Salinger-whose great post-war story, вЂњFor EsmГ©-with Love and SqualorвЂќ shows us moral breakdown eased only by the speech of a lucid child-to his contemporary Albert Camus, who also took from the war the need to engage in a perpetual battle вЂњbetween each manвЂ™s happiness and the illness of abstraction,вЂќ meaning the act of distancing real emotion from normal life. In this enterprise, he sang in unconscious harmony with the other great poets of the warвЂ™s loss, from J. Saint-ExupГ©ryвЂ™s sense of shame and confusion at the devastation led him to make a fable of abstract ideas set against specific loves. But the вЂњPetit PrinceвЂќ is a war story in a very literal sense, too-everything about its making has to do not just with the onset of war but with the вЂњstrange defeatвЂќ of France, with the experience of Vichy and the Occupation.

Not an allegory of war, rather, a fable of it, in which the central emotions of conflict-isolation, fear, and uncertainty-are alleviated only by intimate speech and love. It took many years-and many readings-for this reader to begin to understand that the book is a war story. He is instructed by a wise if cautious fox, and by a sinister angel of death, the snake. The rose has made him so miserable that, in torment, he has taken advantage of a flock of birds to convey him to other planets. But we are no closer to penetrating the central riddle: What is вЂњThe Little PrinceвЂќ about?Д®veryone knows the basic bones of the story: an aviator, downed in the desert and facing long odds of survival, encounters a strange young person, neither man nor really boy, who, it emerges over time, has travelled from his solitary home on a distant asteroid, where he lives alone with a single rose. This year marks an efflorescence of attention, including a full-scale exhibition of Saint-ExupГ©ryвЂ™s original artwork at the Morgan Library & Museum, in New York. But it has altered the conclusion without really changing the point. Over time, the suffrage of readers has altered that conclusion, of course: a classic is a classic.

The little prince boa constrictor