Wind, Sand and Stars by Antoine de Saint-Exupery
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Book Reviews of Wind, Sand and Stars
Book Review: a great tale of humanity
Summary: 5 Stars
What genre is represented by "Wind, Sand and Stars"? A memoir, a novel, a moral tale, an essay, a travelogue? It is difficult to put a label on this book, because it has a bit of each genre. Antoine de Saint-Exupery, a pilot and a poet, best known for his beautiful tale "The Little Prince", which enchanted generations of children and adults, wrote about his experience as a pilot. This is the surface of "Wind, Sand and Stars". There is much more to it, though.
The book was published in 1939. It is hard to believe that on the brink of a great war in Europe, when it was already obvious that the war is inevitable, and many writers created the premonitory visions of doom, Saint-Exupery wrote with great tenderness and faith about the power of humanity.
The job and life of the airplane pilot are for the author an occasion for metaphores. The flights require attention and precision in addition to the observations of nature, the rocks, sand or sea underneath, the stars, moon and sun in the sky above. There is a lot of joy in seeing the Earth from above, but the loneliness adds to the philosophical quality of long flights. Because in the 1930's the airplane technology was not very sophisticated, there were many sudden, unexpected accidents. The constant danger and many lurking traps are described with examples: the accidents of the author's colleagues, Guillaumet and Mermoz, as well as his own in Sahara, and their struggle to survive in the snow, mountains, and desert, without water, food, and rest, show humanity in a most beautiful way. As Saint-Exupery says, in the words of his fellow pilot Guillaumet, who survived in the glacier: "What I did, no animal would ever do".
Saint-Exupery believed in the power of human mind and emotion, in the connection between all human beings - which is obvious when he writes about his experience with Beduins, so different and strange for the French pilot, who could not understand their culture, yet living according to equally valid moral principles and helpful in need. He criticized materialism, and although admired technology and civilization, warned against it becoming a goal in itself.
Banal? Simple? Maybe, but all of us need such positive, however trivial, life philosophy, once in a while, to escape from our daily life, to reconnect and rethink our purpose.
Book Review: Wisdom from an earlier generation
Summary: 5 Stars
It is not exaggeration to say that the reading of four books--one of them "The Little Prince" by St. Exupery--changed my life. It would also not be an overstatement to say all my reading now is done to try to find another title or two to add to this list. (Maybe, though, the changing of my life is of little consequence. . .it slips away. . .it slips away. Maybe now I read to have another title to suggest to my children. They still, I hope, have much of life left. Let their changing begin.)
So, I suggest the "Wind Sand, and Stars" to them.
St. Exupery writes so convincingly of what the human spirit could achieve:
"To be a (man) is precisely, to be responsible. . .It is to feel, when setting one's stone, that one is contributing to the building of the world."
and so devastatingly about what is has achieved:
". . .war is won by him who rots last--but in the end both rot together."
There is wisdom in this book; wisdom in all his books.
I worry, though, that my suggestion will go unheeded. St. Exupery was younger than both my grandfathers. Yet he writes of a world foreign, maybe unknowable, to me--a world, despite its ugliness and hatred, with nobility and honor. I can't imagine, as St. Exupery relates in one tale, a world where an enemy Arab army--forced into a very temporary, very awkward alliance with French soldiers--appeals to the French for a resupply of ammunition spent in that defense. And the French officer--in gratitude for that temporary support, yet knowing the ammunition would likely be used against his own men--complied!
This past world seems so unreal to me, who reads. How will it seem to my children (and the rest of their generation who foolishly) don't?
So, I suggest this to you this generation and, also, I warn.
Book Review: "The physical drama cannot touch us until someone points out its spiritual sense."
Summary: 5 Stars
Like many of his contemporaries, European aviator Antoine de Saint-Exupery (1900 - 1944) was seeking the meaning of life in the post World War I world. He looked for it and often found it outside the bounds of quotidian existence. His job as a pilot for Aeropostale, the French air mail service, offered him a unique perspective as he encountered the elements up close and personal in small planes he guided over vast deserts, oceans and mountains, and through fog, storms and, in a memorable account, a cyclone. His survival depended upon a heightened awareness of nature's elements. His was a life lived large and he knew it; he pities the poor bureaucrat's confined existence; he pities even more the child who with the right "gardener" could become a prince or another Mozart but who is groomed rather to lead a circumscribed life.
His narrative never bogs as he connects the concrete elements of nature with abstract sentiments. He renders his adventures vividly, especially the climatic chapter in which he and his mechanic survive a crash in the Sahara with almost no provisions. A year after that, in 1936, he goes off to Spain and the Civil War to learn why it is that mankind reaches the flash point of war and willingly puts itself in harm's way. That experience and the lessons it divulges comprise the last chapter. Among his often surprising observations is the note on how wild geese flying overhead can stir domestic birds below.
The author speaks in the idiom of a masculine age and a self-assured European culture. The idiom is noticeable but does not diminish the vision or lyricism of the book. I read the 1967 Harvest edition of the book that offered a translation that preserved the authentic voice of the book.
Book Review: Adventure, Philosophy, Aviation . . . all of it
Summary: 5 Stars
A wonderful, wonderful autobiographical work by the French aviation pioneer. Antione de Saint-Exupery was among those first who flew the scheduled air mail runs over the Sahara in the 1920's and 30's. Engine failures, crahses, and falling into the hands of hostile Bedouins was not uncommon. Those stories alone would make for fascinating reading.
Add to that the author's genuine talent as a poet philospher, and this is a unique and great piece of historical literature. Saint-Exupery finds magic and value in everything . . . the lights of his primitive dashbord at night, the world scrolling under him while in flight, the hallucinations while dying of thirst face down in the desert sand. And his observations of people! - the love-hate relationship with the Arabs of the desert, a pair of little princesses living in fantastical (because the author makes it so) house in a remote jungle village, the heroics of Spanish revolutionaries and patriots.
The adventure aspects rival any fiction I have read . . . flying while held stationary in a tremendous offshore windstorm off the South American coast . . . the magic of nightfall while in flight . . . slamming into the Libyan desert floor while flying blind.
As he is wont to do, Saint-Ex frequently treks off into the motivations and worth of mens' efforts, and the human situation in general. But always good stuff, some of it ingenious. Thoughtful, posing many truths and questions.
A wonderful work. I had to read it in English, and doubtlessly something has been lost in the translation from French (transl by Lewis Galantiere). Still, not to be missed.
Book Review: Living defines Man
Summary: 5 Stars
Faced with the absurdity of life, French existentialists threw their hands up in the air and gave up. They failed utterly to place man within the universe. Saint-Exupery lived through the same depressing times as did Sartre and Camus feeling just as lost as they did but he never gave up on living. Man defines himself by the act of living.
One of the most famous passages describes how Henri Guillaumet made his way out of the Andes after a plane crash. Walking several days and nights through the snow, he refuses to stop because he knows his comrades and his wife believe that if he lives, he walks. He fell once and accepted he would die buried in the falling snow. He got up so he could wedge himself on a rock and that way his body would be found in the spring. That way his wife would be able to collect the insurance money without having to wait the statutory seven years after a mere disappearance. When Guillaumet reached the rock, he simply continued walking. "What I did , no animal would have done." said Guillaument when found, broken but alive.
We read of young peasant girls bursting with joy at caring for a pet and of soldiers fighting because that is their trade, despite knowing war is futile and horrible. Later, when Saint-Ex relates his own crash in the middle of a desert, he goes on the same way Guillaumet went. Dying of thirst, he is not even tempted to use his gun to end his suffering. Living is its own end.
Vincent Poirier, Tokyo