The Little Prince: Sixtieth-Anniversary Gift Edition
by Antoine de Saint-Exupery, Richard Howard (Translator)
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Book Summary Information
Author: Antoine de Saint-Exupery, Richard Howard (Translator)Edition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2003-04-01
ISBN: 0152048049
Number of pages: 96
Publisher: Harcourt Children's Books
Book Reviews of The Little Prince: Sixtieth-Anniversary Gift Edition
Book Review: Saint-Ex's goodbye
Summary: 5 Stars
SPOILER WARNING! This review reveals the end of the story.
This is one of my favourite books but its popularity puzzles me because I've always felt The Little Prince dealt with the dark side of life, and that it might tempt us with the lure of an easy exit.
This is a tale in which a child commits suicide. Period. It's no good insisting that Saint-Ex's story offers life lessons, or that it is a metaphor for wanting to go home. This might well be true, but it's at bottom still the story of a little boy whose heart is broken by a difficult relationship who chooses to end his suffering by killing himself with a snake bite.
I believe the book is Saint-Ex's suicide note. Saint-Ex considered suicide unmanly and base. Man must fight on and struggle with life no matter how bad it gets. He clearly states this in Wind, Sand, and Stars. Yet Saint-Ex was an unhappy difficult man stuck in difficult relationships with difficult women. Furthermore, as a French thinker he was living through the same period of existential angst that would give rise to Camus and Sartre. (Not to mention World War II! ) He cleverly trapped himself in his own rules. Men don't kill themselves, and Saint-Ex was a Man. He had to find a subtle exit and any suicide note he left had to be disguised.
He died returning from a reconnaissance mission in an unarmed plane. Why unarmed? Why did he insist on being given these excessively dangerous missions? Pure conjecture on my part, but I think he just wanted to end it all, and he wanted to go out a hero.
In this light, I see The Little Prince as his suicide note. A possible reason is ordinary to the point of being trite. A mere failed love affair, a turbulent romance with his wife Consuelo. The deeper reason is that like so many artists, Saint-Ex suffered and could not shake that off. But being the man's man that he was, he had to go out like a man. Not for Saint-Ex the easy exit. Not for Saint-Ex the certain exit. I suppose his plane was unarmed so that he could not go looking for a fight, as a safeguard against his engineering an easily found death. He had to come back safely for his mission to be successful, and yet the risk of being shot down was always there, the German defenses promising to end his suffering like the snake promises to send the Little Prince home to his beloved rose with a single quick bite.
Saint-Ex himself is thus the Little Prince, but not wanting to be obvious, he makes the narrator a pilot, just as he was, so that we mistake the narrator-pilot for the author-pilot. Instead, perhaps we should see the child-prince in the author and see ourselves, the readers, in the narrator. When the Little Prince tells the narrator not to worry, that he would only seem dead but that he would really be up there in the stars, isn't this really Saint-Ex telling us that his spirit, his soul, would be there for us in his books?
Not for children.
Vincent Poirier, Dublin
Summary of The Little Prince: Sixtieth-Anniversary Gift Edition
Since 1943, the wise little boy from Asteroid B-612 has led children and their adults to deeper understandings of love, friendship, and responsibility. The Little Prince is a cherished story, read by millions of people in more than a hundred languages. In honor of its sixtieth anniversary, Harcourt is proud to present this special edition of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry?s treasure, which includes a satin bookmark and presentation page, and comes in an elegant cloth slipcase enhanced with gold stamping and embossing. A must-have edition for any collector, this lovely book is also the perfect gift for those new to the wisdom of the Little Prince and the charms of his rose-and-star-filled worlds.
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry first published The Little Prince in 1943, only a year before his Lockheed P-38 vanished over the Mediterranean during a reconnaissance mission. More than a half 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 apparition of a little, well, prince, who asks him to draw a sheep. "In the face of an overpowering mystery, you don't dare disobey," the narrator recalls. "Absurd as it seemed, a thousand miles from all inhabited regions and in danger of death, I took a scrap of paper and a pen out of my pocket." And so begins their dialogue, which stretches the narrator's imagination in all sorts of surprising, childlike directions.
The Little Prince describes his journey from planet to planet, each tiny world populated by a single adult. It's a wonderfully inventive sequence, which evokes not only the great fairy tales but also such monuments of postmodern whimsy as Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities. And despite his tone of gentle bemusement, Saint-Exupéry pulls off some fine satiric touches, too. There's the king, for example, who commands the Little Prince to function as a one-man (or one-boy) judiciary:
I have good reason to believe that there is an old rat living somewhere on my planet. I hear him at night. You could judge that old rat. From time to time you will condemn him to death. That way his life will depend on your justice. But you'll pardon him each time for economy's sake. There's only one rat.The author pokes similar fun at a businessman, a geographer, and a lamplighter, all of whom signify some futile aspect of adult existence. Yet his tale is ultimately a tender one--a heartfelt exposition of sadness and solitude, which never turns into Peter Pan-style treacle. Such delicacy of tone can present real headaches for a translator, and in her 1943 translation, Katherine Woods sometimes wandered off the mark, giving the text a slightly wooden or didactic accent. Happily, Richard Howard (who did a fine nip-and-tuck job on Stendhal's The Charterhouse of Parma in 1999) has streamlined and simplified to wonderful effect. The result is a new and improved version of an indestructible classic, which also restores the original artwork to full color. "Trying to be witty," we're told at one point, "leads to lying, more or less." But Saint-Exupéry's drawings offer a handy rebuttal: they're fresh, funny, and like the book itself, rigorously truthful. --James Marcus
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