His first book, and the roughest. Jacques Bernis flies the Toulouse–Dakar mail run down the coast of Africa, over the Spanish Sahara where a forced landing means capture, and the narrator is a friend at one of the desert waystations piecing his story together. Running through it is a woman in Paris and a life Bernis can’t have, and the flying is a way of being nowhere. Saint-Exupéry was running that exact route out of Cape Juby when he wrote it, alone at a shack of a station for a year, which is where the loneliness comes from.
Southern Mail