Review: The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupery

There is a lot of charm in this beautifully illustrated fable about a Little Prince who travels through the galaxy in order to escape from a haughty flower who appeared on his tiny home planet. Our narrator is a stranded pilot who finds him in the dessert, and who listens to his story of how he had travelled across the galaxy to find a new home, but nowhere is quite right and everywhere, it seems has its own rules and agenda.

The Little Prince is a short and entertaining read, the kind where what the reader gets out of it depends very much on what they put in, and by how much they are willing to trust the narrator with the story instead of guessing what will happen next. Questions of childhood, innocence and imagination and how they become lost in adulthood are abundant, and none is quite so clear as at the end--where an innocent, childlike reading would leave the reader believing in one outcome, while a cynical, adult reading would leave one contemplating quite the opposite.

I enjoyed this one, though it is difficult to say precisely why. Something about the mix of innocence with the absurd, I suspect.

Recommended. 


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