BOOK 196: THE LITTLE PRINCE: ANTOINE DE SAINT-EXUPÉRY

BOOK 196: THE LITTLE PRINCE: ANTOINE DE SAINT-EXUPÉRY

The novella has been voted the best book of the 20th century in France. Translated into 300 languages and dialects, selling nearly two million copies annually, and with year-to-date sales of over 140 million copies worldwide,it has become one of the best-selling and most translated books ever published.

Since its first publication, the novella has been adapted to numerous art forms and media, including audio recordings, radio plays, live stage, film, television, ballet, and opera.

Though ostensibly styled as a children's book, The Little Prince makes several observations about life and human nature. For example, Saint-Exupéry tells of a fox meeting the young prince during his travels on Earth. The story's essence is contained in the fox saying that "One sees clearly only with the heart. The essential is invisible to the eye." Other key morals articulated by the fox are: "You become responsible, forever, for what you have tamed," and "It is the time you have lost for your rose that makes your rose so important." The fox's messages are arguably the book's most famous quotations because they deal with human relationships.

In The Little Prince, its narrator, the pilot, talks of being stranded in the desert beside his crashed aircraft. The account clearly drew on Saint-Exupéry's own experience in the Sahara, an ordeal described in detail in his 1939 memoir Wind, Sand and Stars(original French: Terre des hommes).

TRIVIA:  The B612 Foundation is a private foundation created to track Near-Earth objectsthat might pose a threat to Earth, and is dedicated to protecting the planet from asteroid strikes, similar to the Tunguska event of 1908. The private foundationwas founded by a group of U.S. scientists and astronauts, including Clark Chapman, Piet Hut, Rusty Schweickart and Ed Lu in October 2002. The non-profit organization is named in honour of the prince's home asteroid.

An asteroid discovered in 1975, 2578 Saint-Exupéry, was also named after the author of The Little Prince.

http://www.hotelclub.com/blog/idioms-of-the-world-infographic/

BOOK 115: INVITATION TO A BEHEADING: VLADIMIR NABOKOV

Invitation to a Beheading is a novel by Russian American author Vladimir Nabokov. It was originally published in Russian in 1935-1936 as a serial in Contemporary Notes (Sovremennye zapiski), a highly respected Russian émigré magazine. In 1938 the work was published in Paris, with an English translation following in 1959. The English version was translated by Nabokov's son, Dmitri Nabokov, under the author's supervision.

The novel is often described as "Kafkaesque," but Nabokov claimed that at the time he wrote the book, he was unfamiliar with German and "completely ignorant" of Kafka's work. Nabokov interrupted his work on The Gift in order to write Invitation, describing the creation of the first draft as "one fortnight of wonderful excitement and sustained inspiration." Some scholars have argued that the central plot of Invitation has its roots in Chernyshevski, a character from The Gift.

While Nabokov stated in an interview that of all his novels he held the greatest affection for Lolita, it was Invitation to a Beheading that he held in the greatest esteem.

MY VERDICT: I found this book a little hard to read.  It seemed lacking in something to me and I feel like it could be the fault of the translation.  I know Nabokov to be an astounding writer and Lolita is proof of this but there seemed to be something less tangible, easy to grasp, in this novel.  I didn’t dislike it completely, there were still little hints of the unique visual descriptions that I admire Nabokov for, but they are a few precious jewels in an otherwise hard to look at scene.  This is just my opinion, some believe it’s a great book maybe even his best.  Lolita will always be the one for me.  I think it’s because Humbert Humbert is so human and Cinncinnatus (the protagonist in this novel) is almost the very opposite, he is indifferent and wholly unlikeable (which seems to be why he ended up in prison in the first place) but I didn’t really care for him and so I was not particularly concerned about the outcome of the book.

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