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Title: Unsympathetic characters, ambiguous setting
Review: A novel in the tradition of dissolute sojourns by privileged but dissatisfied figures, Bowles attempts to beautify desolate landscapes and repressive Saharan locales, but for this reader he fails. None of the characters are sympathetic, they are merely foils of the ugliest sort: ugly Americans, thieving and conniving Brits, scoffing French officers, amorphous Arab and African stereotypes. Read and enjoy this if you are or like alcoholic and licentious blue-bloods and enjoy suffering in yourself and others, because suffer you will as you read the painful travails of Kit, Port, Tunner, and the others. I can sympathize more with protagonists from Henry Miller, Ernest Hemingway, John Dos Passos, and even Fitzgerald, much more so than Bowles' agonists. The best book about being trapped in a sandy hell hole is Abe's "The Woman in the Dunes."
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