Sky

The tetralogy's finale is its strangest architecture: a memoir that spends its central hundred-plus pages as hagiography — 'The New Patron Saint of Aviation,' Cendrars' obsessive dossier on Giuseppe of Cupertino, the dim, ecstatic friar whose documented levitations baffled the seventeenth century and whom the twentieth, without irony, assigned to its pilots. Around the saint: Brazil, the other pole of Cendrars' betweenwars life — coffee barons, utopian plantations, jungle roads, the Southern Cross — and the recurring meditation on flight, human and otherwise, that stitches earth to the title's subdivided heaven.

The unnamed engine is grief: Rémy Sauser, his aviator son, died in a crash in 1945, and the book's whole ascent — the saint who flew, the sky parceled into lots, the fathers watching — reads as a requiem conducted at altitude, all the more devastating for its indirection. Denoël published it in 1949; Nina Rootes' English Sky completed the tetralogy for Anglophone readers. It is the quietest of the four panels and, for many, the most haunting: the adventurer's last inventory, filed under heaven.

Three ascending movements: the Paris and wartime frames, with the sky's losses pressing in; the great Cupertino dossier — the flying friar's life, trials, and documented levitations, pursued with a scholar's rigor and a believer's hunger; and the Brazilian panorama — fazendas, pioneers, the outback's saints and swindlers — where the modern world's own flights, fortunes, and falls play out under southern stars.

Read it last of the four, as built — the tetralogy's landing is in heaven, and it earns the altitude.