Book Tamers| book reviews

Some teenage friends saw me reading this particular book and they smiled at me with that ironic sprinkle in their eyes. „We have read that when we were young. Why wasting time on this”?  How could I explain them that a beautiful book never wastes one’s time. Or that this reader quality takes you out of the body’s traps and the flat reality dimension.
These friends have become grown-ups mentally. They have reached a point where they valued things on their price and dimension. Grown-ups love other type of books, the wrestling-type: The big Prince, Gorgon-eyed. The Oil Prince, the Wall Street King, the lord of the dance.

But there are things outside size. There is a place that allows our existence, the others’ existence, without self-proclaimed earthly kingdoms, without pride in the battle flag. A place where we can place Socrates, the philosopher who never wrote a book back in the Antiquity, and also Saint-Exupery. It’s not the size, but the nature of things that seem to have a real price. Why are they like that and what do they mean? That’s what Socrates searched for in the Athens’ agora many centuries ago. That’s what Saint Exupery is looking for in this parable of the little prince. The sound of things. The melody of beings. Their mystery. The beauty.

Socrates went to a merchant without caring if he was the greatest. For he was not a merchant or he rarely was one, he understood the one in front of him as a bearer of the merchant idea. But don’t we buy and sell all our lives? Don’t we try to embellish, sometimes artificially, our own things? Isn’t there any competition? Isn’t the merchant the one that can give us an image of the way these kind of relationships work in their natural habitat- the economical one- for us to understand their intrusion in our soul? And especially, asked Socrates, what is to be a merchant, king of Wall Street? How does it compete with life’s most important things, like the good, the beauty, the truth?
Facing cynical answers like the one that a merchant is beyond morality, he would shrug his shoulders and keep looking for somebody else to talk to. He was looking for that particular merchant who understood that talking about the nature of things is not a simple babbling, but a way of exploring one’s deepest abyss. It was a way of knowing oneself.

Thus, in the middle of the XX-th century, Saint-Exupery, the aviator, presents the Little Prince as a Socratic parable. He has the same curiosity when he looks for significations and symbols both in humans and in things. He tells us that each human being has a planet of his own, and that this planet embellishes or it is disfigured by the person’s behavior and nature. He also tells us that we live in a major illusion that makes us incredibly static. One imagines he’s a king but he has no servants. Another one is ready to lethally bite any other living being. One thinks that the meaning of people on Earth is to admire him. Some are slaves - like the Little Prince - of a beauty’s vanities.

That’s why sometimes, a journey is important for shaking the shackles’ rustiness from the realistic monotony of a “grown-up”. That’s why the two characters, the aviator and the Little Prince, are in their own way travelers that fell together in the same desert for a few days. The aviator is terrified by the perspective of his imminent death, his plane crashed in an isolated place, and the Little Prince is sad because his planet is full of baobabs and tyrannized by flowers. The things on his planet are not in the right order, and that’s why he visits other planets - to see something different, maybe something better.

Before I go any further, I should explain my own reaction. I could have joined my friends in irony if I had seen the book in somebody else’s hands. The beginning of the book gave me the impression of a fairytale in which a man in need creates himself an illusion to help him survive in the desert. But fiction will acquire during the deployment of the plot many other sentimental colors than an adult couldn’t possibly see, and the disappearance or the death of the Little Prince has a tragic, apotheosis tone. However, he didn’t even exist. But still, he exists beyond reality, there, on his planet and somewhere on everybody’s planet. It’s an intensity moment from childhood. From our eternal childhood.
What is childhood anyway? We ask this as Socrates does a child. No, not the greatest child, the king child. No. Just a regular kid. And we may receive the answer that in childhood we must remember about dreams and games. But does what we imagined start to make room into reality? And what are games but a repeated try to solve society’s puzzles?
That’s childhood in the Little Prince. He plays with curiosity and learns something from every encounter. It is everything he can take back to his planet, it’s everything that the aviator gets from him. Mirrors of the human abyss.

Here’s what a fox teaches him: that people need rituals and that they appreciate realities that can be tamed, like being cared for, raised and helped by the people around him. A snake shows him that among people one can feel alone, and a geographer reveals to him that beautiful things needn’t be on a map for they are ephemeral.

Why were those young people sarcastic with me? How many topics, similar to this story, could they have discussed? I feel for the first time the need to go back to this book and read it again because I was so touched by the little prince’s disappearance. But this time, in French, where I will definitely find delicacies that can’t be translate.

I would like to add something about Saint Exupery’s technique. It is close to Jacques Prevert’s simple attitude, it has a clear modern manner, it uses cinematographic procedures like moving away and foreground, it has no real background but who cares, really? I can’t really wait for the aviator’ engine to break down again. The Little Prince will show up asking for a sheep to be drawn and will drift away all my anxieties with his starry smile.

Written by Gabriel