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The Little Princeis a novella – meaning you can read it in 2 hours flat. It’s written by French aristocrat, writer, poet, and pioneering aviator Antoine de Saint-Exupéry. It was first published in April 1943. And has sold millions of copies since. This Book is said to be one of the most-sold book in history. It still sells about 2 mil copies per year. That’s enough data for you peeps – something the novel says not to pay much attention to.
The book left me bemused. It raised more questions than it answered. What. Why. Who. When. Everything was a puzzle. Every new page brought in a more complex scenario. Starting from page 1. FYI, Page 1 has a kid drawing a boa from the outside and the inside.
I ran to Google and what I read made things even more complicated. Some say that this is a kids book for adults. Others call it an adult book for kids. Some describe it as a book about life. Others call it a book about the author’s wife.
The book has a Dali-like time wrap. The tiny planets, the kid cleaning the volcano. And that boa. And insists of talking about unconventional things. Like a geographer or a lamplighter.
So I read it again. Taking a good 4 days. Slowly. Some inferences became clear. But not the point.
It was not until one reviewer called the book ‘Hotel California of Literature*’ did I begin to understand it.
There is a rose in the book that causes so much befuddlement. Who does it refer to and all that. If only they bothered to check the memoir of the authors’ wife. It is called The Tale of the Rose. The author is said to have had a stormy relation with his wife. And like a good normal human, he didn’t deal with it straight. Rather wrote about it in this book.
Then there is a fox. The fox says he is not tamed but, paradoxically, seems to have a lot of sane earthy wisdom and morals to share.
We have a dozen other seemingly normal characters who are actually utterly crazy. This is a caustic comment on contemporary life.
When your mind is deprived of water for many days-plus the desert heat, you begin hallucinating. Our writer appears to have been gone thru some such ordeal and went on to write it down – confusing the hell out of us.😊
Nevertheless, It does have a charming sense of humor backed by some minimalistic but interesting drawings – by the author himself.
So read it. And I am sure you will understand more than what I did.
* The reviewer is Rajat Ubhaykar
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