Nabil Abou Hamad Tracks Down the ‘Little Prince’, Who Has Become an Old Man

Book Reviews

February 1st, 12:44pm

London - Asharq Al-Awsat

Nabil Abou Hamad Tracks Down the ‘Little Prince’, Who Has Become an Old Man

The Arab Scientific Publishers publishing house has released a book entitled “The Little Prince’s Old Age- Text and Watercolor Illustrations”. Written by Nabil Abou Hamad, the pocketbook is 81 pages long and includes many watercolor illustrations that accompany the text, which is based on the short 1942 novel “The Little Prince,” written by Antoine de Saint-Exupery while he was living in exile in New York, where he fled after the Nazi occupation of France. “The Little Prince” is widely considered to be a 20th Century classic, and since its publication, more than 80 million copies of the book have been sold and it has been translated into various languages. The story begins with a boy who draws an image depicting a snake swallowing an elephant. The drawing becomes real, and the snake swallows the elephant completely, so the hero quits drawing and becomes a pilot. However, his plane crashes in the desert, and he finds himself in the company of a little prince. During the eight days in which the narrator is trapped in the Sahara Desert, as the narrator tries to repair his plane, the Little Prince recounts to him the story of his and his love for a rose that started growing on the surface of an asteroid a short time before. In the original, the Little Prince disappears inexplicably, while in Abou Hamad’s book, the spaceship that Raed - the new story’s protagonist - was flying crashed into a solid object after the computer’s GPS malfunctions. It collided with one of the many small bodies that orbit around the sun. Sometime later, he finds himself face to face with the Little Prince, who has become an old man and is surrounded by alien creatures. On the back of the book the publisher writes: “Has the Little Prince really become an old man? Does the earth’s logic apply to him? What different ideas, axioms and innovations does this small being reveal? The Little Prince’s Old-Age, with its uniqueness and insights, is an adventure worth the time of young readers and adults.”

from Asharq AL-awsat https://english.aawsat.com/home/article/2778346/nabil-abou-hamad-tracks-down-%E2%80%98little-prince%E2%80%99-who-has-become-old-man