The Little Prince

by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry | Literature & Fiction |
ISBN: 0156012197 Global Overview for this book
Registered by k00kaburra of San Jose, California USA on 3/9/2010
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1 journaler for this copy...
Journal Entry 1 by k00kaburra from San Jose, California USA on Tuesday, March 9, 2010
Rec'd via Paperbackswap.com.

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Amazon.com Review
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry first published The Little Prince in 1943, only a year before his Lockheed P-38 vanished over the Mediterranean during a reconnaissance mission. More than a half century later, this fable of love and loneliness has lost none of its power. The narrator is a downed pilot in the Sahara Desert, frantically trying to repair his wrecked plane. His efforts are interrupted one day by the apparition of a little, well, prince, who asks him to draw a sheep. "In the face of an overpowering mystery, you don't dare disobey," the narrator recalls. "Absurd as it seemed, a thousand miles from all inhabited regions and in danger of death, I took a scrap of paper and a pen out of my pocket." And so begins their dialogue, which stretches the narrator's imagination in all sorts of surprising, childlike directions.

The Little Prince describes his journey from planet to planet, each tiny world populated by a single adult. It's a wonderfully inventive sequence, which evokes not only the great fairy tales but also such monuments of postmodern whimsy as Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities. And despite his tone of gentle bemusement, Saint-Exupéry pulls off some fine satiric touches, too. There's the king, for example, who commands the Little Prince to function as a one-man (or one-boy) judiciary:

I have good reason to believe that there is an old rat living somewhere on my planet. I hear him at night. You could judge that old rat. From time to time you will condemn him to death. That way his life will depend on your justice. But you'll pardon him each time for economy's sake. There's only one rat.

The author pokes similar fun at a businessman, a geographer, and a lamplighter, all of whom signify some futile aspect of adult existence. Yet his tale is ultimately a tender one--a heartfelt exposition of sadness and solitude, which never turns into Peter Pan-style treacle. Such delicacy of tone can present real headaches for a translator, and in her 1943 translation, Katherine Woods sometimes wandered off the mark, giving the text a slightly wooden or didactic accent. Happily, Richard Howard (who did a fine nip-and-tuck job on Stendhal's The Charterhouse of Parma in 1999) has streamlined and simplified to wonderful effect. The result is a new and improved version of an indestructible classic, which also restores the original artwork to full color. "Trying to be witty," we're told at one point, "leads to lying, more or less." But Saint-Exupéry's drawings offer a handy rebuttal: they're fresh, funny, and like the book itself, rigorously truthful. --James Marcus

Journal Entry 2 by k00kaburra at San Jose, California USA on Thursday, April 28, 2011
Read today.

A pilot is stuck in the middle of the Sahara desert after his plane went down. He’s hundreds of miles from the nearest town, with only eight days’ worth of water. When a boy appears and asks him to draw a sheep, he’s understandably frazzled. The Little Prince, as the narrator calls the child, comes from a little planet far away and has wound up on Earth. He describes his home planet to the narrator, with its three tiny volcanoes and a precious, beautiful flower The Little Prince loves more than anything else. He also discusses many of the small planets he visited on his way to Earth, each of which is populated by a single individual who personifies the problems with “adults” and their way of thinking.

This must be to French children what The Giving Tree is to American children. On the surface, it’s a simple story to entertain children. But an older reader will pick upon the philosophy and deeper meanings behind the story. Depending on the reader, the interpretation of the story can seem sweet (the Little Prince’s dedication to his rose is like that of a lover) or disturbing (the author attacks technological innovation and discourages learning) or dark (the Little Prince gets back to his planet by “dying” at the end of the story). However you view it, it’s a story you can read again and again, taking something new from it each time.

I’m rather bummed that it took me this long to encounter The Little Prince. I mean, I’ve known of it since at least second grade, but I never got around to reading it until now, and I loved it. The whole first chapter, where the author talks about drawing a boa constrictor only have adults tell him it looks like a hat, reminded me of a time when I made a snake out of papier-mâché with a big bump in the middle because it had just eaten a rat (I even had a tail hanging out of the snake’s mouth) and everyone kept asking me why my snake had a hump like a camel. Follow that with the author’s discouragement as an artist, and let’s just say that I really identified with him. Now that I’m an adult, and have trouble relating to children, I can’t help but feel sad, because I’ve lost that magical something that I think Saint-Exupéry was trying to capture in The Little Prince.

Maybe I’m thinking about it too much. All I know is that I loved this book.

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