The Little Prince is a short novel written by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry. It was first published 1943 and it has been translated for over 250 languages and it has sold overall over 140 million copies. The book is the most famous work from de Saint-Exupéry.
I haven’t read any books similar to this. It is a poetic tale and it would have been hard to read even in Finnish. I can’t tell if it fits into its genre, but yes it really was poetic. And it was a mind-blowing experience to read, but some chapters and paragraphs were very hard to understand, even the translation sites couldn’t help me. But eventually I started to understand the text, mostly because its reiteration.
The main characters of the story are the author himself and, of course, the Little Prince. They became friends after Antoine crashes into Sahara Desert. The Little Prince starts telling stories from his adventures around the galaxy and tells about his home planet, which has three volcanoes and one flower. In one point Antoine the Pilot in forgotten and the book concentrates in the Prince and his tales. He tells about happiness very metaphorically, which causes the hard-readiness. The plot isn’t really a big whoop in the story, because it really just tells us that the pilot crashes, becomes friends with the Prince, then repairing his engine and then the Prince leaves.
The language of the book. Oh gosh. I thought I was pretty good in English and understand words and know what they mean. I was terribly wrong. I know that this is very hard English but in almost every sentence was a word I couldn’t understand. But in the plus side my vocabulary increased. The pilot tells the story, which means that Antoine himself tells it and about his experiences. I don’t know how badly he was dehydrated, but a little prince appears from another planet? Quite amusing to me.
The reading experience was delightful, yet hard. As I said the were hard words and chapters but in the end I understood it. And even though the book was a big fat metaphore, I still enjoyed reading it.