Southern Mail is a fictional book about a man, Jacques Bernis' journeys as a mail carrier, and is told by the author as the narrator. This novel can be categorized as a love story, however it is more like a sequence of confusing events with a love story intertwined throughout. But isn't that exactly how our lives are today? St. Exupery has accomplished a goal that many can not. He was able to intensify a boring life, like ours, and put it into an exciting journey of a pilot. We experience through Bernis, love, adventure, and death. The three most annoying but essential things of life.
The story follows this mail carrier over Africa, Asia, and Europe in the mid 1920 s and 1930 s. Leaving for many months, Bernis leaves his home in Paris, along with friends and a loved one, Genevieve. Upon arrival from his journey's he find that nothing has changed, and that his home was left the way it was months earlier. The action of this book took place within his mind or his plane. The harshness of ones mind can be far more severe than anything else. This book is much like our lives, like I said before, many would find it boring because its just reading their life, however I found it intriguing because we find ourselves everyday asking why does this happen to me, when actually it happens to everyone. .
II.
Jacques Bernis is the main character of this novel. He is the pilot of a mail carrier. His journeys take him all over the world, however mainly Africa and Europe. He ventures over the Sahara Desert many times going back and forth between Paris and Toulouse. As he makes his way back to Paris from his two month journey, he faces the harsh reality that nothing has changed. Everything is in the same place and everyone is the same since when he left the last time. Upon his arrival, he arranges to meet with some old friends, one of which is Genevieve. This young woman is the love interest of every man in the town.