The Little Prince, by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

Recently I found a copy of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry's The Little Prince on the bookshelves at home. I've often wondered about The Little Prince, having seen it many times, but never felt a great impetus to read it. This year, however, my moleskine diary for 2020 has an illustration from The Little Prince on its cover, and this, of all things, finally prompted me to read it.

It's a beautifully strange and surreal little novel. It's a children's book - or so we're told - but it really doesn't fit any kind of genre. A total original. The story begins with an aviator - the narrator of the story - whose plane has downed in the desert. He must fix his plane so he can set off again. Into this hazy, liminal landscape a boy with gold hair appears, the Little Prince. We learn he comes from a tiny planet - no bigger than a room sized asteroid - which features 3 volcanoes. 

The Little Prince has visited six other planets before he arrived on earth, and met their rather eccentric inhabitants. When he finally arrives on earth, he strikes up a series of conversations with the aviator and they discuss, often in a whimsical fashion, what is important in life and what is not. The Little Prince is critical of a too technical understanding of life (adults can only appreciate something if they can number and name it), preferring the use of the senses and an aesthetic approach to understanding his environment. 

Eventually the two must part, which causes the aviator much sorrow. It's a sorrow that fills the reader's heart, too, for this is quite a melancholic book, one filled with the image of a solitary child finding his own way in the universe. 

No wonder The Little Prince is such a classic. It's the sort of book you can easily read in an evening and will leave you feeling how precious and precarious life is, yet its done in such a subtle, surreal way that you feel yourself mysteriously transformed as you read it.