Wind, Sand and Stars

As a student of languages, I've always been of the opinion that, if you can, it's better to read books in the language in which they were written. As much as I believe in the value of translation, I also feel that this is the only way you can fully appreciate what the author originally had in mind. It was thus that I came to the writing of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry - his legendary children's work Le Petit Prince was the first proper book I ever read in French; its basic style was just right for my GCSE-level knowledge and its existentialism-for-beginners subject matter set me up nicely for years of studying the rest of French literature.

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry was an enigmatic figure in my mind. I'd heard of Le Petit Prince before I read it, but I also knew that he was an inter-war aviation pioneer who lived to tell one of the most extraordinary survival tales of the early 20th Century. The two had always been a struggle to reconcile, but Wind, Sand and Stars has provided closure at last.

I'll admit from the beginning - I broke my own rule here by reading the book in translation. Probably a good move as well, as it became abundantly clear early on, even from the English, that this had been the kind of verbose, impenetrably abstract French that can be a nightmare to even unravel, let alone translate into idiomatic English. William Rees makes a good attempt at it but the result can be stylistically inconsistent and stilted at times. It matters little though, because it's not really the prose that matters here.

Wind, Sand and Stars is an astonishingly deep and perceptive treatise on the pilots of the 1920s and 1930s who finally brought the entire world within reach. de Saint-Exupéry entered the world from an aristocratic background - he had always felt ill-at-ease in his family's world and the call of adventure, or perhaps simply the chance to get as far from the south of France as possible, led him to train as a pilot delivering mail across Africa and South America. The book's early movements recount his training days, the comradeship and gallows humour of his fellow pilots, and an examination of why these men felt so compelled to take on such a dangerous career path; certainly, it was to the benefit of the human race. Things then move on to de Saint-Exupéry's experiences in the Sahara, and culminate with an at times excruciating recounting of his great escape. Lost in fog over the desert one night, he and his copilot crashed into a sand dune, wrecking their plane but otherwise coming through unscathed. But that was only the beginning of their problems - over the next three days as they survived on dew collected on their parachutes overnight and walked for miles attempting to establish where they were, both men began to wonder whether a swift death in the crash might have been preferable. The depictions of the agony of dehydration, the growing delirium caused by heat and the slow realisation that death will be coming soon are a hard read at times, but the author heads towards a surprisingly uplifting conclusion. The men's rescue by Arab nomads is recounted without much fanfare, but it is de Saint-Exupéry's subsequent philosophical cross-examination of his experience and its effects on him that wraps things up so well. In short, it all makes the problems of the everyday seem very insignificant, and yet he can't help but wonder if we'd all be better off for having lived through such an ordeal - it left him feeling more grateful for life than anything else.

It's all extremely French, but it combines its pure abstract philosophy with the distinction of concrete application to real events, and that's quite a rare thing.

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry returned to the skies soon after, because he felt that that was all he could do. His plane went missing over the Mediterranean just under a decade later, and the world lost a great writer and thinker in the event.

4.5/5

The book is also a fascinating account of the history of one of the world's last true wild frontiers, and this feels like an appropriate soundtrack.

The Universe Versus Alex Woods

In my last review, I questioned whether I had been too lenient with my appraisals before concluding that actually they were just a reflection of the quality of book I tend to choose. The fact is, there is a vast ocean of literature out there that is just alright, neither groundbreaking nor inaccessibly unreadable, but which in the big scheme of things will probably not be remembered for years to come.

The Universe Versus Alex Woods is just alright. I can't remember how I came across it or why I decided it would be worth reading - it's been on my Kindle for a long time and I decided to start working through some of the books that have been sitting on there for a while, but I'm not sure why I downloaded it in the first place. Certainly, this 2013 debut work by Lincolnshire's own Gavin Extence has yet to earn much recognition beyond a shout-out by Richard and Judy.

Perhaps it was the plot which, undoubtedly, sounds intriguing on paper. As the book opens, our titular young man has been arrested by the Dover port authorities. His crime? Attempting to transport the ashes of a recently deceased old man and quite a lot of marijuana back into the UK from France. What follows is the story of how he ended up in that situation - beginning some years earlier when he became the second person in history to be hit directly by a meteorite. This event shapes Alex's teenage years - the resulting brain damage leaves him in a coma for two weeks, and with epilepsy for the rest of his life, and despite a few months of positive media attention he becomes something of an outcast at school, having missed so much of his formative time there in recovery. Things aren't helped by the fact that his home schooling comes at the hands of his unconventional mother, who runs a tarot card shop near Glastonbury. Following this period, on the run from his usual tormentors one day, Alex ends up in a chance encounter with a mysterious American widower, Isaac Peterson, and the pair enter an unlikely father-and-son relationship. Extence does well to foreshadow the book's ending/beginning here, as we know that Alex is carrying Mr. Peterson's ashes at the start. And things indeed start to take a much more serious turn as Peterson is diagnosed with a nervous system condition that means he only has a couple more years of increasingly restricted life left. The conclusion is weighty stuff indeed, playing out in Zurich where Mr. Peterson has decided he would like to end his own life with medical assistance.

It's all a good set-up, interspersed with some genuinely good lines about life, death and the things in between that make it all worthwhile, and, funnily enough, a lot of direct and indirect references to the writing of Kurt Vonnegut, whose books start to form a parallel to the events surrounding Alex and Isaac. It's also quite a well-structured coming-of-age story, dealing with all the troubles that teenage life can throw at you. But my main issue with it all has to lie with the writing style - recounting event after event in a positively clinical fashion. The suggestion is that, as it's mostly Alex's interior monologue, we're being given an insight into someone who is likely on the autistic spectrum - but that's not an excuse to sacrifice artistic flair. The likes of Mark Haddon's The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime manage to do a lot more with a lot less, and The Universe Versus Alex Woods falls short in a literary sense by reading almost like non-fiction for the majority of its passages. It makes the insertion of moments of true emotion or perceptive ideas somewhat ham-fisted, and is why ultimately I can't consider this to be on the same level of so many of the other books I've read over the last few years.

The Universe Versus Alex Woods is not a bad book by any means - it makes a lot of good philosophical points and sprinkles them with entertainment, while also approaching an extremely sensitive issue with the respect it deserves - but at the end of the day it has served as a reminder that my ratings system is probably about right.

3.5/5

I'm not a huge fan of Mozart, but I have to say Mr. Peterson does well in choosing this as the last piece of music he ever hears: