The Elegance of the Hedgehog by Muriel Barbery
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Book Reviews of The Elegance of the Hedgehog
Book Review: Reviewed by Andrea Walker
Summary: 5 Stars
With such a strange title, perhaps one should be familiar with the hedgehog before deciding to read the book. The hedgehog is a small mammal with tough needle-like spines that rolls into a ball for protection. It is not native to the Americas. The title, of course, is analogous. Muriel Barbery's novel The Elegance of the Hedgehog unfolds from two perspectives. The chapters alternate between the two main characters who, despite their obvious differences, have basic common ground. First we meet Madame Renee Michel, a concierge in Paris, who leads a double life: educated and interested in the arts she cleverly and obstinately remains within her place in the working class. Next we meet Paloma, the twelve-year-old daughter of one of Madame Michel's rich employers.
A plot emerges when our characters' paths cross. Foreboding lurks on the pages as Paloma lays out her plan to us. Paloma is keeping a journal of the movement of the world. We read fearing tragedy, and like the suicidal lemmings, we are lured dangerously onward to the cliff. Along the way, however, we are privy to a multitude of aha! moments, so much insight, it seems impossible to be contained in one mere story of two little lives over several brief months. Barbery invokes ideas from literature as well as art to express her philosophy. The references to fine literature, politics and philosophy are enough to send one immediately to the book store or library in search of Tolstoy, Marx, Greek classics, to name a few. In her journal Paloma observes that one infinitesimal lapse can succeed in ruining the possibility of perfection forever. She's seeing the minutest events in the total big picture of the Universe, for example, Kairos (right or opportune moment, a moment of undetermined period of time in which something special happens. Chronos is quantitative, kairos has a qualitative nature.) Big Bang, Let there be light.
The theme of time and eternity is continued by Renee's musing in the next chapter with "a camellia on the moss" from the Japanese movie The Munekata Sisters. A line from the dialogue of the movie "True novelty is that which does not grow old, despite the passage of time. The camellia against the moss of the temple- this sudden flowering of pure beauty at the heart of ephemeral passion" (100-101) defines Beauty for Renee and gives us something to think about.
The book asks is the essence of Beauty in the perception? For example, Paloma, a gifted twelve-year-old, says, "... in the split second I saw the ... bud drop to the counter I intuited the essence of Beauty ... all the conditions were ripe. It's the ephemeral configuration of things in the moment, when you can see both their beauty and their death" (272).
"Our eyes may perceive, yet they do not observe" (304). Renee has spent much of her life attempting to be invisible to the upper class for whom she works. It has taken two very perceptive characters with their own elegance to uncover the elegance within Renee. She has metaphorically rolled up into that little self-protecting ball. When she realizes how successful she has been, she questions her own perceptive ability. Nothing is as it seems.
I found great insight in the philosophies offered here. For example, "If you dread tomorrow, it's because you don't know how to build the present" (128). Tomorrow brings death, sooner or later, and to avoid the dread of death, we must be generative, build, leave something for the human race. We have too much of everything as Westerners, we live in fear of want (162). "All is as it should be" (165).
Within all this philosophizing, Barbery consistently makes us laugh. Renee is taken to sometimes slamming the door in the face of her employers. She is indignant at the misuse of a comma by one who should know better. Paloma believes that "grammar is a way to attain beauty" (158). We are satisfied when Renee finds and recognizes bliss, but then Barbery offers up a surprise. From a literary standpoint, the denouement is unacceptable. This reader found it redemptive though because of the ideas and content that lead up to the conclusion.
The novel reads as a delightful series of essays on the meaning of life and how Art and Beauty fit into the human condition. Barbery commands an exquisite use of language, for example, "... dreams and waking hours do not have the same texture" (138). The Elegance of the Hedgehog is translated from French by Alison Anderson. The story, elegant in itself, flows as smoothly as water over a river rock and takes us along for an entertaining and enlightening ride.
Andrea Walker freelance writer, book reviewer
Book Review: Be Prepared to Love
Summary: 5 Stars
The Virgin Knows: an art theft thriller"Indeed, what constitutes life? Day after day, we put up with the brave struggle to play our role in this phantom comedy......to withdraw as far as you can from the jousting and combat that are the appendages of our warrior species, you drink a cup of tea, or perhaps watch a film by Ozu, and place upon this sorry theater the seal of Art and its greatest treasures.
THE ELEGANCE OF THE HEDGEHOG is a novel about class, unhappiness and beauty. It mixes philosophies as disparate as Marx, Dutch painters, Eminen, apartment building gossips, and Mozart. It is a French novel, through and through, in its ideas (heavy on philosophy), language (multi-tiered, claused sentences), its reliance on relationship ( both grammatical and personal), and its description of middle-class quotidian. (The same quotidian that makes French movies seem as if nothing happens.)
I particularly liked the beauty parts: a yellow rose falls from a bouquet onto the counter; a pile of hot noodles; a sleeping cat; red camellias; grammar; moss on a wall in a Japanese film; the feel of a yellow bathroom carpet. Each time a character witnesses Beauty (with a Capital B) time stops, nothing matters but the moment; they feel satisfied and content about being alive and their place in the world. And because this is a thinking novel, the author asks the question: "Is this where we are doomed to live our lives? Poised between beauty and death? Between beauty's appearance and its disappearance.
The unhappiness part twirls around a Leo Tolstoy quote, the first lines of his novel, Anna Karenina: " All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." Which leads to a need to summarize the plot: Renee is the concierge of a fancy Paris apartment on rue de Grenelle that houses rich successful families. Although incredibly intelligent and cultured, the self-educated Renee prefers to melt into the background and play dumb. Paloma, an equally intelligent and precocious twelve-year-old girl, lives in Renee's apartment building. She attends the best school in Paris. Disgusted by the pretensions of her upper class family and neighbors, she plans to kill herself on her birthday and burn down the building. Both Renee and Paloma feel an intellectual, moral and cultural abyss between themselves and others. When a Japanese man moves into the apartment, both Renee and Paloma begin to shift from unhappy people who are rather unique into happy people who are alike in their happiness. Peel back the intellectualizing, the posturing, the criticism, the subterranean shadows in their personalities and voila! they are both suddenly capable of outright love and the appreciation of Beauty ( capital B) can be perused in friendship.
The driving force behind the author's pen seems to be to pull apart the pretensions of the ruling elite and the mistaken oppression of the working class. In the very first chapter Renee the concierge announces as criticism of one of her tenants, in a Marxist voice: "Whoever sows desire harvests oppression." By novel's end the concierge is finally believing another Marxist axiom, "circumstances make men as much as men make circumstances." So during the novel the columns holding up the bridges of both the upper classes and the working class come tumbling down. The playing field is leveled, much to the disdain and embarrassment of both sides.
Beauty, happiness and class consciousness intersect in the transformation of Paloma and Renee, who become friends and soul mates, and in doing so they end up making a pun on the Tolstoy quote which so governed the novel. Here is the pun: "All people involved in happy friendships are alike, each person without a happy friendship is different."
In the end, the characters who people this novel blend into a community of seamlessly smiling characters who down endless glasses of tea in the concierge's loge, who laugh and look forward to running into each other, who borrow and lend clothes, who bake and eat chocolate cakes for each other.
Afterall, the novel asks, in the words of Renee as she quotes young Paloma: what is important about measuring a life's worth? It is Beauty, happiness, class? No. It is what we are doing at the moment of our death that measures our worth. In a true Buddhist moment, the narrator/the author says if we are able to love, if are we prepared to love, then we are alive and worthy human beings.
Book Review: Beautiful Prose
Summary: 5 Stars
"I may be indigent in name, position, and appearance, but in my own mind I am an unrivaled goddess." ~~ Renée Michel
Meet Renée Michel, concierge at 7, rue de Grenelle, a small and elegant apartment building in Paris. The building houses eight families, all in the upper tier of Parisian/French society. Madame Michel, a widow, who has been in her position for the past 27 years. Renée does her best to not draw attention to herself and to project the image that the residents of the building expect of a concierge. In other words, Madame Michel creates an image or caricature of herself as the stereotypical concierge--poorly educated, unintelligent, dull, and bland. But when we see inside her lodge (apartment) we see another side of this complex woman; we see a woman who is self-educated in a wide variety of subjects. She glories in Japanese art and culture, Dutch artists, Tolstoy, and Mozart. But most of all, she is enthralled with Beauty and Art.
Paloma Josse is a precocious twelve year-old who lives with her parents, Maman or Solange (a Ph.D. in Literature) and Papa, a Parliamentarian and former government minister, as well as her sister Colombe, a grad student. Paloma is extremely intelligent, but like Renée, Paloma hides her true self from those around her; she plays down her intelligence and tries hard just to fit in. Paloma often finds herself at odds with both her parents and her sister, who she holds in disdain for what she considers their vacuous, frivolous, and clichéd lifestyle. Paloma is ultimately searching for herself, but moreover, she is looking for some reason to believe not only in others but for carrying on. Paloma has determined that she will commit suicide on her 13th birthday, but before she does, she will record her thoughts in her Journal of Profound Thoughts that we, as readers, become privy to.
At first, I wasn't sure what to think of this book. It took me much longer than I anticipated to get into it, and because I had seen so many positive and glowing reviews of it, I kept wondering when the book was going to pick up and really grab me. We, as readers, come to know Renée and Paloma, who have very little interaction throughout most of the text, through alternating chapters, and we see the other residents of 7, rue de Grenelle through their eyes. At first, I wasn't sure that actually liked either of the central characters, Renée and Paloma. I found them each a bit self-absorbed and self-indulgent in their criticisms of the upper class of Parisian society. But as I read on, the book picked-up pace, and the more I read, the more the characters grew on me. I soon became absorbed in the lives of these two characters and their view of those around them. Barbery's prose and sketching all the characters, but especially these two, was rich and, quite frankly, simply beautiful.
Then, Mr. Kakuro Ozu enters the story when he purchases the 4th floor apartment from the family of a deceased resident. Mr. Ozu sees through the masks that both Paloma and Renée wear and befriends both of them. As he does, the lives of Paloma and Renée begin to intertwine and we see both of them grow and change, often in ways that neither we, as readers, or they could predict. We are entertained with a series of events that are hilarious, touching, heart-warming, and sometimes, heart-wrenching. We also begin to see the other residents through a third set of eyes. While I was already absorbed with Renée and Paloma, when Kakuro entered the story, I simply did not want to put the book down because he brought another dimension to the text and Barbery's prose. The writing seemed to take on more depth with the introduction of this character who brought out the complexities of the other characters.
I found myself not wanting the book to end. I wanted the burgeoning friendships among Kakuro, Renée, and Paloma to simply go on. And when the end came, it was both unexpected and slightly shocking. I think I'm still processing the ending because I find myself strangely satisfied with ending in that I thought it was fitting for the overall text but also disappointed that the book ended the way that it did.
Overall, I found this to be a beautiful exploration of the characters and human behavior. Barbery's prose is beautifully crafted in a way that I found certain lines haunted me throughout the reading and stuck with me after I closed the book.
Book Review: Unsuspected aristocrats of the mind cast a beady eye on pretentiousness
Summary: 5 Stars
Never mind that the two principal characters in this delightful and often witty book, whose musings alternate and sometimes mirror each other, are not in the slightest credible, even given the ferocious intellectualism that is supposed to be typically French: they are both great fun, and they are vehicles for the author to debunk every kind of pretension - social as well as intellectual.
One protagonist is Renée, a 54 year old autodidact concierge living on the ground floor of a block of eight luxury flats in Paris. When, near the beginning, we see Renée rejecting the `hardcore autism' of Husserl's Phenomenology (so inferior to the philosophy of Kant whose meaning she `had no difficulty in penetrating'!), it look as if we are in for some pretty high-powered stuff, and indeed from time to time we do have dense passages which it requires some knowledge of or at least interest in philosophy to understand - but for the most part the book is quite easy to read.
The other protagonist is Paloma, a 12 year old girl living in the apartment on the top floor.
They only meet properly late in the book, but they have much in common. Renée can't stand bad punctuation; Paloma can't bear the ugly and sloppy slang her sister and her sister's friends put on to show they are `with it'. She cherishes grammatical accuracy because it is beautiful in its own right (and she supports this view against her pedantic class teacher by referring her to the linguistic philosopher Roman Jakobson!) They both respond in a very direct and intuitive way to Art, or rather to Beauty, but have reflected on what causes this response.
Both live a double life. Renée makes sure that she displays the stereotypical characteristic supposed to pertain to a Parisian concierge, and conceals her intellectual interests, her accumulated knowledge and her deeply pondered reflections from the employers she despises.
Paloma makes no bones about being a supra-intelligent child. She has a simply unbelievably precocious vocabulary and an articulacy in formulating what she calls her Profound Thoughts, which are not only intelligent but wise and aesthetically sensitive. She, too, conceals all this from her narcissistic family: her father, a government minister; her mother who lards her conversation with exhibitionist references to her knowledge of literature and to her trophy psychoanalysis; and her older sister Colombe whom Paloma describes as an insecure, obsessional fake, even if she is intelligent enough to work for a Master's thesis aridly expounding, though not reflecting on, a marginal text by William of Ockham (obviously one of the tougher passages in the book).
Paloma announces at the beginning that when she grows up, she would be bound to be drawn into the insincerities and vacuousness of adult life, and that she therefore intends, in a very matter-of-fact way, to commit suicide on her 13th birthday.
Actually Paloma and Renée are both struck by the pointlessness of existence; but experiences of beauty, and especially that the simplicity and purity of aspects of some things Japanese can for a time transport them out of the sense of meaninglessness. And then a wealthy and cultivated Japanese gentleman moves into one of the apartments in the block.
Kakuro Ozu quickly sees that there is more to Renée than she allows to meet the eye; and Paloma, whom he quickly befriends, has already suspected it, too: it is she who perceives in Renée `the elegance of the hedgehog'. The three of them come to form a little island of kindred spirits, to the incomprehension of Paloma's family whose professed socialism had never prevented them from treating the concierge de haut en bas. In the last part of the book Renée and Paloma come out their isolation (not that Renée has been totally isolated: she had been happily married and she has a good friend in Manuela, an unintellectual but `authentically aristocratic' cleaning woman); and the sharp-eyed critique of their surroundings fades, to give way to a deeper self-understanding, an inner healing, and a touching transformation.
Alison Anderson is a practised translator, so I imagine the occasional stodginess in the philosophical passages could possibly be in the French original; but the style in much the greater part of the book is a delight to read.
Book Review: Itself Reveals the Elegance of the Hedgehog
Summary: 5 Stars
Last time I so thoroughly enjoyed a French novel as this one was back in 1969 when Philippe Sollers got his novel "The Park" published in the United States, already a post-modernist novel that Francois Mauriac said -- without irony -- was written in "the classical tradition." I happen also to love Francois Sagan novels, but Muriel Barbery writes, as I've already hinted, in a far less conventional manner. She's closer to Sollers than anything written by Sagan. For those who are already acquainted with Schopenhauer, the prospective reader will be delighted to find on page 143, Ms. Barbery writing, "Madame Michel [one of the main characters] has the elegance of the hedgehog: on the outside, she's covered in quills, a real fortress, but my gut feeling is that on the inside, she has the same simple refinement of the hedgehog: a deceptively indolent little creature, fiercely solitary, and terribly elegant." In Schopenhauer's philosophy, it's called the "porcupine dilemma," but is also known as the "hedgehog dilemma," hence a 2002 work by Deborah Anna Luepnitz entitled "Schopenhauer's Porcupine: Intimacy and its Dilemmas." Renee Michel is a woman who wants intimacy but who, the reader eventually discovers, is also afraid of it, thus the porcupine's dilemma. Sharp quills prevent intimacy, no?
There are wonderful riffs on psychotherapy and its pretensions, art and its pretensions, philosophy and its pretensions, academia and its pretensions, social interchange and its pretensions, intelligence and its pretensions, aristocracy and its pretensions, cuisine and couture and their pretensions, all done so beautifully and -- unpretentiously (honestly), I was also reminded while I flipped pages of a Japanese painting of the quiet and meditative adolescent boy (but who looks girlish) sitting on a lotus, finishing one page after the other. There is no doubt this book aims to address an intelligent and widely cultured audience, and that fact, to me, was a joy. it was unpretentious and unapologetic in its aim.
I was thrilled, at one point of the story, to find Madame Michel finally calling French phenomenology crap. Later, I laughed nearly hysterically when Paloma, the 13-year-old suicide wanna-be, decries the falseness of psychotherapy's depths and actually confronts the fraudulence of a particularly false psychoanalyst, wittingly or unwittingly.
This novel, while remaining philosophically inclined, is neither without its startling humor nor a 19th century interest in class divisions and the struggle to find love amid class conflict.
Finally, one of the things the novel did for me was open up a new interest and a new appreciation: the films of Yasujiro Ozu. It's a testament to Muriel Barbery's novel and descriptive powers to understand that his films are exactly as she depicts them through the eyes of the character Madame Michel, and while Madame Michel's "family" in the story remains far different from the biological ones depicted by Ozu, the inner connection is identical and full of the same integrity and depth of feeling. Ms. Barbery's depiction of Kakura Ozu, a retired businessman and distant relation of the actual film director (in the novel) is completely perfect, touching, and loving.
Finally, I loved this one statement in the novel -- stated by the oh-so-bright 13-year-old, Paloma character (page 258): "And I am probably the biggest victim of all of this contradiction because, for some unknown reason, I am hypersensitive to anything that is dissonant, as if I had some sort of absolute pitch for false notes or contradictions.... As a result, I don't feel I belong to any belief system, to any of these incoherent family structures."
I dare any reader to name one false note in this entire work. It easily could have been written by a Parisian practiced in the art of Zen meditation.
Just one note: Be patient and take time to read the novel. One of its themes is time itself, the essence of which can only be revealed through time. In the end, when the novel "dies," everything will be revealed. Guaranteed.