I still remember the day my mother appeared in my room one afternoon with the book “The Little Prince.” “That must be a great book,” I thought, when I noticed how carefully she opened it. The drawings of that boy with long hair. I was captivated by the golden gold. But the story… disturbed me! How horrible, such a small planet, it’s like a prison! And that strange spiteful rose, but why does he like it so much? And why does he befriend of a fox and then abandon it again?
When my mother read a short chapter aloud to me, I couldn’t bring myself to tell her how uncomfortable the story was. And while pop culture celebrated the hero of the world’s most famous children’s novel, I just wanted to distance myself from that alien kid.
“The Little Prince”, a childhood memory
The book is about a boy who lives on a very small planet with a rose, two active volcanoes and one dormant, and baobab tree shoots to fight with. The rose and the little prince don’t get along, the rose is grumpy and demanding. So the boy decides to leave and goes on a journey to explore seven planets. His last stop is Earth.
80 years after its first publication, I gave this story another chance. I must say that this time his chapters captivated me. But it is not a story for children, but rather a reminder of the childhood that is in each of us. The short novel deals in 27 chapters with great themes of adult life, such as love, loneliness and death.
“The Little Prince” is the last book by an aviation enthusiast, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, published in New York in 1943. Three years later, it was translated into French. However, the famous author never got to see it, since he never returned from a flight in World War II, in 1944.
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry: piloto and escritor
Born in Lyon in 1900, Saint-Exupéry’s career as an aviator began with tourist flights over Paris. In the twenties, he flew routes like Toulouse-Casablanca – Dakar. Subsequently, he was assigned as a night airmail carrier to Argentina.
Later, he repeatedly attempted to break distance records and survived two accidents on the Paris-Saigon and New York-Tierra del Fuego routes. With the start of World War II, he was called up.
His life as a pilot doesn’t just read like an adventure story. Antoine de Saint-Exupéry wrote highly acclaimed novels during some stages of his life. Although he received literary prizes, he considered himself first and foremost a pilot, and then a writer.
“The Little Prince” was, at first, a disappointment. It is a bittersweet tale, illustrated by Saint-Exupéry himself, where one can also find his biography embodied in the narration of the pilot who crashed in the desert. But no one imagined that this book would not only become his greatest success, but also the best-seller in French history. It is said that since then more than 200 million copies have been sold and it has been translated into some 340 languages and dialects.
An ode to the imagination
“Draw me a sheep”, is the first thing the little prince says to the wrecked pilot. The pilot draws three sheep, but all of them are rejected by the boy. Exasperated, he finally draws a box and says, “The sheep you want is in there.” Much to his astonishment, the strange boy is very excited.
But that was not how I was as a child. What nonsense, I thought at the time. Why doesn’t he paint the sheep as the prince likes? I couldn’t understand the genius of these lines. Today, this passage does convince me: it is an ode to imagination, to childish ingenuity without prejudice. “The great ones never understand anything by themselves. And, for children, it is too much work to explain things to them over and over again,” Saint-Exupéry writes in the first chapter.
“It only looks good with the heart…”
The book is full of wisdom. “You only see well with your heart, what is essential is invisible to the eye” is probably the most famous aphorism. The story also contains reflections of social criticism.
The little prince experiences strange encounters on each planet before arriving on earth: a monarch looking for subjects, a drunkard who drinks to forget the shame of drinking, a bluffer who only exercises orders, a vain man who wants to be admired, a geographer who explains the world, but has not seen it, a businessman who believes he owns the stars.
“All the adults have been, first, children, but few remember it”, writes Saint-Exupéry at the beginning of his literary work. And, without a doubt, “The Little Prince” reminds us, like no other book, of what It is childhood and, perhaps for this reason, it has been a bestseller world for 80 years.