Le Petit Prince, as the book is called in its original French, is a classic on the order of Pilgrim’s Progress and Das Kapital; it’s timeless and heartbreakingly beautiful. The author, Antoine de Saint Exupéry, used his experience, as a pilot who crashed in the desert and a witness to the general melancholy of midwar Europe, as fodder. The narrator is also a pilot who has crashed in the desert and despairs of being rescued. The way he describes the desert is particularly apt, and gave me the sense he wasn’t talking about the desert. Lines like:

“What makes the desert beautiful,” said the little prince, “is that somewhere it hides a well”

show the little prince’s wisdom. This scene with the fox particularly resonates with me. The fox begins:

“It is the time you have wasted for your rose that makes your rose so important.”

“It is the time I have wasted for my rose—” said the little prince so he would be sure to remember.

“Men have forgotten this truth,” said the fox. “But you must not forget it. You become responsible, forever, for what you have tamed. You are responsible for your rose…”

Exupéry was a thoughtful, quiet man. I’m looking forward to reading his autobiography, Wind, Sand and Stars, which I found in a thrift store for 50 cents. It’s waiting on my shelf for me to finish the other stacks.

His pen and ink illustrations are excellent as well, and add to the journal-ish feel, as well as contributing to the characterization of both the narrator and the prince. The scene in which we meet the prince uses the drawings brilliantly; it even uses their self-admittedly poor quality. All of the comments on imagination and faith the narrator has been making focus down on the prince in that moment, though he is completely unaware of his heightened state of enlightenment.

The best sections of the book were the cumulative expressions of the love the narrator had for the prince, and Exupéry’s explication of loneliness, loss, and innocence. Passages like this one foreshadow heavily:

“Whomever I touch, I send back to the earth from whence he came,” the snake spoke again. “But you are innocent and true, and you come from a star . . .”

The little prince made no reply.

“You move me to pity—you are so weak on this Earth made of granite,” the snake said. “I can help you, some day, if you grow too homesick for your own planet. I can—”

“Oh! I understand you very well,” said the little prince. “But why do you always speak in riddles?”

“I solve them all,” said the snake.

And they were both silent.

The bittersweetness of friendship and loss runs through the book—the prince and his tamed fox, for instance, and of course the narrator and the prince. The little prince’s grave and chidish wisdom made me love him as much as the narrator does. It’s a touching book, profoundly sad and pure. You can read it for free online.

A word on the art: it’s fantastic. The pen and watercolor is full of texture and character: rust and clammy skin crusted with sewer grime and thin, tickling hairs abound. Everyone’s hands, even the children’s, are arthritic; their fingers are long and bent, with swollen, red knuckles. Chilling. The beasts in the water and on the slips of land and platform are all unique but they share the an underlying malignancy which somehow manages to seem also playful. Nothing is quite serious, but then again, these things lurking under the water have shifty eyes and long arms… It gives off the feeling one can be scared and enjoy it.

The Dangerous Alphabet had less story in the words than I was expecting. I don’t know why I expected that, since Neil Gaiman said as much in his blog. There’s certainly no “and then Jack did this, then that, and finally killed a giant.” The words push the story along, but they don’t dominate. As Neil Gaiman says, the story happens mostly in the reader’s head.

A good example of the art taking over for the text: the page for ‘I’ reads, “I am the author who scratches these rhymes,” and shows an illustration of an ancient man in robes, wearing a far-reaching, almost sentient beard. He’s chained to the wall, ceiling, and an iron ball, and he’s writing with a quill. That phrase, “I am the author…” is fairly uninspiring without the image, but with it conveys quite a bit about the nature of story creation. The rest of the illustrations are like that, to one degree or another.

Browse the first few pages of the book at the HarperCollins site to see what I mean. I think you’ll say along with me, “Are those hairy eyes in the water?”