West With The Night by Beryl Markham

Here is the reason why I love to be in a book club:

Someone picks a book they love, or thinks they’re going to love, and then they put it out there, and hope we share in their excitement. This month I read West with the Night. I had heard of Beryl Markham in a vague sort of way; basically I knew she was an aviatrix. The book is not new (written in 1942), but I had never heard of it. And, if it weren’t for my book club, I probably would never have read it. Instead, I got a copy at the library (still have those 84 books to read on my shelf), and, since the cover did not seem compelling, I waited quite a few days before finally cracking it open. (Full disclosure – I finished ten minutes before I left for the meeting).

I loved this book. The woman was amazing. I wanted to be her. She fought lions, trained horses, flew airplanes. Who wouldn’t want to be her? I think it should be required reading for teenage girls who feel they are not given the chances they deserve. Beryl Markham had no mother, and was raised in East Africa by a father who preferred to consider her his contemporary as opposed to his daughter.

Her writing is, in most places, pure poetry. The closest thing I can compare it to is Toni Morrison’s, but Morrison's writing was just too beautiful for me that it became a distraction. The writing also reminded me of Antoine de Saint-Exupery’s The Little Prince, and even more, Wind, Sand and Stars. I don’t know if it’s the similar topic of flying, or just writing about the thing you love. Do not read this book if you are looking for romance. She apparently had plenty of that, but this is not a book for that subject. This is, according to critics, the utopian view. Which brings me to the next part,

Here is the reason I hate the internet:

Because I read the book so late, I was lucky in that I avoided any google searches on this topic. It is apparently a hotly debated one, whether or not Markham even wrote this book herself. You can do your own research online. I refuse to come down from the high I got reading this book. I say, just let it be. This is not James Frey lying about rehab. Nobody got hurt, and it happened too long ago to interview the witnesses. Supposedly her third husband wrote it. So what? Maybe he loved her, and wanted her to look good, so he gave her adventures the words she did not have. I am tired of snopes! Let’s be naïve and trusting for a little while longer. This is an amazing book, a complete delight; a story of adventure that will give you chills. How could you not enjoy this, as she begins her historic solo flight across the Atlantic Ocean:

“We are bound for a place thirty-six hundred miles from here — two thousand miles of it unbroken ocean. Most of the way it will be night. We are flying west with the night.

So there behind me is Cork; and ahead of me is Berehaven Lighthouse. It is the last light, standing on the last land. I watch it, counting the frequency of its flashes — so many to the minute. Then I pass it and fly out to sea.”

If you need more than that, take Ernest Hemingway’s word for it, not mine:

"Did you read Beryl Markham's book, West with the Night? I knew her fairly well in Africa and never would have suspected that she could and would put pen to paper except to write in her flyer's log book. As it is, she has written so well, and marvelously well, that I was completely ashamed of myself as a writer. I felt that I was simply a carpenter with words, picking up whatever was furnished on the job and nailing them together and sometimes making an okay pig pen. But [she] can write rings around all of us who consider ourselves writers. The only parts of it that I know about personally, on account of having been there at the time and heard the other people's stories, are absolutely true . . . I wish you would get it and read it because it is really a bloody wonderful book.”