The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

The Little Prince, or Le Petit Prince, is a novella by Antoine Saint-Exupéry. I first saw it as a high-school play some years ago, after which I read it in translation. Just this past summer while in Ecuador, I read the novella in the original French. The version before me now that I have just finished reading is a new translation from 2000 by Robert Howard, packaged very nicely in a cloth slipcase for the sixtieth anniversary edition. Saint-Exupéry published the novel in 1943 and his plane went down the next year.

It's the long-favorite novel of developmentally arrested young people, the story of a pilot who crashes in the desert and meets a young boy. The boy tells him stories about his home planet, Asteroid B-612, and the other planets he has visited. He complains about grown-ups and their lack of imagination, worries about his planet's sole rose, and asks for a picture of a sheep. The pilot, after a few frustrated attempts at such, draws a box. The sheep is inside, he says. The little prince thinks it is perfect.

If this all sounds awfully precious, it is. But it could very well make you think about the value of things in a new way, about ephemerality and friendship and what it means to tame something. It's also a good book to introduce children to some difficult adult concepts, and to introduce adults to some difficult childlike ones.

I don't like the new translation as much as whichever I read before, because though I'm near certain it is the more faithful (though I can pass no judgement on the style of the French,) it lacks the lyricism that I remember. I have quotes from the novella written in my notebook from years ago, and they just sound better than this new edition. It's a beautiful and strange book, I think, in any translation. It only takes forty minutes to read, maybe an hour if you consider the words carefully. Your time would be well-spent.

I would recommend this novella to anyone in search of something short and meaningful, in search of a great gift for graduates, or in search of a great gift for a cool kid (or their parents.)

The Little Prince gets an A- for making even the most jaded reader think about things and for being a kid's book with a lot of heart. Rated G for Great for kids.