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.