In a review of Tom Young’s latest book, The Mapmaker, Lawrence De Maria writes: In high school, I was assigned a book written by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, the French author and pilot. I can’t remember its title, but I recall liking it immensely. I mention this because St. Ex, as he is called in The Mapmaker, is a minor character in Tom Young’s novel of the Second World War, so it was nice to make his acquaintance again.
Young drops a lot of famous names and incidents in The Mapmaker (e.g., “Nazi butcher” Klaus Barbie, the SS massacre of the French village Oradour-sur-Glane, etc.). The book is fiction, but he weaves real people into his narrative to give it verisimilitude. The conversations between characters major and minor never happened, of course, and the main protagonists never existed. But facts are facts, and the novel taught me a few I didn’t know. One of the saddest was that Saint-Exupéry disappeared — and was presumably killed — while flying a reconnaissance mission over Corsica in July 1944. Whether he was shot down or merely had engine trouble in his cantankerous P-38 has never been determined.