Book Report: The Little Prince

22. Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince: Deluxe Pop-Up Book, translated by Richard Howard (2009) (8/27/18)

Believe it or not, I never read The Little Prince until I was recently loaned a pop-up version. This even though I actually own copies in English, French, German, and Japanese. I know the first illustration of the hat—I mean, the boa that's swallowed an elephant—intimately, because the first chapter is about as far as I ever got. Several times over the years. I don't know why I never progressed further. It's a lovely book, with lovely illustrations—all by Saint-Exupéry himself.

You, of course, know the book: I'm probably the last person on the planet not to have read it, or to have had it read to me. The crashed aviator in the middle of the Sahara; the delicate little prince who visited six planets—inhabited, respectively, by a king, a very vain man, a drunkard, a businessman, a lamplighter, and a geographer (after my own heart!)—on his way to Earth, where he hoped to learn how to take care of a perfidious, proud flower on his tiny home planet, which also boasts three knee-high volcanoes, one of them extinct. On Earth, he first meets a snake, "more powerful than a king's finger," and a fox, who teaches him about belonging.

I love the fox the best. "Please . . . tame me!" he says. The prince says he'd like to, but he doesn't have much time: he's got friends to find, so much to learn.

"The only things you learn are the things you tame," said the fox. "People haven't time to learn anything. They buy things ready-made in stores. But since there are no stores where you can buy friends, people no longer have friends. If you want a friend, tame me!"
 "What do I have to do?" asked the little prince.
 "You have to be very patient," the fox answered. "First you'll sit down a little ways away from me, over there, in the grass. I'll watch you out of the corner of my eye, and you won't say anything. Language is the source of misunderstandings. But day by day, you'll be able to sit a little closer . . ."
 The next day the little prince returned.
 "It would have been better to return at the same time," the fox said. "For instance, if you come at four in the afternoon, I'll begin to be happy by three. The closer it gets to four, the happier I'll feel. By four I'll be all excited and worried; I'll discover what it costs to be happy! But if you come at any old time, I'll never know when I should prepare my heart . . . There must be rites."
 "What's a rite?" asked the little prince.
 "That's another thing that's too often neglected," said the fox. "It's the fact that one day is different from the other days, one hour from the other hours. My hunters, for example, have a rite. They dance with the village girls on Thursdays. So Thursday's a wonderful day: I can stroll all the way to the vineyards. If the hungers danced whenever they chose, the days would all be just alike, and I'd have no holiday at all."

The prince eventually takes leave of the fox, who has promised him a secret: "It's quite simple," he says. "One sees clearly only with the heart. Anything essential is invisible to the eyes. . . . People have forgotten this truth. But you mustn't forget it. You become responsible forever for what you've tamed."

It's a bittersweet little book, because it's about connecting and losing, but it teaches us to look into the heavens, knowing that the little prince—who could stand in for everyone we've ever known and loved and lost—is up there on his little planet taking care of his little rose (unless the sheep ate it—but let's not go there, because that's a whole other subplot . . . that actually sweetly ends the book, so perhaps you'll just have to reread it if you've forgotten how).

Here's a teaser from the publisher about the pop-up book itself:

Book Report: Less

21. Andrew Sean Greer, Less (2017) (8/25/18)

Ann Patchett, on the cover of the paperback, recommends Less with her whole heart—and I do too. Though a quick glance at Goodreads suggests that not everyone is as enamored as I was of this bumbling, clumsy, rather clueless, but ultimately (I'd say) lovable protagonist. I'm glad I was. I really enjoyed this book.

The story is something of an international road trip as Arthur Less, seeking to flee the country as the wedding of his younger lover of nine years—to another man—approaches. He is also about to turn fifty, which is giving him conniptions. So he accepts various invitations: he will conduct an interview with a well-known writer in New York; participate in a conference in Mexico City centered on his former lover, a well-known poet of the bohemian "Russian River School"; attend an awards ceremony in Turin (an older book of his, recently translated into Italian, is among those nominated); teach a writing class in Berlin for three weeks; indulge in a trek across Morocco, invited by a friend to fill an empty spot on a trip organized by another birthday celebrant whom he does not know (it is there he will turn fifty); engage in a writing retreat in Kerala, India; and finally, spend two days in Kyoto, where he will review kaiseki cuisine for an in-flight magazine (this last an opportunity won in a poker game).

Of course, none of these experiences goes as planned. Misfortunes, embarrassments, and disappointments galore arise. But along the way Less learns some things—about letting go, about enjoying what he has, about humor and wisdom, survival and grace.

I found the writing wonderful. Sometimes laugh-out-loud funny, always with fresh turns of phrase, and with wonderful observation, both external and internal. Here are a few samples:

What had Freddy meant, "the bravest person I know"? For Less, it is a mystery. Name a day, name an hour, in which Arthur Less was not afraid. Of ordering a cocktail, taking a taxi, teaching a class, writing a book. Afraid of these and almost everything else in the world. Strange, though; because he is afraid of everything, nothing is harder than anything else. Taking a trip around the world is no more terrifying than buying a stick of gum. The daily dose of courage.

And at the Italian awards ceremony:

The only speaker is a handsome Italian . . . whose appearance on the podium is announced by a crack of thunder; the sounds goes out on his microphone; the lights go out. The audience goes "Aaaah!" Less hears the young writer, seated beside him in the darkness, lean over and speak to him at last: "This is when someone is murdered. But who?" Less whispers "Fosters Lancett" before realizing the famous Brit is seated just behind them.
 The lights awake the room again, and no one has been murdered. A movie screen begins to unroll noisily from the ceiling like a mad relative wandering downstairs and has to be sent back into hiding. The ceremony begins again, and as the mayor begins his speech in Italian, those mellifluous, seesawing, meaningless harpsichord words, Less feels his mind drifting away like a spaceman from an airlock, off into the asteroid belt of his own concerns. For he does not belong here. It seemed absurd when he got the invitation, but he saw it so abstractly, and at such a remote distance in time and space, that he accepted it as part of his getaway plan. But here, in his suit, sweat already beginning to dot the front of his white shirt and bead on his thinning hairline, he knows it is utterly wrong. . . . For he has come to understand this is not a strange funny Italian prize, a joke to tell his friends; it is very real. The elderly judges in their jewelry; the teens in their jury box; the finalists all quivering and angry with expectation; even Fosters Lancett, who has come all this way, and written a long speech, and charged his electronic cigarette and his dwindling battery of small talk—it is very real, very important to them. It cannot be dismissed as a lark. Instead: it is a vast mistake.
 Less begins to imagine (as the mayor doodles on in Italian) that he has been mistranslated, or—what is the word—super-translated, his novel given to an unacknowledged genius of a poet (Giuliana Monti is her name) who worked his mediocre English into breathtaking Italian. His book was ignored in America, barely reviewed, without a single interview request by a journalist (his publicist said, "Autumn is a bad time"), but here in Italy he understands he is taken seriously. In autumn, no less. . . . How has it come to this? What god has enough free time to arrange this very special humiliation, to fly a minor novelist across the world so that he can feel, in some seventh sense, the minusculitude of his own worth? Decided by high school students, in fact. Is there a bucket of blood hanging high in the auditorium rafters, waiting to be dropped on his bright-blue suit? Will this become a dungeon at last? It is a mistake, or a setup, or both. But there is no escaping it now

Spoiler: Less wins the prize. But more than that, he makes some first steps in confronting his own talent and ambition, even as he continues to obsess on love—which is another theme of this book, along with time. In Morocco, with the woman who's celebrating her fiftieth a day before him (which he ends up celebrating alone, for various reasons), there's this:

Zohra's voice comes loudly from her camel: "Shut the fuck up! Enjoy the fucking sunset on your fucking camels! Jesus!"
 It is, after all, almost a miracle they are here. Not because they've survived the booze, the hashish, the migraines. Not that at all. It's that they've survived everything in life, humiliations and disappointments and heartaches and missed opportunities, bad dads and bad jobs and bad sex and bad drugs, all the trips and mistakes and face-plants of life, to have made it to fifty and to have made it here: to this frosted-cake landscape, these mountains of gold, the little table they can now see sitting on the dune, set with olives and pita and glasses and wine chilling on ice, with the sun waiting more patiently than any camel for their arrival. So, yes. As with almost every sunset, but with this one in particular: shut the fuck up. 

I flagged a lot of passages and could go on. But what I most enjoyed about this book was the heart: the humor and the heart. Late in the book, his lover's father (who has never liked Less), while explaining that he's always thought that people's lives are split in two, either tragedy followed by comedy, or the reverse—and he'd always considered Less in the reverse category—tells him:

"Arthur, I['ve] changed my mind. You have the luck of a comedian. Bad luck in things that don't matter. Good luck in things that do. I think—you probably won't agree with this—but I think your whole life is a comedy. Not just the first part. The whole thing. You are the most absurd person I've ever met. You've bumbled through every moment and been a fool; you've misunderstood and misspoken and tripped over absolutely everything and everyone in your path, and you've won. And you don't even realize it."
 "Carlos." He doesn't feel victorious; he feels defeated. "My life, my life over the past year—"
 "Arthur Less," Carlos interrupts, shaking his head. "You have the best life of anyone I know."
 This is nonsense to Less.

I came away from this book feeling uplifted and even a little full of resolve myself, to pay better attention, to appreciate my own life more, to look harder for the humor and absurdity in things. I found it celebratory.

Midcentury Modern: Alvin Lustig

The book I'm working on is about UPA
(United Productions of America),
an animation studio active from the
1940s through the 1970s (think
Mr. Magoo). Alvin Lustig designed
their logo, shown here—with
cartoon characters added.

I have been working lately, so not reading—so no book reports. But this blog was whispering to me, "Isn't there something you want to say or share?" And then, in the work, I stumbled on a reference to one Alvin Lustig, well known in the mid–twentieth century for a series of book covers he created for New Directions' "New Classics" series (1941–52). They epitomize midcentury modernism. I thought I'd share a few here.

But first: what is midcentury modernism? To quote Creative Bloq, it is "a practical, clean-lined design movement spanning architecture, interior design, furniture, product and graphic design created during the middle of the 20th century. The exact dates are open to debate: some place mid-century modernism between 1933 and 1965, while others claim the time period was smaller—from 1947 to 1957." The design aesthetic is marked by "clean, sculptural lines, simple, organic shapes and neat proportions, as well as vibrant colour palettes—an evolution of earlier Modernist styles such as Bauhaus." See this page for 15 iconic examples of the style. You'll recognize them.

And here is "A Mid-Century Modern Primer for Graphic Designers," focusing on the qualities of color, shapes, typography, and use of space that practitioners of the style manipulated to arrive at their signature designs.

And now, here's Mr. Lustig (who curiously is not listed in the above "Primer" as a designer to study to learn more about the style). As the author of the book I'm working on puts it, "Lustig’s trademark, particularly on display in his book covers, was his ability to assess a large body of information and to distill it into a representation that was stark, simple, and arresting." See for yourself.