Book description
Take-off: almost a ton of inert matter transformed by the pilot as it
lifts off the runway into a thing of spirit and beauty. Take-off:
lifting one's shadow off the earth, entering a new element where
movement is the very condition for existence, for, as the author
observes, "in life, to choose the wrong wife or the wrong lift is
conventionally viewed as being matters of varying gravity, but in
piloting an aircraft an act of petty oversight, due to the obvious but
decisive fact that in flight there can be no stopping, could be fatal."
The eight chapters of this book carry the reader up into the clouds,
into a world governed by different laws where as we look though the
cockpit window - and into our own souls - we see the earth below, and
our own lives, under a new angle and with a painful new clarity.
Whether he is reliving his first solo flight or a frightening
experience as he pilots a light aircraft through storm clouds, his
training and his instincts constantly at odds, or the mysterious loss
of an airliner on an internal flight, or the brief, adrenaline-charged
lives of Italian torpedo-bombers in World War Two, Del Giudice focuses
on the edge of experience in which a person learns to take nothing,
but nothing, for granted. While Take-off has much of the charm,
humour and poetry to be found in the best of Saint-Exupéry (whose
last flight is evoked in the final chapter), it will also remind the
reader of Robert Pirsig's classic Zen and the Art of Motor Cycle
Maintenance by its close focus on the question of how the mind
approaches problem-solving.
Winner of the Bagutta, Campiello and International Flaiano Prizes.
DANIELE DEL GIUDICE was born in Rome in 1949. He is author of two
previous novels and a novella. Being a qualified pilot with many a
story to tell, he was encouraged to write the present book by Federico Fellini.
JOSEPH FARRELL, journalist, reviewer and broadcaster, teaches
Italian at Strathclyde University. Italian novelists whose work he has
translated include Leonardo Sciascia and Vincenzo Consolo; he has also
translated plays by Goldoni, De Filippo and Dario Fo.
