The Sheltering Sky

‘I felt strongly then about my not being a tourist as my protagonist Port did in the novel I eventually wrote, The Sheltering Sky,’ he told one of his biographers. He states this explicitly early in the novel, speaking of Port: ‘He did not think of himself as a tourist; he was a traveler. The difference is partly one time, he would explain. Whereas the tourist generally hurries back home at the end of a few weeks or months, the traveler, belonging no more to one place than to the next, moves slowly, over periods of years, from one part of the earth to another.’

Paul Theroux about Paul Bowles in the introduction of The Sheltering Sky, a very tiring yet fascinating novel.