A few days ago I re-read this book that many French children are narrated by their parents during their childhood. The most translated book in the world after the Bible, translated into more than 500 languages, with 140 million copies worldwide, Le Petit Prince (The Little Prince) is a must-read in French literature.
The novel is written by Antoine de Saint Exupéry, a French author, journalist and aviator, flying all around the globe. He spent a part of his life in the United States, where he wrote Le Petit Prince.
In less than 100 pages – so easy to read that you find yourself finishing the book in one evening – the gentle plume of Saint Exupéry will overwhelm you through a myriad of life-lessons and striking thoughts about the world and humanity.
The story recounts the little adventures of a young prince, almost an angel, coming from his house-sized planet. All story long, the little prince is engaging in philosophical conversations with the narrator, a pilot who crashed his plane in the Sahara desert, and the one-of-a-kind characters the little prince meets throughout his journey on several whimsical planets.
This multi-layered-reading novel tackles the absurdity of social niceties and decorum, the flaws and behaviors that make humans what they are. However, beyond a social criticism, what is conveyed – I believe – is more a message of hope, an olive branch for a purer and simpler lifestyle, unpretentious and devoid of artifices. It invites us to reconnect to our human experience of the world with the wittiness of a child. To reinvent oneself with the imagination we lost when we grew up.
The script bombards us with truths expressed through a parsimonious selection of raw and ethereal words. The reader finds themselves so overwhelmed by the delicacy and the sensibility of what seem to be such simple words at first sight, that as the reader goes on, tears shamelessly pour out. “C’est tellement mystérieux, le pays des larmes” (“It is so mysterious, the land of tears”), Le Petit Prince teaches us.
Le Petit Prince is without a doubt a real chef-d’oeuvre and remains one of the major literature artworks of the 20th century, as well as a legacy of French literature. Le Petit Prince is as much a children’s tale as a coming-of-age story. A philosophical account for us, grownups, to catch sight of our inner child, that we believed vanished a long time ago.
Written in a prose of the utmost stripped down style, Le Petit Prince is also one of the most accessible artworks if you fancy reading your very first French novel in its original version. Furthermore, the Scottish version of the novel, The Wee Prince, is also available in most of Edinburgh’s libraries, and the Gaelic version as well.
“Le Petit Prince” by coutorture is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0