The Elegance of the Hedgehog by Muriel Barbery

Publication date/ Length: 2010 / 274 pages
 

Synopsis (from the jacket cover): We are in an elegant hotel particulier in the center of Paris. Renee, the building’s concierge, is short, ugly, and plump. She has bunions on her feet. She is cantankerous and addicted to television soaps. Her only genuine attachment is to her cat, Leo. In short, she is everything society expects from a concierge at a bourgeois building in a posh Parisian neighborhood. But Renee has a secret…

First line: “‘Marx has completely changed the way I view the world,’ declared the Pallieres boy this morning, although ordinarily he says nary a word to me.”

Review:  I found this novel so charming and so thoroughly French.  The narrative takes place at the exclusive, tony rue de Grenelle and follows the thoughts of two female tenants who must, for very different reasons, hide their intelligence and exceptionality.  The novel opens with the thoughts of Renee Michel, the fifty-something concierge, who has built a life reinforcing the assumptions and expectations of what her wealthy clients assume about a concierge.  Thus, she is able hide in plain sight, and embrace her true love of art in every form — film, books, food, music, culture.

Soon the perspective of the novel changes to Paloma, a twelve-year-old girl so thoroughly filled with ennui she has decided to take her own life in a few months to teach her family a lesson about materialism, excess, and gratitude.  In the meantime, she has decided to try and have one profound thought a day — and write it down.  Now, learning that a 12-year-old is about to commit suicide sounds like a terribly dark way to start a novel, but the humor, wit and originality of Paloma’s voice dispels any pessimism that her proclamation might engender.  Surrounding our two protagonists is a cast of quirky, fully-developed characters, but Renee and Paloma are really the guiding forces of this novel. 

So, why did this novel feel French?  The first half is quite philosophical and delves into questions of existence and the meaning of life, while simultaneously embracing the finer things in life, too.  I read this novel in a day — it is a fairly fast read from the beginning, despite the philosophical meanderings, but once a certain Japanese tenant moves into rue de Grenelle, I found the novel impossible to set aside. 

Here are three (unrelated) passages that I particularly loved:

…this is the first time I have met someone who seeks out people and who sees beyond. That may seem trivial but I think it is profound all the same. We never look beyond our assumptions and, what’s worse, we have given up trying to meet others; we just meet ourselves. We don’t recognize each other because other people have become out permanent mirrors…

Personally, I think that grammar is a way to attain beauty. When you speak, or read, or write, you can tell if you’ve said or read or written a fine sentence. You can recognize a well-turned phrase or an elegant style. But when you are applying the rules of grammar skillfully, you ascend to another level of the beauty of language.  When you use grammar you peel back the layers, to see how it is all put together, see it quite naked, in a way. And that’s where it becomes wonderful, because you say to yourself, ‘Look how well-made this is, how well-constructed it is? How solid and ingenious, rich and subtle!’ I get completely carried away just knowing there are words of all different natures, and that you have to know them in order to be able to infer their potential usage and compatibility. I find there is nothing more beautiful, for example, than the very basic components of language, nouns and verbs. When you’ve grasped this, you’ve grasped the core of any statement. It’s magnificent, don’t you think?  Nouns, verbs…  Perhaps, to gain access to all the beauty of the language that grammar unveils, you have to place yourself in a special state of awareness.

But above all it is crazy how people think that though they understand nature they can live without it… Living, eating, reproducing, fulfilling the task for which we were born, and dying: it has no meaning, true, but that’s the way things are. People are so arrogant, thinking they can coerce nature, escapte their destiny of little biological things… and yet they remain so blind to the cruelty or violence of their own way of living, loving, reproducing and making war on their fellow human beings…  Personally, I think there is only one thing to do: find the task we have been placed on this earth to do, and accomplish it as best we can, with all our strength, without making things complicated or thinking there’s anything divine about our animal nature.

 So, I send a huge “thank you” to my friend Katy, whose book club enjoyed Hedgehog, and recommend this novel to all, without reservation.

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