The Little Prince

Author: Antoine de Saint-Exupery

Genre: Children’s fiction

Surprised I'm writing about a children’s novel? Well, ‘The Little Prince’ isn’t just any children’s book. Its about a little child who comes from a planet hardly bigger than himself, and who leaves it to see the Universe…and in the course of his travels comes in contact, for the first time, with the crazy world of the adults.

He meets a King, whose subjects consists of an old mouse…and that’s about it. To exercise his authority, he condemns the mouse to death. But since that would mean having no subjects to rule over, he exercises his authority once again to pardon him. And does that again, and again, and again…

Or with the rule-obsessed lamplighter, who’s job was to light the lamp in the evenings and extinguish it in the morning. The rest of the day was for relaxation, and the night for sleeping. But as time went by, his planet started rotating quicker and quicker, and yet the orders didn’t change. So he switches the lamp on every thirty seconds, and switches it off in another thirty!

Earth is a different deal altogether…populated by two billion adults, it’s a lot crazier than all the planets he’s been to so far, put together. There a lot more people living repetitive lives, lives with no meaning, than anywhere else you can find. The author, as a child, was an artist with a flair for drawing boa constrictors digesting elephants from the outside and the inside. But now he is a man of facts and figures, of action and responsibility. In other words, he has become an adult.

In the course of his travels, the Little Prince comes to the Earth. Here, he meets the author stranded in the middle of the desert, and asks him to draw him a sheep…and that’s how their friendship starts.

Each day the author learns a little more of the The Little Prince’s world…the love of his life, the aforementioned flower, who thinks she can save herself from tigers with her four thorns, and who asks the Prince to put a glass globe over her head since she’s allergic to draughts. How the Prince knew that he was being taken for a ride, but let himself be hoodwinked…he didn’t want to hurt the flower’s feelings, you see? Or how his planet is so small, that he just has to move his chair a few feet if he wants to watch the sunset, which he loves to watch when he is very sad…or the baobab seeds which are blown onto his planet…baobabs are dangerous things, capable of completely destroying the planet they grow on…or the…

The Little Prince attempts the impossible: trying to make sense of the inane world which the grown-ups of the world have created for themselves, and explain this to a child. And at the same time, it reminds grown-ups of their own follies: of forgetting their own childhood. It finally treats children as being capable of accepting all natural things, even death, with no lasting effect on them. “The adults are the ones who give them wrongful attitudes, who distort their notions of the natural. I don’t believe that death has to be morbid. No child is going to be upset by the going of the little prince. It’s just a part things as they are.” (from Saint-Exupery in America)

This isn’t your run-of-the-mill Enid Blyton children’s book, as you probably gathered by now. It is a book for children and adults alike, to read again and again, and discover more and more hidden meanings each and every time. If you haven’t read this book yet, go read it…if you have, read it again.

As the Little Prince would say, “From where I come from, everything is very small…” True, my young friend…very true. But ultimately, the smallest things matter the most in life, don’t they?