Flight to Arras

After reading my original comment I realized that I hadn't given any example of Saint Exupery's amazing talent, and the thought occurred to me: you probably think this is a lot of nonsense. No one can write non-fiction - certainly not about war - and make it half as lyrical as first-rate prose. Well, just read on: From page 127 Flight to Arras Saint Exupery is eating dinner with a French farmer and his family at the height of the war. "I looked at the beautiful niece beside me and said to myself, 'bread in the child is transmuted into languid grace. It is transmuted into modesty. It is transmuted into gentle silence. And tomorrow, perhaps, this same bread, by virtue of a single gray blot rising up on that ocean of wheat, though it nourish this same lamp, will perhaps no longer send forth this same glowing light. The power which is in this bread will have gone out of it." "… What moved me so deeply in that pensive little girl was the insubstantial vestment of the spirit. It was the mysterious totality composed of the features of her face. It was the poem on the page, more than the page itself." "The little girl felt that I was looking at her. She raised her eyes to mine. It seemed to me that she smiled at me. Her smile was hardly more than a breath over the face of the waters; but that fugitive gleam was enough. I was moved. I felt, mysteriously present, a soul that belonged in this place and no other. There was a peace here, sensing which I murmured to myself, 'The peace of the kingdom of silence'. That smile was the glow of the shining wheat."

This is the way the book reads from the first page on. The style is not just totally original - it's almost as though Saint Exupery (please excuse several mispellings above) reinvented language to suit his own convenience.