Krishna
This is a children’s classic. I am confused about the children it aims for. Sometimes it seems to address really small children like the books that say ‘See Jane. See Jane Run’ or ‘Mickey goes for a walk. He sees a plant. There is a bug on a leaf’.
It is very popular and is highly thought of, so I guess I may be one of the few who doesn’t “get it”. To me, it sounded like a lot of rambling discourses about very many things. I was given to understand that this is about seeing how weird adult behavior can be, when viewed from the eyes of an innocent, pure, child. To me, it did nothing of that sort. No revelations to me.
A very short book, a quarter of which is filled with pictures, so it is an easy read.
What is the story about?
It is about the narrator, who is a man who knows children are pure and adults, who get adulterated with life’s experiences cannot see the simple truth as children do.
He crash lands in a desert and thinks that he is done for, as there is no one to help him. He meets the Little Prince, where the latter tells him of the smallest planet where he lives. In the Little Prince’s home planet, he can see sunset as many times as one wishes by moving the chair just a little bit (since the planet itself is tiny). He asks for a drawing and our narrator draws one of a sheep.
It seems to give great pleasure to the prince. In a disjointed manner, the Prince describes the grave danger to his home planet, which is threatened by a fast growing weed-tree thing called Baobobs. Solution? The people in the planet weed the plant out constantly. If they relax or forget, the planet is gone.
Such things, pleasant but silly, meant for kids
If you have read this much in the book, you know what to expect next. The Prince goes about meeting a whole series of people, a businessman, a man who has to light a lamp and snuff it since the day and night lasts a few minutes at most, a fox who wanted to be tamed .. oh God, let the misery end!
Then the little prince makes a pact with a snake “to go back to his world by dying”.
Didn’t get the logic of that either.
Sorry, I did not get what people are raving about. I would give it a 2/10
— Krishna