Third reading: D.W. Buffa on "The Sheltering Sky"

The Dark Backward is among D.W. Buffa's more recent novels to be released. The story revolves around not just the strangest case William Darnell had ever tried;

it was the strangest case ever tried by any lawyer anywhere. It was impossible to explain; or rather, impossible to believe. The defendant, who did not speak English or any other language anyone could identify, had been found on an island no one knew existed, and charged with murder, rape and incest. He was given the name Adam, and Adam, as Darnell comes to learn, is more intelligent, quicker to learn, than anyone he has ever met. Adam, he learns to his astonishment, is a member of an ancient civilization that has remained undiscovered for more than three thousand years.

Buffa is also the author of ten legal thrillers involving the defense attorney Joseph Antonelli. He has also published a series that attempts to trace the movement of western thought from ancient Athens, in Helen; the end of the Roman Empire, in Julian's Laughter; the Renaissance, in The Autobiography of Niccolo Machiavelli; and America in the twentieth century, in Neumann's Last Concert.

Buffa's latest take in his "Third Reading" series is on The Sheltering Sky by Paul Bowles. It begins:

When Paul Bowles was ten years old his family bought a piano and he did what any ten year old would have done: studied music theory, sight-singing and piano technique, and then wrote “LeCarre: An Opera in Nine Chapters.” It was a story that any ten year old would think to compose: the tangled affair of two men who exchange wives. The private New York school he attended decided that the young Paul Bowles was perhaps not quite normal for his age and moved him from the fourth to the sixth grade. It might have been better had they simply sent him off to graduate school, though, if they had, it would have been difficult to know exactly what university he should be sent and what he should study. Music was not his only interest, or his only accomplishment. When he was fifteen, he wrote his first crime story, saw Stravinsky’s The Firebird at Carnegie Hall, and displayed considerable, not to say prodigious, talent as a painter.

It would take a dozen pages to list the musical compositions of Paul Bowles and more pages than that to describe the sometimes discordant events of his personal life. His marriage, in which he and his wife often lived separately, and sometimes with other people, could only be described in a novel, one something like the one he wrote himself, a novel that, it is fair to say, could only have been written by a great musician. The Sheltering Sky is music set to English prose.

The story, on the surface, is simple enough, and even, again on the surface, a little absurd. A young couple travel with a friend across North Africa, moving from one remote village to another across the arid, blindingly hot Sahara. An epidemic is raging across North Africa. The husband, named Port, gets Typhoid and dies. His wife, Kit, wandering off into the desert, is picked up by a caravan, sleeps with the Arab leader, is made part of his harem, and then escapes. That is all there is, an adventure story without much adventure. There are no battles, no rescues, and no happy endings. There is not much, really, in the way of an ending at all; nothing but a vast feeling of sadness and regret. It is, if you will, like the ending of Richard Strauss’s Thus Spake Zarathustra, a few dying notes in the distance that somehow seem to hint, and perhaps more than hint, at a new beginning, a beginning that gives a different, and a deeper, meaning to what you have just heard, or, in this case, what you have just read.

Begin at the beginning, begin with the title: The Sheltering Sky. There is a difference between Moslems and Christians, a difference in the way Moslems and Christians live, the culture, or more adequately, the horizon within which people take their bearings, what they look to when they try to define who and what they are. But, Bowles reminds us, there is another horizon, a horizon that everyone, Moslem, Christian, Hindu, Jew, or any other religion or nationality, share, the horizon that...[read on]

Visit D.W. Buffa's website.

Buffa's previous third reading essays: The Great Gatsby; Brave New World; Lord Jim; Death in the Afternoon; Parade's End; The Idiot; The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire; The Scarlet Letter; Justine; Patriotic Gore; Anna Karenina; The Charterhouse of Parma; Emile; War and Peace; The Sorrows of Young Werther; Bread and Wine; “The Crisis of the Mind” and A Man Without Qualities; Eugene Onegin; The Collected Works of Thomas Babington Macaulay; The Europeans; The House of Mirth and The Writing of Fiction; Doctor Faustus; the reading list of John F. Kennedy; Jorge Luis Borges; History of the Peloponnesian War; Mansfield Park; To Each His Own; A Passage To India; Seven Pillars of Wisdom; The Letters of T.E. Lawrence; All The King’s Men; The Roman History of Ammianus Marcellinus; Naguib Mahfouz’s novels of ancient Egypt; Main Street; Theodore H. White's The Making of the President series, part I; Theodore H. White's The Making of the President series, part II; Thus Spoke Zarathustra; Fiction's Failure; Hermann Hesse's Demian; Frederick Douglass, Slavery, and The Fourth of July; Caesar’s Ghost; The American Constitution; A Tale of Two Cities; The Leopard; Madame Bovary; The Sheltering Sky.

--Marshal Zeringue