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silverflight8) wrote2010-06-29 11:35 pm
silverflight8) wrote2010-06-29 11:35 pm
Le Petit Prince: Antoine de Saint-Exupery
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bookish .
I read this in French, but I'm afraid my French is too patchy to do the review. :) Not yet ready to risk the pitfalls of French grammar quite yet...
It's easy to dismiss this book as childish, really. The narrator starts off by describing his youth, when he tried to draw a boa constrictor swallowing an elephant, and being told by les grandes personnes--adults--that it was a hat. But it's inn that first chapter, the big theme of the book--the beautiful simplicity and naturalness of children--is shown.
Sometime in the future, after the narrator became a pilot, he crashed in the Sahara Desert, meeting a character named the little prince, the same prince the title alludes to. The little prince, as the back story shows, is from a tiny meteor where he can heat his breakfast on volcanoes and see the sunset forty-four times a day. He is tenacious and persists in asking questions, and at the same time is perfectly innocent. The first thing the narrator is greeted with is a small voice, asking him to "S'il vous plaît… dessine-moi un mouton…"--please draw me a sheep...
I'm sure I missed quite a lot out of this book, as I'm not very good with French. But Saint-Exupery shows, through what to a native speaker would be simple language, the sometimes nonsensical adult world to someone whose eyes see clearly. The follies of adults and the beauty of a single rose, the quick friendship between the little prince and the fox--they are laid out cleanly and plainly.
The punctuation threw me at first--instead of English's double quotations that close off speech, French uses guillemets, two of these << to indicate a whole conversation, with a dash and new line to indicate a new speaker. The "he said" part, though, runs right into the dialogue, separated only by a comma, which I found disorienting at first.
I'd recommend reading this in the original, French version; the translated English version, I've found, loses a lot of the charm and delight that the original has. 9/10
bookish .It's easy to dismiss this book as childish, really. The narrator starts off by describing his youth, when he tried to draw a boa constrictor swallowing an elephant, and being told by les grandes personnes--adults--that it was a hat. But it's inn that first chapter, the big theme of the book--the beautiful simplicity and naturalness of children--is shown.
Sometime in the future, after the narrator became a pilot, he crashed in the Sahara Desert, meeting a character named the little prince, the same prince the title alludes to. The little prince, as the back story shows, is from a tiny meteor where he can heat his breakfast on volcanoes and see the sunset forty-four times a day. He is tenacious and persists in asking questions, and at the same time is perfectly innocent. The first thing the narrator is greeted with is a small voice, asking him to "S'il vous plaît… dessine-moi un mouton…"--please draw me a sheep...
I'm sure I missed quite a lot out of this book, as I'm not very good with French. But Saint-Exupery shows, through what to a native speaker would be simple language, the sometimes nonsensical adult world to someone whose eyes see clearly. The follies of adults and the beauty of a single rose, the quick friendship between the little prince and the fox--they are laid out cleanly and plainly.
The punctuation threw me at first--instead of English's double quotations that close off speech, French uses guillemets, two of these << to indicate a whole conversation, with a dash and new line to indicate a new speaker. The "he said" part, though, runs right into the dialogue, separated only by a comma, which I found disorienting at first.
I'd recommend reading this in the original, French version; the translated English version, I've found, loses a lot of the charm and delight that the original has. 9/10