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The Little Prince

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

Start date: January 1, 2016

Finish date: January 31, 2016

Discussion: Short Story/Novella Collection

Why we're reading this: Monthly Short Story Read, January 2016
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Short Story/Novella Collection

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Jan 14, 2022 Maggie rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: fiction, boxall-1001, fantasy, childrens, classics, guardian-1000

This is the story of a pilot whose plane crashes in the Sahara desert. While repairing it, he meets a little prince from a foreign planet Asteroid B-612. The prince is innocent, and asks many questions, but rarely answers any. As the pilot builds his friendship with the prince, he learns many lessons about love and what matters in life.

The book was written by a French aristocrat and military pilot Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, and published posthumously at the end of WWII. The narrator's experience This is the story of a pilot whose plane crashes in the Sahara desert. While repairing it, he meets a little prince from a foreign planet Asteroid B-612. The prince is innocent, and asks many questions, but rarely answers any. As the pilot builds his friendship with the prince, he learns many lessons about love and what matters in life.

The book was written by a French aristocrat and military pilot Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, and published posthumously at the end of WWII. The narrator's experience of being stranded in the Sahara desert with only a week's supply of drinking water left, and the loneliness of an uninhabited desert all around him, draws on Saint Exupéry's experiences as a war pilot and his time in the Sahara desert.

The prince comes from a tiny planet, where the greatest danger is from baobabs. The baobabs, when small, resemble other plants, but if they are not distinguished from rose-bushes and destroyed when small, they may potentially grow too large to be destroyed, spread all over the planet, bore through its core with their roots, and destroy the planet. It is a metaphor for Nazism, and other forms of evil. When the seedlings of evil are recognised early enough, they may be killed in their infancy. But when allowed to spread over the planet, they grow wild and uncontrollable, and cause much destruction.

The prince has a flower on his planet. It appeared one day, and while beautiful and heavily perfumed, it is also tempestuous and arrogant. The prince learns that while the flower thinks highly of itself with is beauty and its thorns, it is really a vulnerable creature whose thorns are useless for protecting it from predators. He waters it and protects it, placing a glass globe over it every night to protect it from the wind. When he arrives on Earth, he finds a garden with five thousand roses just like his flower, and he realises that although his flower pretended to be special, it was not. He lies down and cries. Later, he meets a fox, who asks him to tame it, with "taming" meaning "to establish ties". Through his friendship with the fox, he learns that both his rose and the fox are special. As he tells the other roses, "But in herself alone she is more important that all the hundreds of you other roses: because it is she that I have watered".

The rose was apparently inspired by Saint-Exupéry's wife, with whom he had a tumultuous relationship, but whom he loved. The little prince talks of how the five thousand roses are empty, and that what he is looking for cannot be found in five thousand roses, but can be found in one single rose. It is a beautiful story of loving the ones close to us even when they are far away, and loving them in spite of their flaws, and having the grace to pretend not to see their weaknesses, and to help them hide their flaws.

All this comes after the prince travels through seven planets, including the Earth. On the other six planets, he meets a king who rules nobody, a conceited man who asks to be admired though there is no other being on his planet to be compared to, a tippler who drinks to forget that he is ashamed of drinking, a businessman who constantly counts the stars he owns although there is no benefit to either him or the stars for owning them, a lamplighter who lights and extinguishes a streetlamp every minute and never gets the sleep he craves, and a geographer who knows nothing about geography because there are no explorers on his planet. Each of these characters gain their pride and identity from ridiculous notions of importance and self-worth, and the prince increasingly believes that adults are extraordinary. It is the fox who tells him what is important: "It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye."

There are many other gems in this book. Reading it first in my adulthood has caused it to lose some of its appeal, but I think it would be a magical book to read as a child. ...more

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