The Lit Fix By Sophy Roberts

The Lit Fix

Marshwood Vale based author, Sophy Roberts, gives us her slim pickings for December

As a writer who travels, I usually spend a good part of every year abroad. Africa has always been one of my favourite places to work, with my last assignment before lockdown taking me into the desert landscapes of Chad. As the weather gets colder and we creep towards the end of a year grounded in West Dorset’s valleys, I’m dreaming of those Saharan skies again, of warmth and a golden landscape. This month’s slim pickings are all evocative depictions of the desert, bringing with them the dry, scorched aroma of a place elsewhere.

A Friend of the Desert by the contemporary Spanish author, Pablo d’Ors—translated by the American poet, David Shook— follows one man’s repeated trips into the Sahara. As the narrator, Pavel, explores the windswept sands, he drifts ever further into an existential infinity of unknowns and a silent world. This captivating tale draws you into the freedom of the desert, a place where you can ‘walk for days, weeks and even months without seeing anything but sand’. Pavel considers what the desert teaches: the monotony of following the same pattern day after day, until the moment comes when you realise ‘not only do you love the oasis but the walk itself.’ If ever there was a book for curing Covid-fatigue, this is it.

Gold Dust by Ibrahim al-Koni (translated by Elliott Colla) follows the story of Ukhayyad, as he flees across the Libyan Sahara with his thoroughbred camel. The fable-like tale recounts the struggle to survive in a world of limitless wasteland, the companionship between man and camel, and the ultimate tragedy of human nature. The scenes are both cruel and elegant, from the harrowing depiction of a female camel being forced to succumb to the thoroughbred’s desires, to another where Ukhayyad’s prize is struck down by illness, ‘chasing angels whose flight shimmered in the mirages on the horizon’. Haunted by prophetic cave paintings and desert jinn, Gold Dust is filled with allusion and parable.

The Immeasurable World by William Atkins is rather longer than my usual slim pickings. Travelling to five continents over three years, Atkins weaves travel writing with cultural history, writing about the human appeal of desert landscapes, from Australia’s Great Victoria Desert to Kazakhstan’s Aralkum, and of course the Sahara, with a sojourn in Egypt’s Eastern Desert. Atkins masterfully depicts the ‘complex of arenas’ that make up a desert, with ravishing descriptions of valleys ‘ablaze with shifting, rocking yellow light’. While you can choose to simply read the Sahara section, Atkin’s other chapters can be read episodically too, for a full dose of desert dreams (and tough realities) strung in evocative, intelligent prose.

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s Wind, Sand and Stars is—I think—the masterpiece of desert literature. A French aviator who flew mail routes across the Sahara between the wars, SaintExupéry writes compellingly about the ‘vast sandy void’ and the late sun casting a ‘veneer of gold’. He also captures an inspiring sense of optimism. In a plane crash over the desert, his fellow survivor discovers a single orange in the wreckage: ‘I lie on my back and suck the fruit, counting the shooting stars,’ says SaintExupéry; ‘For a moment, my happiness is infinite.’ It’s hard not to fall for Saint-Exupéry’s heroic prose; after all, in his own words—‘Suppose I feel like plunging into a mirage? Suppose I want to feel hope?’

It’s a sign of how much I admire Antoine de Saint-Exupéry that he appears twice in this month’s slim pickings. The Little Prince is unlike any other book I know. A pilot, fixing his broken plane in the desert, strikes up conversation with a little boy who has left his planet to explore the universe. The original French is said to have been translated into over 300 languages and dialects, making it one of the most widely distributed books of all time. A children’s novella with scope for adult interpretation, it is full of gentle philosophical musing—‘what makes the desert beautiful… is that somewhere it hides a well’—as well as charming illustrations. This is the perfect Christmas present to set a-light curiosity in a young child.

Buy any of the books above at Archway Bookshop in Axminster in December and receive a 10% discount when you mention Marshwood Vale Magazine. archwaybookshop.co.uk.

Sophy Roberts is a freelance journalist who writes about travel and culture. She writes regularly for FT Weekend, among others. Her first book, The Lost Pianos of Siberia—one of The Sunday Times top five non-fiction books for summer 2020—was published in February by Doubleday.