Book Review - Night Flight by Antoine de Saint-Exupery

 Night Flight by Antoine de Saint-Exupery, with a foreword by Andre Gide, translated by Stuart Gilbert

New York: Signet Classic, copyright 1942 (first published in French 1931)

This is my first time reading Saint-Exupery (yes, I haven't even read The Little Prince!). Night Flight was not his first novel, but was his first success. The story is straightforward - a night flight of mail 'planes in South America, one of which is lost. Yet the story is not about that at all - it is about the power of human will, and the courage it takes to not only risk one's life, but to send other people to risk theirs.

Riviere, the driver of what was then a new idea - night air mail flights - spends his evening musing over what he makes other men do. Is it right to risk their lives for such a task? Is it right that he takes them from their wives and children to try and prove a point? Is it right to be the first to try something, and to keep pushing through disasters?

Saint-Exupery believes that it is - that human progress is more important than individual human life. It is something that humans have always done. His description of the bravery of individual pilots, of the tension of those in the head office, and the beauty and terror of night-flying in the 1930s are transcendent. This is such a short novel (125 paperback pages), and yet grapples with age-old human emotions, hopes and fears.

This might be the first of Saint-Exupery's works that I have read, but it won't be the last.

Cheers for now, from

A View Over the Bell