‘The Little Prince’ turns 80
I vividly remember when my mother came into my room one night with “The Little Prince”.
“What a great book this must be,” I thought, noting the care and precision with which she handled and opened it.
And although the drawings of the little boy with the shaggy golden hair and the green outfit piqued my interest, I found the story disturbing.
Allow me to explain. The tiny planet looked like a terrible prison. And that strange, spiteful rose – why does he like the flower so much? And why does he befriend a fox and then leave him again?
As my mother placidly read the short chapters aloud, I didn’t dare say how uncomfortable I found the story. As the world’s most famous fairytale hero celebrated with mugs, puzzles, T-shirts and movie adaptations, I tended to keep my distance from this strange alien child.
Second chance brings back memories
“The Little Prince” is about a boy who lives on a very small planet along with a demanding rose, two active volcanoes, an extinct volcano and baobab seedlings to fight. Baobab and the prince don’t get along, and the rose is sullen and ingratiating. So the little prince decides to go on a journey, exploring seven planets. The last stop is Earth, where he meets a pilot who crashed in the desert.
Now, 80 years after its first publication, I wanted to give this modern fairy tale another chance. The 27 short chapters made for a quick read and this time the simple language resonated, along with the unpretentious watercolor images. Slowly, I realized that I had been tricked as a child.
It’s not a children’s fairy tale; instead, a reminder of the child in all of us. The book deals with really big questions like love, loneliness and death that adults ask themselves. It’s no wonder, then, that as an elementary school kid I clearly felt that something important was being discussed here, something I wasn’t able to comprehend due to my young age. The seriousness before scared me, but now I felt enlightened.
“The Little Prince” is the last book by passionate aviator Antoine de Saint-Exupery and was first published in New York in 1943. By the time of the French edition, three years later, the now celebrated author had died after failing to return from a reconnaissance flight over the Mediterranean during World War II in 1944.
Author and professional pilot
Born in Lyon in 1900, Saint-Exupéry’s career as a pilot began with tourist flights over Paris for tourists. In the 1920s, he flew on the Toulouse-Casablanca-Dakar legs, becoming head of the airfield in the then Spanish-controlled zone in southern Morocco, in the Sahara desert, where he repeatedly rescued colleagues who had made emergency landings.
He then moved to Argentina in 1929, where he was put in charge of overnight air mail. He later tried to set air distance records and survived two crashes: Paris-Saigon and New York-Tierra del Fuego. At the start of World War II, he was drafted and experienced the German Wehrmacht’s Blitz attack in northeastern France. His life in the air reads like an adventure story and despite having won several literary prizes, Saint-Exupéry always saw himself first and foremost as a professional pilot, with writing just a hobby.
His own story comes to life in “The Little Prince”, as, like the narrator of the fairy tale, Saint-Exupéry fell into a desert and had to survive days without drinking water until he was rescued.
Few expected any kind of success for the book, never mind that it became not only Saint-Exupéry’s most successful but also the best-selling book in France.
“The Little Prince” is said to have sold over 200 million copies, has been translated into some 340 languages and dialects, including the language of the Inuit, Tuareg and Mayan, as well as the fantasy language Klingon from the TV series Journey in the Stars.
Source: DW
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