Le petit prince

 A few months ago, I found myself constantly struggling in my French lessons. So, I challenged myself to start reading books in French, and quite predictably, I started with Le petit prince. Completing this in French was something I kept putting off, but this week I finally sat down, with the translator tab open and completed the book. 

Le Petit Prince was written by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry. It is quite a short book (around 100 pages). A one-line synopsis would be:

The story of how our narrator ( a pilot) crash-lands onto the Saharan desert and meets a strange little boy (the little prince) who is from another planet. 

The little prince has journeyed across many plants before landing on Earth. As the story unfurls, we learn about the different asteroids and the adults on each of these planets. All the grown-ups in the story are portrayed as superficial and self-absorbed. We meet a grown-up who believes he is a king, a drunkard, a vain man who only cares for admiration, and a geographer. The little prince narrates his stories to the narrator, who narrates them to us!

On a surface level, this book holds a child-like superficiality. To completely understand Saint-Exupéry's brilliance, one must read between the lines. I loved the way the author presented how obsessed we as a society are with one-dimensional ideals. For example, one of the characters the little prince encounters is a businessman, who is constantly counting stars. He is so engrossed in his task that he hardly looks up when the little prince arrives. When the little prince asks why he says that he is keeping count of all the stars he owns. He counts them and puts them in a bank. When asked about what he is planning to do with all this money in the bank, he says it's to buy more stars. I thought this was a wonderful commentary on how most people waste their lives away constantly working at a job that is collecting one star after the next, without thinking about why, or whether they are satisfied. 

It is a great short read, and I definitely recommend it!