go to a movie last night. I had less than two hours before I was supposed to leave, so I sat down at the computer to try and just get the thousand words out, but they wouldn't come. I was tired. I laid down on the couch and read another essay in the Chee book, "The Writing Life" about his experience as a student of Annie Dillard's. That essay included some really great advice, but by that time I had less than an hour before I was supposed to leave for the movie. I decided to stay home instead. I rested some more, and then finally I wrote. I don't think I actually hit the thousand word mark, but I ended the six days with more than 6000 words, so I averaged more than 1000 words a day, which is good enough for me. With that weight off me, I decided I could start a new book. 

It was later in the day then I usually read, but but I was in the mood to read. Last Night in Nuuk was the very last book on my shelves, because it's the book by the youngest author in my collection. (I've read a couple authors who are younger, but no longer have their books.) I'm not sure what prompted me to pull it out yesterday, but I did a count the other day to see how far along I was on my world books reading project. I thought I was around 75 countries, but it turns out I'm somewhere between 80 and 83 depending what you count. (The higher number is if you count Yaa Gyasi toward Ghana; Viet Thanh Nguyen toward Vietnam; and Albert Camus toward Algeria. There are perhaps some other equally uncertain books that I have counted, but the are the ones that stand out for me.) In any case, I realized that I could feasibly reach the 100 country mark this year, possibly even with books I already own. This was a start. 

The book follows five people in their early 20s and is divided into five sections, each told in one of their voices. I read the first section in one sitting yesterday evening and the other four this morning. The book centers around the events of one crazy spring night in Nuuk, the capital of Greenland, as the characters navigate love, friendship, sexuality, and identity while getting very, very drunk. Reading this book, one has the sense that Nuuk is a nocturnal place. The characters wander from house parties to bars to clubs to after parties. They go home at 4am then go back out again because the parties are still happening. It's been a long time since I've had a night anything like the one in the book, and reading it didn't make me miss those days. The last section was my favorite, and actually takes place a couple weeks after the fateful night. The character Sara starts her day at 4:30 in the morning because her sister is in labor at the hospital. She goes to be with her sister while she delivers her baby daughter. The entry of a brand new person into her life seems to profoundly change her and watching this transformation was interesting and beautiful.

American Spy, by Lauren Wilkinson

Along with My Sister, the Serial Killer, American Spy was the other book I brought with me to Texas thinking it could be a good break, if I wanted one, from The Copenhagen Trilogy. As it turned out, my breaks went the other way: I paused in reading American Spy to read the third book of The Copenhagen Trilogy, then I paused while reading it again to read Affections, and I even paused a third time and started another book that I've not yet finished. It's not that I didn't like American Spy, more that it was not what I was expecting it to be. I think I assumed it would be light reading; something I would pick up and not be able to put down. When I did sit down and read it, I would often read for long stretches, because it is absorbing, but it was darker and more serious than I expected it to be and so I often wasn't in the mood to read it. 

The other thing I struggled with while reading this was that the narrator and protagonist worked for the FBI. It's not just me who struggled with this; she struggles with it herself – trying to explain to the reader (her own young sons, in the frame of the book) why she joined the FBI. That aspect of her character never quite worked for me, on a couple levels. Firstly, because I never quite believed her motivations; and secondly – outside of the narrative itself – I don't really want to read books that are told from the point of view of law enforcement. (I suppose the whole titular American spy should maybe have given me pause to begin with. Why don't I feel this conflicted when reading John le Carré? Is it because they're English?)

Part of me feels that my assessment of this book is unfair. It was not what I expected, and had I read it with different expectations or even just at a different time, I may well have enjoyed it more.