Le petit prince
Le Petit Prince est une œuvre de langue française, la plus connue d'Antoine de Saint-Exupéry. Publié en 1943 à New York simultanément à sa traduction anglaise, c'est une œuvre poétique et philosophique sous l'apparence d'un conte pour enfants. Traduit en quatre cent cinquante-sept langues et dialectes, Le Petit Prince est le deuxième ouvrage le plus traduit au monde après la Bible. Le langage, simple et dépouillé, parce qu'il est destiné à être compris par des enfants, est en réalité pour le narrateur le véhicule privilégié d'une conception symbolique de la vie. Chaque chapitre relate une rencontre du petit prince qui laisse celui-ci perplexe, par rapport aux comportements absurdes des « grandes personnes ». Ces différentes rencontres peuvent être lues comme une allégorie. Les aquarelles font partie du texte et participent à cette pureté du langage: dépouillement et profondeur sont les qualités maîtresses de l'œuvre. On peut y lire une invitation de l'auteur à retrouver l'enfant en soi, car « toutes les grandes personnes ont d'abord été des enfants. (Mais peu d'entre elles s'en souviennent.) ». L'ouvrage est dédié à Léon Werth, mais « quand il était petit garçon ». (Wikipedia)
Stats for nerds
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2014–2026years
50% recommend50% neutral
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What Hacker News says
- Yeah, re-reading it, that first post of mine could have been better. I don’t write that reading cotton-candy fiction is bad, but it could be read as implying it. It’s not bad, it’s just that it’s also not better than a bunch of other activities just because it’s reading. Most reading that happens (the optional reading, anyway) isn’t some lofty activity that’s a ton “better” than, say, watching TV. And that is ok.
> Then self-esteem is tied to that activity and now that by default means its more prestigous or intellectual or important or what have you.
I’m sure motivations vary, but I definitely get a sense of insecurity behind a lot of the “look at me, I’m a reader! You should be a reader too, reading makes you better!” stuff. Which, fine, whatever, but I’m sure there are a few folks out there who buy that messaging while not managing to get into reading for pleasure, and who feel bad about it, but they really shouldn’t. Can you truly expand your horizons and, maybe even, a little, become a better person through reading or whatever else it is that people suppose reading does that’s good for you? Yeah, I think so. I’d agree with that. I think I’ve gotten a lot of good out of many books I’ve read. Is that what most folks are up to most of the time they’re reading? LOL no. What’s got more viewers, the latest sublime, expertly crafted, dense, soul-scouring, literary-and-literate gem of a Cannes darling (“and this one’s really good, I swear, it’s not just award bait”), or the latest Marvel movie? How many who watch the latter will watch a single film this year that really demands their full attention and yields more and more good Zen food (if you will) the harder you interrogate it? Not many. Reading’s the same. Which is Ok!
> For what it's worth, I think a book can still be improving even if its written in simplistic language and grammer because a book has the ability to tell a story from another humans perspective. We all lack that ability and I think we all could use a bit more empathy in our lives.
One of my sins in this thread is that I’ve been sloppy with implying “hard-to-read language” means “good book”. To be clear, I definitely don’t think a book must be good if the language is complex or “elevated”, and I don’t think all good books have complex language. I do think some excellent books with complex or elevated language couldn’t be much simplified without doing them great violence—that they really needed the complexity, by which I don’t necessarily mean opaque Finnegan’s Wake stuff, but maybe just something a tad trickier than Goosebumps. What I do think is that really good books are usually harder to read, and harder to appreciate, in some sense, than the average airport novel, but that can be because a bunch of what they’re doing has to do with things many readers aren’t tuned-in to (theme, careful word choice that you’ll miss if you’re not reading closely, really subtle character work, that kind of thing), or because it assumes certain background reading has been done to get the full effect, or something of that sort—and maybe, but not necessarily, also because it includes sentences with multiple clauses, and more-than-rarely employs paragraphs longer than a quarter-page with little repetition or restatement of context, in which you’ll get lost if you’re used to skimming.
Meanwhile, I genuinely love a few picture books that can’t have more than a few hundred words each, and think they’re truly great. Can they do as much as a stompin’ big novel? Can they do the same things? Nah, but I mean hell, how many stuffy literature teachers have assigned Le Petit Prince? More than zero, and with good reason. I’ll gladly read Madeline solo, slowly, drinking in the words and pictures, and kinda meditate on life—that thing’s a whole mood. Good shit. Not everything with simple language is bad, and nothing’s bad just because the language is simple.
… and, just because this thread’s been a mess in part due to my sloppiness, the above is not intended as some exhaustive exploration of all the ways and for-whom a book might be either good or bad. I have not covered every corner of that topic, and I know it. :-)
- I learned more French from a day of trying to read Le Petit Prince in French, with the English translation beside, than I did from 3 months of Duolingo.
Rote learning just doesn't work that well for most people.
- All grown-ups were once children... but only few of them remember it.
- Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, "Le Petit Prince."
While I love de Saint-Exupéry generally, even in his time (especially?), he knew that not all children got to be children. Hell, I think even in his childhood, he never really got to be a child. The reason not many remember it is because for some, they really don't want to.
- Seems like the protection laws were enacted with the goal of ensuring access to books in small towns.
I've lived much of my life in small towns in the US, and honestly, the single best thing about Amazon is that it massively increased my access to books. Small-town bookstores never carried more than a handful of programming books, a couple of short shelves of science fiction, and none of the strange specialist material I buy today (books on purely functional data structures, bilingual French/hieroglyphic texts, and so on—everybody wants something out on the long tail, but the details obviously vary).
Right now, my least favorite thing about the French book market is the near-impossibility of buying French-language ebooks from overseas, assuming I want more than Le Petit Prince or a bunch of public domain classics. The only French publishing niche that has this figured out is long-form comics (aka bandes dessinées). There, the publishers banded together to create the massively awesome online distributor Izneo, which sucks up more of my book budget than I'd care to admit, and which allows me to buy from anywhere in the world: http://www.izneo.com/
On the other hand, the French tradition of aggressive law-making means that they can actually decide to create a 4-year startup visa, then go ahead and actually do it.
