The Elegance of the Hedgehog
by Muriel Barbery
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Book Reviews of The Elegance of the Hedgehog
Book Review: Through the eyes of a hedgehog.
Summary: 5 Stars
Do not let the preamble of this book repel you. While reading this page and a half for the first time, I discovered eleven unknown words and exclaimed "What the heck!" twice. She discusses Marx, she discusses social hierarchy, she discusses "the anthropological cornerstone on which all his exhortations for a new world would be built". Sure. Right. I know exactly what you're talking about.
Persevere. Persevere, I tell you! Because this book is something that induces a moment. A moment where you look up from the pages, and see the world through different eyes. Sometimes through Kakuro's eyes, sometimes through Paloma's, but mostly through the ever-so elegant hedgehog's eyes.
A brilliant change in writing style occurs every other of the sixty-one sections. As the main character changes from Madame Michel to Paloma Josse the font changes with it, the age drops forty-two years, and the writing becomes slightly less sophisticated. Less sophisticated, but equally hilarious. Both Paloma and Madame Michel are earth-shatteringly intelligent. But both Paloma and Madame Michel hide their intelligence as if it were a shameful faux pas.
While Madame Michel sits holed up in her apartment, watching soap operas and Japanese films, reading Russian romance with the company of her cat, Leo, Paloma plans her own suicide. Yes, a girl of twelve (albeit her mind far exceeds her years) has made the decision to take her own life. The day she turns thirteen she will set fire to her own apartment. Her pyromania will kill only her, all because she does not wish to grow into an adult. She does not wish to be bipolar Maman, ignorant sister Colombe, or withdrawn Papa. This decision I find completely selfish and while Paloma uses her "Profound Thoughts" and "Journal of the Movement of the World" to try to find a reason to stay in the world, I screamed right at the book.
Along comes Kakuro Ozu, grabbing the attention of the whole apartment complex. Finally the stories of Paloma and Madame Michael are melded. It is here that a document of deep thought and witty anecdote gets some plot. Monsieur Ozu first uncovers both characters hidden brilliance. Next, he does the impossible: he gets Madame Michel out of her cave of an apartment and in his for dinner. After his toilet sings to her and they share a moment of convulsing laughter, they are friends. With Paloma the friendship is easier to acquire, it only took one elevator ride. The three friends discuss the world, art, beauty. Hence, their heartstrings are tied to each other's, and the two stubborn heroines are forever changed. My summary ends there, but the end is as shocking as any thriller.
On the top we have this everlasting social hierarchy: Paloma at the top, Madame Michel beneath. We have people (Madame Michel) who walk with the complete awareness of it, and others (Paloma) who simply follow unconsciously. But whether you are aware of it or not, whether you recognize this power, you are subject to it. And you are subject to break it.
And then, the recurring theme of camellias. The camellia is a delicate flower that symbolizes beauty. Madame Michel finds beauty in stillness and Paloma finds beauty in movement. Madame Michel can watch the camellia sit, Paloma is riveted when the dead flower "drops onto the counter with a puff".
Muriel Barbery's second novel is full of mind-numbing philosophy... but it is lightened with thigh-slapping satire. It tugs at the reader's mind, and their own faith and belief. You will rethink true intelligence and ignorance. You will discover the real way to eat a piece of chocolate. You will ask: what is art? What is beauty? You will find yourself craving Russian literature and noticing things you never noticed before. It may release your own cynical mind; maybe your will rethink your own suicide. Your vocabulary will expand, your depth will deepen. You will ponder... the elegance of the hedgehog.
Book Review: Moments of Always Within Never
Summary: 5 Stars
Muriel Barbery was born in Casablanca in 1969. A former philosophy teacher, her first novel ("Une Gourmandise") was published in 2000 - appearing in English as "Gourmet Rhapsody" in 2009. "The Elegance of the Hedgehog" was its follow-up and was published France as "L'Élégance du Hérisson" in 2006. Both books are set in a very exclusive apartment building on Rue de Grenelle in the famous Left Bank district of Paris. Where "Gourmet Rhapsody" had one lead character, Pierre Arthens, "The Elegance of the Hedgehog" follows two people - Renée Michel and Paloma Josse.
Renée is a fifty-four year old widow and lives alone with her cat. She has been the concierge at 7 Rue de Grenelle for twenty-seven years, and is well aware of how a concierge is viewed. As such, she ensures the building's residents see only what they would expect - she prepares very basic food and pretends to watch low-brow television shows. However, while Renée has little in the way of a formal education, the image couldn't be further from the truth. Renée eats well, as the cr@p food is fed to the cat - who is named Leo in Tolstoy's honour. While the tv is constantly on, Renée is generally sitting in a different room reading or listening to something a great deal more refined. (The sound of the tv is for the benefit of passing ears in the hallway). She also adores Dutch art and is a fan of Japanese art-house movies. Sadly, Renée only has a single friend, Manuela - a Portuguese immigrant who cleans for the building's rich inhabitants. Manuela dreams of one day being able to return to Faro - it's a day that Renée herself dreads.
Paloma, meanwhile, is twelve years old and lives on the fifth floor with her family. High intelligence is clearly a family trait - Paloma's father is a Member of Parliament, while her mother holds a PhD in Literature. Her sister, the irritating Colombe, is studying philosophy at an École Normale Supérieure. Paloma, however, can't face a long life, believing it to be meaningless, and has decided to commit suicide on her thirteenth birthday. Until that point, she's going to keep a couple of diaries - one containing a series of profound thoughts and another devoted to the beauty of movement.
The book jumps back and forward between the two characters, with each telling their own story - although more of the book focuses on Renée. (Renée uses one font and Paloma uses another - it means, straight away, you know who's story you're reading...it's a very helpful technique, given how similarly the pair think certain topics). The pair have so much in common, you know it's only a matter of time before they meet properly and become friends. (I was surprised at how long it took though - and how much the apartment building needed to be shaken up for that to actually happen).
More of the book is actually spent with Renée : although very intelligent, she has a very low sense of self-worth - but is still a likeable character. Paloma was clearly a very intelligent and quite witty girl - but sometimes I got the impression she was a little pretentious and full of herself. (She's an intellectual who "makes fun of other intellectuals" - yet will still trot out the occasional cliché). I wasn't always convinced she intended to go through with her suicidal plan either. (However, she's only a couple of months short of thirteen : perfect time for being a little over-dramatic, eh ?) Still, she is very quotable - full of funny (and quite acidic) observations about the world around her - and, deep down, seems to have a good heart. An excellent book, totally recommended.
Book Review: How to Live an Elegant Life
Summary: 4 Stars
The Elegance of the Hedgehog
by Muriel Barbery
Published by Europa Editions
Translated from the French by Allison Anderson
For some time now I've had an itching to take French lessons. I have no idea why. Long ago, in my ancient past, I took a semester of university French with Madame Maas and did not like the language. I think I felt it too simplistic and effete after the rigors of wrestling with German syntax and Russian verb aspects.
Perhaps, these 40 years later, I am more inclined to a search for elegance.
Muriel Barbery brings us two seemingly disparate characters - a fifty-something concierge for an elite apartment complex and a twelve-year-old daughter of one of the complex families. Both, however, are bitter, super-intelligent misfits who have built themselves into their own individual worlds of misery. They are both philosophical snobs, decrying the fallacies and foibles of those on the other sides of the invisible walls they've built around themselves.
I didn't like either of them much for the first 150 pages or so of their individual journals. I wanted to give them each a swift kick in the keister and wondered why I was even bothering to continue reading. But this is a book not just about redemption, but transformation. Barbery manages to weave a thin thread of hope of that transformation through her characters' misery. Just hints, but they held me through to the sad, but satisfying, ending.
I particularly enjoyed this passage on the joy of writing by Madame Michel, the concierge:
"This is eminently true of many happy moments in life. Freed from the demands of decision and intention, adrift on some inner sea, we observe our various movements as if they belonged to someone else, and yet we admire their involuntary excellence. What other reason might I have for writing this - ridiculous journal of an aging concierge - if the writing did not have something of the art of scything about it? The lines gradually become their own demiurges and, like some witless yet miraculous participant, I witness the birth on paper of sentences that have eluded my will and appear in spite of me on the sheet, teaching me something that I neither knew nor thought I might want to know. This painless birth, like an unsolicited proof, gives me untold pleasure, and with neither toil nor certainty but the joy of frank astonishment I follow the pen that is guiding and supporting me."
Yup. I get that. Been there. Frequently.
And shortly after this passage twelve-year-old Paloma brings us this after a visit to her grandmother:
"So, we mustn't forget any of this, absolutely not. We have to live with the certainty that we'll get old and that it won't look nice or be good or feel happy. And tell ourselves that it's now that matters: to build something, now, at any price, using all our strength. Always remember that there's a retirement home waiting somewhere and so we have to surpass ourselves every day, make every day undying. Climb our own personal Everest and do it in such a way that every step is a little bit of eternity.
That's what the future is for: to build the present, with real plans, made by living people."
So, basically what Barbery tells us through Madame Michel and Paloma is get out of your heads, break down your invisible walls, find your passion, and live life like it will end tomorrow, because it might. Not an original premise certainly - we hear it from motivational speakers ad nauseum - but Barbery presents it with such elegance.
Book Review: Everything A Great Story Should Be
Summary: 5 Stars
Smart is the best word I can come up with to describe Muriel Barbery's The Elegance of the Hedgehog - however, funny and insightful aren't too far behind. And, I'm realizing I don't have an intro for this review that does this book justice, so here it is.
Set in present day Paris, The Elegance of the Hedgehog is about two females - one pre-teen and another middle-aged - who are both trying very hard to appear on the outside what on the inside they are not.
Paloma, a precocious 12 year-old, lives in an upscale Parisian apartment building with her socialist-diplomat father, psychoanalysis-addicted mother, and dim-witted bohemian sister. She has figured out that life as an adult is not worth living, that all teenagers want is to get to adulthood, and therefore, she plans to commit suicide on her 13th birthday. In addition, she feels being an intellectual is overrated, so she tries very hard not to appear as smart as she is so as to not elevate expectations.
Renee, the middle-aged concierge for the apartment building is also keenly aware of expectations. For example, as a concierge, her tenets do not expect her to read Tolstoy or appreciate Dutch Renaissance art, and so she also does her best to appear to be as common as her neighbors think she is.
Alternating between these two narrators, this novel is - in part - a satire of the wealthy bourgeoisie who toss around unintelligible phrases at dinner and murder the King's English (oops, this is Paris) in notes to one another. In addition, it is a coming-of-age story - that is much more complex than a girl deciding not to kill herself. Paloma and Renee's lives intersect when a wealthy Japanese man moves in and very quickly recognizes what the two have been hiding.
The reviews of this book have been astounding. In fact, I read where one person said they didn't want to read it because they hadn't heard anyone say anything bad about it. So what could make a book so great? On the surface, the story deals with friendship, class and status, and while the themes are universal, I don't think they are enough to earn such widespread favor.
As I was reading, I was trying to figure out what is so appealing about this book, and I think I know at least in part: I think that most people (women at least) believe that they are smarter than the world sees them to be. And so, somewhere in Paloma's and Renee's attempt to hide themselves, readers relate to the constant inner-dialogue commentary that reveals an untapped potential.
One disclaimer, it will have you reaching for your dictionary over and over and over. I can't remember when I read a book that contained so many words I didn't know. My mom and I were talking about this last night and wondering if this was due to its being a translation from French - perhaps the translator was being very particular to make sure every connotation was correct.
And, I'll echo other reviews I've read - the first 100 pages are not as enticing as the book is made out to be, but stick with it. It is well worth the read.
P.S. In reading over my review, I'm struck by the irony of my relating to the wit of the characters while continually being reminded through the language that my vocabulary isn't as polished as I thought. Hmmm...wonder if this is intentional?
Book Review: "IT'S ALL WELL AND GOOD TO HAVE PROFOUND THOUGHTS ON A REGULAR BASIS, BUT I THINK IT'S NOT ENOUGH."
Summary: 5 Stars
"It's all well and good to have profound thoughts on a regular basis, but I think it's not enough." Thus writes Paloma, the precocious twelve-year-old who is one of the narrators in this delightful, often funny and even more often profound (sorry, Paloma!) novel from French author Muriel Barbery. Paloma keeps a secret journal in which she pours out her discontent with the world that regularly disappoints her. (Actually she keeps two journals. She labels one "Profound Thought" and the other "Journal of the Movement of the World.")
The other protagonist is Rene, the concierge in Paloma's building. Rene is a widow, in her mid-fifties. She's almost a caricature of the Paris concierge: squat, ugly, to all appearances hopelessly mundane in her capabilities and myopic in her interests. The people in the building --with the exception of Paloma and one other girl who wants to b a veterinarian and seizes on any opportunity to talk with her about animal ailments-- slide past Rene without seeing her: she is all too obviously all that they're not: unintelligent, uneducated and uncultured.
But Paloma and Rene have much in common. Though for quite different reasons, they both have taken to hiding themselves from the world: they assume the world won't accept them as they really are. Rene has a cat that sleeps the day away on the living room couch in her ground floor apartment. The cat is camouflage: all of the concierges in Paris have cats and the cats are always fat and lazy. But Rene's cat is named Leo, after a character in Tolstoy. In the secret life she keeps hidden from her tenants, she dines on fine cuisine instead of cabbage soup, and reads Tolstoy, Kant and Husserl. (After reading Husserl, whom she scorns, she declares that phenomenology is "hard-core autism."). She listens to Mozart, is in love with the Dutch Masters, and once a week, she and a cleaner friend of hers (a duchess in the rough) meet to drink tea and eat patisseries in the back kitchen of her ground floor apartment. Rene is determined not to reveal herself to the outside world, Paloma has decided to commit suicide on her next birthday (her thirteenth) so that her life won't descend into the routine and trivial.
Events throw a monkey wrench in both their plans. A new tenant, Kakuro, moves in on the fourth floor. Charming, cultured and decidedly Japanese, Kakuro refuses not to see Rene. He soon becomes friends with Paloma too. Kakuro never condescends, is always considerate, and he's perpetually delighted in what he sees in Rene and Paloma. He sees Rene's intelligence in her eyes, intuits the significance of her cat's name. He sends her a bound copy of War and Peace, as though to say, "I see you. And I like what I see." As if it hadn't been lovely enough until this point, the novel becomes steadily lovelier as Rene, against her fears and inclinations, responds to Kakuro's overtures. Paloma grows from what she sees in Rene and Kakuro: adults needn't disappoint her all of the time, and maybe her life is worth living after all. The novel's ending is both sad and upbeat.
If this little book has a moral, it is, as much as anything else, that "art is life, playing to other rhythms." Everything is right about this book.
Dk/