Excerpt from The Kites by Romain Gary, Miranda Richmond Mouillot, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

It took me many years to find my way through which things were matters of great consequence and faith to him, and which ones he drew from a wellspring of irony that seemed to flow from some pooled source where the French go to find themselves when they are lost.

My uncle always said: "Kites need to learn to fly, just like everybody else," and from the time I was seven, as soon as school let out, I would accompany him to what he called "practice." Sometimes we'd go to the field beside La Motte, and sometimes farther, to the banks of the Rigole, with a gnama that still smelled deliciously of fresh glue.

"You have to hang on tight to them," he would explain, "because they pull, and sometimes they break loose and fly too high — they take off in pursuit of the blue yonder and you never see them again, except when people bring them back here in pieces."

"But if I hang on too tight, won't I fly away with them, too?"

My uncle would smile, which made his big mustache look even kinder.

"It could happen," he'd say. "You can't let yourself get carried away."

My uncle gave all his kites pet names: Cracklemunch, Gambol, Hobbledehoy, Fatsy, Zigomar, Flutterpat, Lovey. I never understood why he picked the names he did. Why the name Bumble belonged to a kind of silly frog whose front legs waved "hello" to you in the wind, and not to Swash, who was a fish wreathed in smiles that wiggled its silvery scales and pink fins in the air. Or why he chose to fly his Patooty above the field by La Motte and not his Martian kite, Meemy, who I thought was a lovely creature, with round eyes and wings shaped like ears that quivered as the kite began to rise. I practiced until I could imitate him with great skill, and bested everyone in schoolyard competitions. When my uncle launched a gnama with a shape I didn't understand, he would explain, "You've got to try and make them be different from everything else in the world. Something really new — something that's never been seen or known before. Those are the leads you have to hold on to the hardest, though. They really go after the blue yonder if you let them go, and can do a lot of damage when they fall back down."

Sometimes it seemed to me that it was the kite holding Ambrose Fleury at the end of the line, and not the other way round.

For a long time, my favorite was the brave Fatsy, whose belly would puff up in the most wonderfully surprising way as soon as he got up in the air. With only a little breeze, he would execute comical flips by flapping his paunch with his paws, depending on how my uncle pulled or let out the line.

I allowed Fatsy to sleep with me, because on the ground, kites require a great deal of friendship. The shape goes out of them when they come down, and living flat on their faces like that makes them highly susceptible to the blues. For its beauty to really shine, a kite needs height, fresh air, and wide-open skies.

As a rural postman, my guardian spent his workdays crisscrossing the countryside, picking up the mail at the post office each morning and delivering it to the people in our community. But he was nearly always back home by the time I'd finished the walk from school, a good three miles away, standing in his postman's uniform in the field by La Motte — the wind at our place was always better in the late afternoon — gazing up at one of his "little friends" bobbing and fluttering high above us. And yet, when we lost our superb Fourseas — all its twelve sails filled up in one big burst and ripped kite and reel right out of my hands — I burst out sobbing and my uncle said to me, his eyes following his work of art as it disappeared into the blue yonder: "Don't cry. That's what they're meant to do. He's happy up there."

Excerpted from The Kites by Romain Gary. Copyright © 2017 by Romain Gary. Excerpted by permission of New Directions Publishing. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.