The Strange Triumph of "The Little Prince" - The New Yorker

The Strange Triumph of "The Little Prince" - The New Yorker

Of all the books written in French over the past century, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry's "Le Petit Prince" is surely the best loved in the most tongues. This is very strange, because the book's meanings-its purpose and intent and moral-still seem far from transparent, even seventy-five-plus years after its first appearance.

newyorker.com

From an experience that was so dehumanizing and overwhelming—an experience that turns an entire human being with a complicated life history and destiny first into a cipher and then into a casualty—Saint-Exupéry wanted to rescue the person, not the statistic. The statistics could be any of those the men on the planets are obsessed with, the ‘counting’ fetish that might take in stars if one is an astronomer or profits for businessmen. The richest way to see “Le Petit Prince” is as an extended parable of the kinds and follies of abstraction—and the special intensity and poignance of the story is that Saint-Exupéry dramatizes the struggle against abstraction not as a philosophical subject but as a life-and-death story. The book moves from asteroid to desert, from fable and comedy to enigmatic tragedy, in order to make one recurrent point: You can’t love roses. You can only love a rose.