3 best books by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

Antoine de Saint Exupery it is a very singular case of literature. Author and adventurer filled with a fascinating legend behind him. Aviation lover and builder of high-flying stories, halfway between his forays into the sky and the fantasies of the boy who watches the clouds.

Disappeared on July 31, 1944 aboard his plane left a literary legacy definitely marked by The Little Prince. The images, symbols and metaphors of this universal literary gem have given and do give a lot. Children who are new to reading thanks to that little prince who jumps from planet to planet. Adults who rethink the world at times while rereading the pages of this great work. It all starts with a hat that is not such, but rather a snake that has swallowed an elephant in one bite. When you are able to see it, you can start reading ...

The best edition of this masterpiece came out in celebration of its 50th anniversary. Here below you can get it in its cardboard and cloth box, with the first pages of the manuscript and original drawings by Saint ExupĂšry. Reading it like this must be a real wonder...

The little Prince. 50th anniversary special edition.

But there is more to Saint Exupery. The pity is that expectations always fall short after reading The Little Prince. But then comes the legend of the downed pilot, killed in combat. And it goes without saying that this was his destiny and the rest of his work takes on new energy with the myth.

Antoine already had a first encounter with death when he fell years ago with his plane in the middle of the desert ... On the first occasion, between delusions of heat and thirst, The Little Prince was born. But there are usually no second chances, nor could The Little Prince have a second part ...

So read Saint-Exupéry always has a differential background, that of reading someone special, a kind of writer to whom someone from heaven passed his stories, until he finally took it away ...

3 recommended books by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

The Little Prince

Book of books, key between childhood and maturity. Leaves and words as spells towards innocence and, paradoxically, towards wisdom. The happiness of discovering the world without fear, knowing you are the little prince of your destiny, with no other intention than to learn everything from everything you find. A fantastic path to the wisdom that time is what it is. We cannot buy time or happiness.

We cannot buy ANYTHING. We can only learn to be always restless, critical, to have an open attitude to discover that the magic is in undoing our preconceptions, our prejudices and all those towers that we build in maturity ...

Summary: The little prince lives on a small planet, the asteroid B 612, in which there are three volcanoes (two of them active and one not) and a rose. He spends his days taking care of his planet, and clearing the baobab trees that constantly try to take root there. If allowed to grow, the trees would tear your planet to pieces.

One day he decides to leave his planet, perhaps tired of the reproaches and claims of the rose, to explore other worlds. Take advantage of a migration of birds to start your journey and travel the universe; This is how he visits six planets, each of them inhabited by a character: a king, a vain man, a drunkard, a businessman, a lamplighter and a geographer, all of whom, in their own way, demonstrate how empty the cities become. people when they become adults.

The last character he meets, the geographer, recommends that he travel to a specific planet, Earth, where among other experiences he ends up meeting the aviator who, we have already mentioned, was lost in the desert.

Land of men

And what I expected happened. When I read this second favorite book of the author, I felt again that unspeakable frustration of what was not going to be. Land of men was not going to be a new fantasy like a life journey ...

But I kept reading, forgetting what I longed for, and I discovered an interesting story in which to meet the only lucky man who found the Little Prince in a delirium in the desert. Summary: One day in February 1938, the plane piloted by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry and his friend André Prévot took off from New York for Tierra del Fuego.

Loaded with excess fuel, the aircraft crashes at the end of the runway. After five days of coma and while convalescing from the terrible accident, Saint-Exupéry writes "Land of Men" with the perspective of someone who contemplates the world from the solitude of an airplane cabin. He writes with the nostalgia of a happy and lost childhood, he writes to evoke the difficult learning of the profession of aviator, to pay homage to comrades Mermoz and Guillaumet, to show the Earth from a bird's eye view, to relive the accident suffered with Prévot or to reveal the secrets of the desert.

But, what he really wants to tell us is that living is venturing to seek the mystery hidden behind the surface of things, the possibility of finding the truth within oneself and the urgency to learn to love, the only way to survive this. dehumanized universe. "Land of Men" was published in February 1939 and in the autumn of that same year it was awarded the Grand Prize of the French Academy and the National Book Award in the United States.

Letter to a hostage

Yes, why not remember it. Antoine de Saint Exupéry was a war pilot. It is not a question of the holy man but of the soldier ready to bomb a city. Paradoxical right?

Summary: Letter to a hostage born from a prologue to a work by Leon Werth, To who Saint Exupéry dedicated The little Prince. Later, the references to this Jewish friend disappear, to avoid anti-Semitic suspicions, and Léon Werth becomes "the hostage", the universal and anonymous human being capable of recognizing the other through an instantaneous gesture, common with him. enemy, and of turning him into a traveler on the same adventure of living.

By sharing a cigarette, the hostage and his captor open the floodgate that kept them fixed in their roles: it is time to discover mutual humanity, to destroy a new twinning in the future.

Letter to a hostage
4.9/5 - (12 votes)

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