The Little Prince - Antonie de Saint-Exupery

I saw "The Little Prince" mentioned in the list of top books by a close friend in one of those facebook chain posts (it is interesting how some things never seem to die!). There were a quite a few in her list of ten that I had not read. Some did not interest me much, others did. This one lied in the latter. Co-incidentally she had borrowed the book from a colleague and I borrowed it from her before it was eventually returned.

I am not too sure whether this book is for children or adults. But then that is probably what distinguishes a great book from the lot. Every age that you read it, you have a different understanding of it. There are layers that you unravel with time and experience. "The Little Prince" is one of those books that I wish I had read as a kid. In the book, de Saint-Exupery shows the world through a child's eyes. The world of adults and what they (we) hold dear and how pointless and funny it seems to a child. He also talks about love, its pangs, and death which give an eeire dark side to the otherwise light story.

The narrator finds the little prince in the desert while fixing his crashed aircraft. The little prince asks a lot of questions but answers very few. The narrator manages to reconstruct the little prince's story from the bits and pieces he gathers during their conversations. The prince lives on a planet with two active volcanoes and a dead one, and a flower which is the most beautiful in the universe. He loves to see sunsets and keeps his planet free of baobabs. The flower's vanity and demanding nature make the prince leave his planet to explore the universe. He visits six other 'small planets', each inhabited by ridiculous 'adults' and finally ends up on Earth where he meets the fox which teaches him the meaning and importance of love, and the snake which promises him a passage back to his planet and his beloved flower.

This book can easily be finished in a single sitting, but 'we adults' are in such a haste to complete! I imagine it as a bedtime story that one could read to a child. Though I did not mind it much, the book seemed a little random in the way it is structured and I liked almost everything about this book, especially the paintings that accompanied the story. It was an extremely delectable read.