Review: The Sheltering Sky

Synopsis from Amazon:
American novelist and short-story writer, poet, translator, classical music composer, and filmscorer Paul Bowles has lived as an expatriate for more than 40 years in the North African nation of Morocco, a country that reaches into the vast and inhospitable Sahara Desert. The desert is itself a character in The Sheltering Sky, the most famous of Bowles' books, which is about three young Americans of the postwar generation who go on a walkabout into Northern Africa's own arid heart of darkness. In the process, the veneer of their lives is peeled back under the author's psychological inquiry.

My Review:
I read this book because it is on several best books lists that I am working on completing.  The book follows three people traveling in the dessert of Africa (they never really specify the exact country).  This book never really pulled me in, but it was just interesting enough that I didn't really want to give up on it.  I kind of wish that I had.  I found the characters, a husband and wife and their friend, to be boring and spoiled.  Each new place they traveled to, they complained about.  Most of all, the husband and wife complained about the "friend" they were traveling with and hatched ways to get rid of him.  Towards the end something mildly interesting happened to the characters, but honestly, I just didn't care.  The ending was confusing, and I did not know what was happening to the wife.  I also felt like the author just stopped writing, and didn't really wrap up the book.

2 stars