Wind, Sand and Stars, or Terre des hommes, is a memoir by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry.
Is there a book you return to again and again, a work that would make life on a desert island bearable? Each weekend, between Canada Day and Labour Day, Globe writers will share their go-to tomes – be it novel, poetry collection, cookbook – and why the world is just a little better for them.
Forty years ago, when my family had freshly landed in Montreal after fleeing the fall of Saigon, there was little money and distractions were few. A rare outlet for my restless young mind was some dusty second-hand paperbacks that my father could afford, French literature classics by Balzac or Victor Hugo.
One of those books, dog-eared, yellowing and already underlined by a previous reader, was Antoine de Saint-Exupéry's memoir Wind, Sand and Stars, which I read in the French original, titled Terre des hommes.
Terre des hommes, which details the pioneering days of commercial aviation, has always had a resonance for people who enjoy adventure writing, with its epic descriptions of pilots guiding rickety aircraft over Africa and Latin America. It became a book I regularly revisited, a work by an author who regularly appeared in my life in the new land.
To be a refugee or an immigrant is to have different memories from the people who surround you. And so, even as I learned to appreciate my new surroundings and cheered the Montreal Canadiens and watched Québécois sitcoms, part of me felt atypical and I found comfort in the exoticism and vivid imagery of Saint-Exupéry's work.
The book is a thoughtful autobiography, imbued with a humanistic streak as the author ponders themes such as loyalty, friendship, courage and the loss of childhood innocence. There was never a movie or TV adaptation, so your mind was free to imagine the scenes he describes.
In one chapter, titled Oasis, Saint-Exupéry has to make an emergency landing in a field in Argentina and is billeted in a ramshackle old mansion where his host's two young daughters keep domestic pets that include an iguana, a mongoose, a fox and a monkey. In the evening, vipers return to their nest in a hole in the dining room floor.
That passage always brought back to me all the mysterious houses of my own childhood, relatives' homes that my child's mind saw as looming places full of darkened rooms, long hallways and incomprehensible books.
Other episodes take us to unfamiliar surroundings but are no less poetic. In the North African desert, Saint-Exupéry lands at the pristine top of a mesa that has never been stepped on by a human foot, then is startled when he notices a polished dark stone. Then another one. He eventually realizes those stones could only have come from fallen meteorites.
At the time it was first published, in 1939, the book received a measure of recognition and a handful of awards but it's fair to say that it has since faded from the public consciousness, with Saint-Exupéry now mostly remembered as the author of The Little Prince.
Like his other writings, it was inspired by his experience as a pilot with Aéropostale as the French company trailblazed a cross-Atlantic mail delivery route from France through Morocco and West Africa to Argentina and Paraguay.
In this age of e-mail, Facebook and Skype, there is something surreal about the tale of men who risked their lives over the Sahara or the Andes just to deliver sacks of letters.
At one point, Saint-Exupéry was in charge of an airfield near the border between Morocco and Mauritania.
The desert's proximity inspires him into poetic, meditative reflections but it is also a backdrop for human violence and cruelty.
As if prescient of modern counter-insurgency wars in Afghanistan or Iraq, he writes about camel-mounted French troops patrolling the desert, trying to thwart raids by insurgents nomads.
Slavery still existed in Mauritania and the book describes Saint-Exupéry's encounter with "Bark," a Moroccan shepherd who had been abducted and sold into servitude.
The author and his colleagues pooled enough money to buy back Bark's freedom. They put him on a plane out of town and bid Bark farewell.
"No. I am Mohammed ben Lhaoussin," he replied as he left.
Saint-Exupéry in some way keeps reappearing in my life.
When I started in journalism, I was posted in Quebec City from 1991 to 1993. It was the heady days of Quebec nationalism. But I lived in the old town and enjoyed coming home on foot through its timeless tiny streets lined with stone houses. One of them, which I walked by every evening, was number 25, rue Sainte-Geneviève. Outside a plaque commemorated the fact that Saint-Exupéry had stayed there during a visit in 1942. His hosts were a prominent local family, the De Konincks. The legend has it that Saint-Exupéry, who was in the midst of composing The Little Prince, was further inspired by his host's eight-year-old son, who peppered him with questions during his visit.
Two years after his Quebec City visit, Saint-Exupéry, who was flying for the Free French, disappeared while flying solo on a reconnaissance mission off the coast of southern France.
In my last brush with the great author, I wrote an article in 2008 about an elderly German war veteran who had stepped forward to admit he might have been the Luftwaffe fighter pilot who shot down Saint-Exupéry's plane. The German pilot was actually a fan of the writer. "If I had known, I wouldn't have fired – not on him," he said.
Tu Thanh Ha