Toevolution

The Little Prince (in French: Le Petit Prince, pronounced) is a novel by the French aristocrat, writer, and aviator Antoine de Saint-Exupéry. It was first published in English and French in the USA by Reynal & Hitchcock in April 1943, and posthumously in France after the liberation of France, as Saint-Exupéry's works had been banned by the regime of Vichy. The story follows a young prince who visits various planets in space, including Earth, and addresses issues of loneliness, friendship, love, and loss. Despite its style as a children's book, The Little Prince makes poignant remarks about life and human nature.

The Little Prince became Saint-Exupéry's most successful work, selling approximately 140 million copies worldwide, making it one of the best-selling and most translated books ever published. It has been translated into 361 languages ​​and dialects. The Little Prince has adapted to numerous art forms and media, including audio recordings, radio plays, live stage, film, television, ballet, and opera.

The narrator begins with a discussion about the nature of adults and their inability to perceive especially important things. As a test to determine if an adult is enlightened and as a child, he shows them an image he drew at the age of 6 that represents a snake that has eaten an elephant. Adults always reply that the image represents a hat, so they know how to talk to them about "reasonable", rather than fanciful things.

The narrator becomes a pilot and, one day, his plane crashes into the Sahara, far from civilization. You have 8 days of water supply and you must fix your plane to be saved.

In the middle of the desert, the narrator is unexpectedly received by a boy who is nicknamed "the little prince". The prince has golden hair, an adorable laugh, and will repeat questions until they are answered.

Upon meeting the narrator, the little prince asks him to draw a sheep. The narrator first shows him his old image of the elephant inside the snake, which, to the narrator's surprise, the prince correctly interprets. After three unsuccessful attempts to draw a sheep, the frustrated narrator simply draws a box (box), claiming that the sheep the prince wants is inside the box. Again, to the narrator's surprise, the prince exclaims that this was exactly the drawing he wanted.

Over the course of eight days stranded in the desert, as the narrator tries to repair his plane, the little prince tells the story of his life.

The prince begins by describing life on his tiny home planet: indeed, a house-sized asteroid known as "B 612" on Earth. The asteroid's most prominent features are three tiny volcanoes (two active and one inactive or extinct), as well as a variety of plants.

The prince describes spending his early days cleaning volcanoes and removing the unwanted seeds and twigs that infest the soil of his planet; in particular, removing baobab trees that are constantly on the verge of invading the surface. If baobabs are not uprooted by the time they are recognized, they can be postponed until it is too late and the tree has grown too large to remove it, and its roots have a catastrophic effect on the little planet.

The prince wants a sheep to eat undesirable plants but is concerned that he also eats plants with thorns.

The prince tells of his love for a vain and foolish rose that began to grow on the surface of the asteroid some time ago. The rose is given to the claim, exaggerating ailments to attract attention and make the prince take care of it. The prince says he fed the rose and tended it, making a screen or glass globe to protect it from the cold wind, watering and chasing the caterpillars away.

Although the prince fell in love with the rose, he also began to feel that she was taking advantage of him and decided to leave the planet to explore the rest of the universe. When saying goodbye, the rose is serious and apologizes for not showing that she loved him and that they had both been fools. She wishes him well and rejects his desire to leave her on the glass globe, telling her that he will protect himself.

The prince laments that he did not understand how to love his rose while he was with her and that he should have listened to her kind actions, instead of her vain words.

Since then, the prince visited six other planets, each of which was inhabited by a single narrow-minded, irrational adult, each destined to criticize an element of society. They include:

A king without subjects, who only issues orders that can be followed, such as ordering the sun to go down at sunset.
A narcissistic man who just wants the praise that comes from admiration and being the most admirable person on his uninhabited planet.
A drunk who drinks to forget the shame of drinking.
A businessman who is blind to the beauty of the stars and instead counts and catalogs them endlessly to "own" them all (criticizing materialism)
A lamplighter on a planet so small that a full day lasts a minute. He blindly loses his life following orders to turn the lamp on and off every 30 seconds to correspond with the day and night of his planet.
An elderly geographer who has never been anywhere, nor seen any of the things he records, providing a caricature of specialization in the contemporary world.
It is the geographer who tells the prince that his rose is an ephemeral being, who is not registered, and recommends that the prince visit planet Earth.

The visit to Earth begins with a deeply pessimistic assessment of humanity. The six absurd people the prince previously encountered comprise, according to the narrator, almost the entire adult world. On earth there was

111 kings ... 7000 geographers, 900,000 businessmen, 7,500,000 tipplers, 311,000,000 cocky men; that is, around 2,000,000,000 adults.

As the prince landed in a desert, he believed that the Earth was uninhabited. He then encountered a yellow snake that he claimed to have the power to return to his home, should he ever wish to return. Then the prince encountered a desert flower, who told him that he had only seen a handful of men in this part of the world and that they had no roots, letting the wind blow them and living hard lives. After climbing the highest mountain he had ever seen, the prince hoped to see the entire Earth, thus meeting the people; however, he only saw the vast and desolate landscape. When the prince screamed, his echo answered him, which he interpreted as the voice of a bored person who only repeats what another says.

The prince was met by a row of rose bushes, dejected at having ever thought that his own rose was unique and that she had lied. He began to feel that he was not a great prince at all, as his planet contained only three small volcanoes and a flower that he now considered common. He lay down on the grass and cried until a fox appeared.

The fox wished to be tamed and teaches the prince how to tame him.

Being domesticated, something goes from being ordinary and, like everyone else, to being special and unique. There are downsides, as the connection can cause sadness and nostalgia when they are apart.

From the fox, the prince learns that his rose was truly unique and special because she was the object of the prince's love and time; He had "tamed" her, and now she was more precious than all the roses he had seen in the garden.

After his sad departure, the fox imparts a secret: important things can only be seen with the heart, not with the eyes.

The prince finally meets two people from Earth:

A railway technician who told him how passengers constantly ran from one place to another onboard the trains, never satisfied with where they were and not knowing what they were looking for; only the children among them bothered to look out the windows.
A merchant who spoke to the prince about his product, a pill that eliminated the need to drink for a week, saving people 53 minutes.
Back in the present moment, it is the eighth day after the narrator's plane crash and the narrator and the prince die of thirst. The prince has become visibly sullen and saddened by his memories and longs to return home and see his flower.

The prince finds a well and saves them. Later, the narrator finds the prince talking to the snake, discussing his return home and his desire to see his rose again, who is concerned that he is left alone. The prince emotionally says goodbye to the narrator and states that if he appears to have died, it is only because his body was too heavy to carry him to his planet. The prince warns the narrator not to see him go as it will upset him. The narrator, realizing what will happen, refuses to leave the prince's side. The prince comforts the narrator by saying that he only needs to look at the stars to think about the prince's adorable laugh and that it will appear that all the stars are laughing. The prince then walks away from the narrator and allows the snake to bite him, falling silently.

The next morning, the narrator cannot find the prince's body. Finally, he manages to repair his plane and leave the desert. It is up to the reader to determine whether the prince returned home or died.

The story ends with a drawing of the landscape where the prince and the narrator met and where the serpent took the prince's body life. The narrator requests to be contacted immediately by anyone in that area who comes across a small person with golden curls who refuses to answer any questions.

Book Review:
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry published The Little Prince in 1943, just a year before his Lockheed P-38 disappeared over the Mediterranean during a reconnaissance mission. More than half a 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 appearance of a little prince who asks him to draw a sheep. "In the face of an overwhelming mystery, you dare not disobey," recalls the narrator. "As absurd as it seemed, thousands of kilometers from all inhabited and life-threatening regions, I took a piece of paper and a pen from my pocket." And so begins his dialogue, which extends the narrator's imagination in all kinds of surprising and childish directions.
The Little Prince describes his journey from planet to planet, each small world populated by a single adult. It is a wonderfully ingenious sequence, evoking not only great fairy tales but also postmodern fantasy monuments like the Invisible Cities of Italo Calvino. And despite its tone of gentle bewilderment, Saint-Exupéry also achieves some fine satirical touches. There is the king, for example, who orders the Little Prince to function as a one-man (or a boy) judiciary:

I have good reason to believe that there is an old rat that lives somewhere on my planet. I listen to it at night. You could judge that old rat. Occasionally, you will sentence him to death. That way his life will depend on your justice. But you will forgive him every time for the good of the economy. There is only one rat.
The author mocks a businessman, a geographer, and a lamplighter, all of which signify a useless aspect of adult existence. However, her story is ultimately tender: a heartfelt display of sadness and loneliness, which never turns into molasses in the style of Peter Pan. Such delicacy of tone can present real headaches for a translator, and in his Translation of 1943, Katherine Woods sometimes deviated from the brand, giving the text a slightly didactic or wooden accent. Fortunately, Richard Howard (who did an excellent job at the Stendhal Parma Charter House in 1999) has been streamlined and streamlined with a wonderful effect. The result is a new and improved version of an indestructible classic, which also restores the original artwork in full color. "Trying to be resourceful," they tell us at one point, "leads to lying, more or less." But Saint-Exupéry's drawings offer a practical rebuttal: they are fresh, fun, and, like the book itself, rigorously true. --James Marcus

Book Club Questions

About The Author Antoine de Saint-Exupéry:
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry was born in Lyons on June 29, 1900. He flew for the first time at the age of twelve, at the Ambérieu airfield, and it was then that he became determined to be a pilot. He kept that ambition even after moving to a school in Switzerland and while spending summer vacations at the family's château at Saint-Maurice-de-Rémens, in eastern France. (The house at Saint-Maurice appears again and again in Saint-Exupéry's writing.)

Later, in Paris, he failed the entrance exams for the French naval academy and, instead, enrolled at the prestigious art school l'Ecole des Beaux-Arts. In 1921 Saint-Exupéry began serving in the military and was stationed in Strasbourg. There he learned to be a pilot, and his career path was forever settled.

After leaving the service, in 1923, Saint-Exupéry worked in several professions, but in 1926 he went back to flying and signed on as a pilot for Aéropostale, a private airline that flew mail from Toulouse, France, to Dakar, Senegal. In 1927 Saint-Exupéry accepted the position of airfield chief for Cape Juby, in southern Morocco, and began writing his first book, a memoir called Southern Mail, which was published in 1929. He then moved briefly to Buenos Aires to oversee the establishment of an Argentinean mail service; when he returned to Paris in 1931, he published Night Flight, which won instant success and the prestigious Prix Femina.

Always daring, Saint-Exupéry tried in 1935 to break the speed record for flying from Paris to Saigon. Unfortunately, his plane crashed in the Libyan desert, and he and his copilot had to trudge through the sand for three days to find help. In 1938 he was seriously injured in a second plane crash, this time as he tried to fly between New York City and Tierra del Fuego, Argentina. The crash resulted in a long convalescence in New York.

Saint-Exupéry's next novel, Wind, Sand, and Stars, was published in 1939. A great success, the book won the Académie Française's Grand Prix du Roman (Grand Prize for Novel Writing) and the National Book Award in the United States. At the beginning of the Second World War, Saint-Exupéry flew reconnaissance missions for France, but he went to New York to ask the United States for help when the Germans occupied his country. He drew on his wartime experiences to write Flight to Arras and Letter to a Hostage, both published in 1942. His classic The Little Prince appeared in 1943. Later in 1943 Saint-Exupéry rejoined his French air squadron in northern Africa. Despite being forbidden to fly (he was still suffering physically from his earlier plane crashes), Saint-Exupéry insisted on being given a mission. On July 31, 1944, he set out from Borgo, Corsica, to overfly occupied France. He never returned.