The Elegance of the Hedgehog
by Muriel Barbery
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Book Summary Information
Author: Muriel BarberyTranslator: Alison Anderson
Edition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2008-09-02
ISBN: 1933372605
Number of pages: 336
Publisher: Europa Editions
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- Condition: Like New
Book Reviews of The Elegance of the Hedgehog
Book Review: Hedgehog's Dilemma
Summary: 4 Stars
This book may not be quite as good as its most fervent admirers claim --they do get a bit hyperbolic --but it hardly merits the scorn heaped on it by its most censorious detractors. I think a few of the former and most of the latter have misread it. And in some ways it invites misreading.
As a few reviewers have already noted, the use of first-person narratives seems to lead some readers astray. They may regard the fictional narrators as the author's mouthpieces, blaming her for her characters' failings. Or the misreading may be more subtle. Recognizing the author's sympathy for the fictional narrators, readers may conclude that she must be endorsing all their views and attitudes. So they criticize her for that.
But reliance on first-person narratives courts an even more basic risk. The narrators control access to the story, and if we don't like them we probably won't like the book. If we decide the middle-aged concierge and the 12-year-old rich girl are insufferable egotists who judge others without pity, fossilized in their self-righteousness and basking in their intelligence and erudition... we may lose patience with them and with anything they have to say. Yet that reaction itself entails a hard-hearted censoriousness. We need patience and empathy if we are to understand these prickly, sensitive, and insecure characters --characters some of us also find brave and likable.
Right, prickly. There's more than elegance to a hedgehog, as Paloma notes in comparing Renée to that creature. Moreover, Paloma herself has a full complement of quills. Yet each of them does also have a "simple refinement," humor, sensitivity to unexpected moments of joy, and an inner beauty that the quills may obscure from view.
I think this book is, as much as anything else, a kind of extended midrash on Schopenhauer's parable about the hedgehog's (originally the porcupine's) dilemma. The prickly creatures can share body heat by getting together, but the closeness exacts a price, the pain inflicted by their quills. This can be taken as a metaphor for the benefits and drawbacks of intimacy. (Barbery admittedly makes no direct reference to this. But it's hard for me to believe that this philosophy professor would not have had this famous parable in mind, choosing her title and developing her story as she did.)
It is fear that keeps both Renée and Paloma from accepting the risks of intimacy. They keep others at a distance and take comfort in soliloquies. Of course they pay a price. Each of them comes to recognize that and each eventually changes the way she relates to other people. Recognition and change come in stages, leading up to the book's climax.
Meantime, philosophical ramblings and witty dissection of others' foibles are ways of keeping desperation at bay and are well suited to the narrators' introspective habits. (This makes for a fairly talky book, and that likely accounts for some of the divergent opinions about it, which must in part reflect differences in personal taste.) Notice how each of the narrators reviews mentally several possible responses to a situation (and notice the undercurrent of self-mockery that subverts any suggestion of smug self-satisfaction). Both are thoughtful and deliberate, at times too much so for their own good --yet they find that yielding to impulses can have unfortunate results. (Ah, to be like Paloma's classmate Marguerite, with her knack for unhesitating on-target comebacks!) And both enjoy the beauties and oddities of language, as Barbery herself evidently does.
[WARNING to anyone who's read this far. If you haven't yet read the book but plan to do so, and you have not learned from other reviews how the story turns out, be aware that some of the final events will be mentioned in the paragraphs that follow.]
It's not just that Barbery has her narrators go on, sometimes at length, about grammar, vocabulary, and style. She even invites our interest in the names of her characters, though she may leave us guessing.
Thus, the name of Paloma's older sister, Colombe, is introduced very early and used repeatedly. Moreover, Barbery calls attention to its meaning: Colombe makes a crack about Marguerite's name and the latter replies that at least it's not a bird's name (that's lost in the English translation, where Alison Anderson substitutes word play about the name Christophe Colombe --more about the translation later). In contrast, we don't learn Paloma's name until we reach the last section of the book. We may then notice that the name, like her sister's, means "dove." So what's going on here? Why play keep-away with the younger sister's name? Why did the Josses name both girls after the same kind of bird? What (if anything) does this say about what the sisters have in common and how they differ? Or is Barbery just putting us on? Some readers, at least, will wonder.
The concierge's name presents no such mystery. She and her siblings were all named after dead relatives; and she thinks of her childhood, lived in abject poverty, as belonging to a world of the dead. But her name is Renée: "reborn." Her first rebirth (her first true birth, according to her) takes place when she is five and her teacher calls her by name. (Her parents rarely used their children's names, and Renée wonders if they even remembered them.) Much later, her friendship with Ozu opens up a new life. But an old fear returns as she recalls her older sister: beautiful but poor, she died (it seemed) for thinking her beauty could raise her above her station. Renée, only a child at that time, decided she would not make that kind of mistake. Highly intelligent but poor, she would hide her intelligence and stay within her social class. Now she retreats in panic from Ozu. But she confides in Paloma, who has long contemplated suicide but now somehow draws hope from Renée. Renée summons up her courage and accepts Ozu's latest invitation, only to learn that Paloma has "betrayed" her: Ozu knows the whole story and assures her she has nothing to fear. That is the beginning of another rebirth, only completed in her dying moments. She has been hit by a van as she tried to save a homeless man who had bolted blindly into danger. She recalls what Paloma once said, that what matters is what you are doing in the moment of your death. And Renée has her final rebirth.
Some readers have found this ending contrived, even though fatal accidents are a daily occurrence --and death, like life, happens while we're making other plans. The likelihood of the prelude to the death, and of what ensues, might fairly be questioned. But some will find the account given convincing. And even some doubters will think it admirable in its imperfection.
* * *
Since attention to language is so prominent in this book, the quality of the English translation is of special interest. Anyone who has ever tried to produce a faithful translation knows that often the best one can hope for is a passable representation of the meaning or meanings conveyed by the original text --and even identifying those meanings accurately is not always easy. Renée, moved as she is by reading Tolstoy in French, "would give anything" to be able to read his works in Russian. She particularly admires the artful use of pauses in a certain passage, and she wonders if the credit should go to Tolstoy or to the translator. Admirers of Barbery's book may have comparable questions.
In my opinion, Anderson's translation has for the most part met the considerable challenges Barbery's text presents.
Anderson is especially adept at finding suitable English equivalents for French slang, idioms, word-play, examples of linguistic excellence, and solecisms. She also smooths the way for readers unfamiliar with specific cultural references, whether to the French system of education or to standard reference works. So Grevisse, author of a work on proper French usage, becomes Roget, author of a thesaurus English-speakers can be expected to know.
A translator must often choose between strict fidelity to the original text and attention to the reader's interests, and Anderson generally chooses well. Rarely does she risk perplexing the reader for the sake of literal accuracy. True, some readers may wonder about Manuela's laconic utterance in Chapter 7 of the fourth section: "Nun's farts." Is this some unfamiliar expletive? Only pastry fanciers will be likely to know that "pets-de-nonne" is the name of the treat Manuela has brought Renée, choux-pastry fritters. Anderson evidently couldn't resist the colorful phrase, and who can blame her?
Generally, though, Anderson favors accessibility and clarity. She occasionally even improves on the original (admittedly an ambiguous achievement). When Nguyen declines an invitation of Renée's but hopes to take her up on it later, Anderson eliminates the somewhat stilted phrasing of the original --and Nguyen, in (largely) baseball-deprived Paris, asks for a rain check.
A peculiar situation arises in Chapter 8 of the fifth and last section ("Contented Little Sips"), where an extended English quotation (from Tate's libretto for Purcell's "Dido and Aeneas") is embedded in the French text. The quotation (at least in the 20 October 2009 printing of the Gallimard paperback "folio" edition) contains some anomalies. Three lines are omitted; two are shortened; and word substitutions in the first line render it incoherent. Anderson again favors the reader's interests and simply provides a correct version.
It's unlikely, however, that any translation can be flawless. For one thing, the translator must sometimes choose the lesser of two evils. What was Anderson to do, for instance, with the phrase "mouroir de luxe," in the chapter about visiting the retirement home? "Mouroir," not "maison de retraite," the wording used repeatedly elsewhere in that chapter. Not just a retirement home but rather a place to die, "mourir," like a hospital where (according to "Le Petit Robert") patients receive minimum care in the expectation of their death. And this is a "mouroir de luxe," a place to die in luxury. How could Anderson capture, in English, the terse irony of the French wording? A long paraphrase would be self-defeating. So Anderson settles (as most translators probably would) for "luxury old people's home," and the ironical edge is blunted.
This kind of compromise is unavoidable. But at times the translation departs needlessly, I think, from the sense conveyed by the original. Of course I may be mistaken about that in some instances, but some look pretty clear-cut.
A couple of simple cases first:
Section 3, Chapter 3, "The Poodle as Totem." Here "moelle épinière" becomes "bone marrow." But, though "moelle" does mean "marrow," "moelle épinière" means "spinal cord," and that should have been the translation. It fits not only the dictionary definition but also the context: Renée is comparing Bernard Grelier's doltish responses to a spinal reflex arc in which the brain does not need to participate.
Section 2, Chapter 12, "Phantom Comedies." Renée muses on the vanity of human striving and achievements, including "...notre petit nid douillet, fruit d'un endettement de vingt ans, une vaine coutume barbare..." The English version omits a long phrase, here restored and put in brackets: "...our cozy little nest [,the fruit of twenty years' worth of debt,] is reduced to some futile barbarian custom..." The abridgment is hard to justify. Elsewhere in the passage from which this comes, Renée notes the high price paid for seemingly futile achievements, but here she quantifies that price in terms of years.
Other situations are a bit more complicated:
Section 2, Chapter 7, "In the Confederate South." Manuela arrives out of breath, and so far the original and the translation agree. But then they seem to diverge. While the English version allows for some ambiguity, it will surely seem to many readers that the theme of breathlessness has carried over: that it is Manuela who has been rendered consumptive, Manuela's breathing that resembles Darth Vader's. In the original it seems pretty clear that it is "Dame de Broglie" (Anderson nicely renders "Dame" as "Lady," with mocking overtones of "her ladyship") who has been affected in this way: "...une Dame de Broglie que le diner qu'elle donne ce soir a rendue phthisique. Recevant du livreur sept boîtes de caviar...elle respirait comme Dark Vador." The plain sense seems to be "...a Lady de Broglie whom the dinner she's giving tonight has rendered consumptive [or "who's been rendered consumptive by..."]. Having accepted delivery of seven jars of...caviar, she was breathing like Darth Vader." It's not only that the placement of the relative clause seems to demand this. It also fits the context. Manuela may have been under some pressure to help with preparations, but it's obviously the hostess who is feeling stressed; she's especially unhappy, as we soon learn, about the nearly odorless truffles. Renée and Manuela picture her, "haggard and disheveled," trying to compensate by spraying the truffles with an extract of porcini and chanterelles. No wonder her breathing calls to mind the stertorous menace of Darth Vader's.
Section 2, Chapter 9, "Red October." Toward the end of this chapter Renée, with a kind of proud self-mockery, wonders at the way she has anticipated a trend despite her very restricted contact with the outside world. To stress her isolation, the rhetoric of the original employs three nouns that are near-synonyms and one reinforcing participle: "claustration," "isolement," "quarantaine," "confinée." Anderson's version generally reproduces this rhetoric, but she has Renée singling out as especially shameful "those...years in my forties..." I'm prepared to be persuaded otherwise, but I think the translator has introduced a novelty here, misconstruing the word "quarantaine." It's true that this can mean "about forty," and to near one's fortieth birthday is to approach "la quarantaine." But applying that to "cette quarantaine honteuse" seems rather a stretch. The most straightforward reading takes "quarantaine" to mean "quarantine," which fits the overall rhetorical thrust. It's common to use the word figuratively in the sense of exclusion or ostracism, and what is especially "shameful" here is that Renée's quarantine was self-imposed, as if she'd taken up a leper's bell.
Section 5, Chapter 12, "Sisters." Near the end of the chapter the original text has the "iron hand of destiny" giving dead mothers to stillborn infants: "...donne aux mort-nés des mères mortes..." In the translation it is the dead mothers who receive the stillborn infants. While infants and mothers alike could be pictured as receiving such macabre gifts, and the difference may not be of great import, Barbery did choose the wording she did, and there's no obvious reason for having changed it in this way.
Section 5, Chapter 23, "My Camellias."
1. In bidding her dead husband goodbye, Renée says "Je t'ai bien aimé..." This becomes "I did love you well..." It's true that "aimer" and "bien" mean "to love" and "well," respectively. But "aimer bien" rarely means "to love well." It normally means "to be fond of," or "to like," with the adverb's role one of tempering rather than of intensifying. That kind of translation would fit with what we've learned about Renée's feelings for Lucien. She was quite fond of him, but he had never been the love of her life. That was a love she was just in the process of discovering as her relationship with Kakuro began to go beyond friendship.
2. Renée sums up her life's climax this way, in the English version: "I had met another, and was prepared to love." But in the original she does not say "un autre," but "l'autre." We should not underestimate the importance of the definite article here. This encounter is the culmination of Renée's life. Also, if we recall her interest in philosophy we may recognize an allusion to something more: the self-transcendence required to truly encounter "the other." Certainly the barriers to accomplishing that are made abundantly clear in this book.
3. Near the very end, Renée looks back on fifty-four years in a desert or "wilderness," emotional and moral (or "psychological," as the English version has it). She evidently acknowledges some wasted effort, referring repeatedly to the fifty-four years. She looks back in particular on fifty-four years of hatred, and a sense of its futility certainly comes through in the English version: "...fifty-four years of venting my futile frustrations upon a world and a caste I despised..." Yet this does not really disclose her newly won self-knowledge as the original does: "...cinquante-quatre ans de haine pour un monde et une caste dont j'avais fait les exutoires de mes futiles frustrations..." This might be translated as "...fifty-four years of hatred for a world and a caste from which I had fashioned outlets for my futile frustrations..."
Again, I think Anderson's translation is generally admirable.
Summary of The Elegance of the Hedgehog
Renee is the concierge of a grand Parisian apartment building, home to members of the great and the good. Over the years she has maintained her carefully constructed persona as someone reliable but totally uncultivated, in keeping, she feels, with society's expectations of what a concierge should be. But beneath this facade lies the real Renee: passionate about culture and the arts, and more knowledgeable in many ways than her employers with their outwardly successful but emotionally void lives. Down in her lodge, apart from weekly visits by her one friend Manuela, Renee lives resigned to her lonely lot with only her cat for company. Meanwhile, several floors up, twelve-year-old Paloma Josse is determined to avoid the pampered and vacuous future laid out for her, and decides to end her life on her thirteenth birthday. But unknown to them both, the sudden death of one of their privileged neighbours will dramatically alter their lives forever. By turn moving and hilarious, this unusual novel became the top-selling book in France in 2007 with sales of over 900,000 copies to-date.French Books
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