Review by New York Times Review
The woman and the girl who narrate this French novel are closet intellectuals. WILL Americans embrace a heroine who skulks like a spy among the intelligentsia, an apparently unlettered concierge who secretly disdains Husserl's philosophy, adores Ozu's films and is so passionate about Tolstoy she named her cat Leo? Or will Muriel Barbery's studied yet appealing commercial hit be a purely European phenomenon, exposing a cultural fault line? "The Elegance of the Hedgehog," a best seller in France and several other countries, belongs to a distinct subgenre: the accessible book that flatters readers with its intellectual veneer. (Alain de Botton's handy guide "How Proust Can Change Your Life" comes to mind.) The novel's two narrators alternate chapters, but the book is dominated by Renée, a widowed concierge in her 50s who calls herself "short, ugly and plump," a self-consciously stereotypical working-class nobody. She is also an autodidact - "a permanent traitor to my archetype," as she drolly puts it - who takes refuge in aesthetics and ideas but thinks life will be easier if she never lets her knowledge show. Even the slippers she wears as camouflage, she says, are so typical, "only the coalition between a baguette and a beret could possibly contend in the domain of cliché." Her unlikely counterpart is Paloma, a precocious 12-year-old whose family lives in the fashionable building Renée cares for. Paloma believes the world is so meaningless that she plans to commit suicide when she turns 13. Renee's story is addressed to no one (that is, to us), while Paloma's takes the form of a notebook crammed with what she labels "profound thoughts." Both create eloquent little essays on time, beauty and the meaning of life, Renée with erudition and Paloma with adolescent brio. Neither character realizes they share such similar views, from "the pointlessness of my existence," as Renée says, to their affection for Japanese culture. Paloma adores reading manga, while Renée goes into raptures over an Ozu scene in which the violet mountains of Kyoto become a soul-saving vision of beauty. Both skewer the class-conscious people in the building: Paloma observes the inanity of her politician father and Flaubert-quoting mother, while Renée knows that such supposedly bright lights never see past the net shopping bag she carries, its epicurean food hidden beneath turnips. Both appreciate beauty in Proustian moments of elongated time. What Renée calls "a suspension of time that is the sign of a great illumination," Paloma experiences while watching a rosebud fall. "It's something to do with time, not space," she says. "Beauty consists of its own passing, just as we reach for it." And, exceedingly self-concerned though they are, each may be less perceptive about herself than about anything around her. Especially in the novel's early stretch, Barbery, a professor of philosophy, seems too clever for her own good. (This is her second novel; her well-received first, "Une Gourmandise," will appear in English translation next year.) Her narrators mirror each other so neatly, the pattern threatens to become more calculated than graceful. Her brief chapters, more essays than fiction, so carefully build in explanations for the literary and philosophical references that she seems to be assessing what a mass audience needs. In just a few pages, Renée offers a mini-treatise on phenomenology. Only one reference is missing. The sharp-eyed Paloma guesses that Renée has "the same simple refinement as the hedgehog," quills on the outside but "fiercely solitary - and terribly elegant" within. Yet there is no mention of "The Hedgehog and the Fox," Isaiah Berlin's essay on Renée's beloved Tolstoy, which may make this the sliest allusion of all. (What are the odds that a philosophy professor with a working knowledge of hedgehogs and Tolstoy would not have known it?) In Berlin's famous definition of two kinds of thinkers - foxes gather multiple unrelated ideas, while hedgehogs subsume everything into a controlling vision. The woman and the girl who narrate this French novel are closet intellectuals. WILL Americans embrace a heroine who skulks like a spy among the intelligentsia, an apparently unlettered concierge who secretly disdains Husserl's philosophy, adores Ozu's films and is so passionate about Tolstoy she named her cat Leo? Or will Muriel Barbery's studied yet appealing commercial hit be a purely European phenomenon, exposing a cultural fault line? "The Elegance of the Hedgehog," a best seller in France and several other countries, belongs to a distinct subgenre: the accessible book that flatters readers with its intellectual veneer. (Alain de Botton's handy guide "How Proust Can Change Your Life" comes to mind.) The novel's two narrators alternate chapters, but the book is dominated by Renée, a widowed concierge in her 50s who calls herself "short, ugly and plump," a self-consciously stereotypical working-class nobody. She is also an autodidact - "a permanent traitor to my archetype," as she drolly puts it - who takes refuge in aesthetics and ideas but thinks life will be easier if she never lets her knowledge show. Even the slippers she wears as camouflage, she says, are so typical, "only the coalition between a baguette and a beret could possibly contend in the domain of cliché." Her unlikely counterpart is Paloma, a precocious 12-year-old whose family lives in the fashionable building Renée cares for. Paloma believes the world is so meaningless that she plans to commit suicide when she turns 13. Renee's story is addressed to no one (that is, to us), while Paloma's takes the form of a notebook crammed with what she labels "profound thoughts." Both create eloquent little essays on time, beauty and the meaning of life, Renée with erudition and Paloma with adolescent brio. Neither character realizes they share such similar views, from "the pointlessness of my existence," as Renée says, to their affection for Japanese culture. Paloma adores reading manga, while Renée goes into raptures over an Ozu scene in which the violet mountains of Kyoto become a soul-saving vision of beauty. Both skewer the class-conscious people in the building: Paloma observes the inanity of her politician father and Flaubert-quoting mother, while Renée knows that such supposedly bright lights never see past the net shopping bag she carries, its epicurean food hidden beneath turnips. Both appreciate beauty in Proustian moments of elongated time. What Renée calls "a suspension of time that is the sign of a great illumination," Paloma experiences while watching a rosebud fall. "It's something to do with time, not space," she says. "Beauty consists of its own passing, just as we reach for it." And, exceedingly self-concerned though they are, each may be less perceptive about herself than about anything around her. Especially in the novel's early stretch, Barbery, a professor of philosophy, seems too clever for her own good. (This is her second novel; her well-received first, "Une Gourmandise," will appear in English translation next year.) Her narrators mirror each other so neatly, the pattern threatens to become more calculated than graceful. Her brief chapters, more essays than fiction, so carefully build in explanations for the literary and philosophical references that she seems to be assessing what a mass audience needs. In just a few pages, Renée offers a mini-treatise on phenomenology. Only one reference is missing. The sharp-eyed Paloma guesses that Renée has "the same simple refinement as the hedgehog," quills on the outside but "fiercely solitary - and terribly elegant" within. Yet there is no mention of "The Hedgehog and the Fox," Isaiah Berlin's essay on Renée's beloved Tolstoy, which may make this the sliest allusion of all. (What are the odds that a philosophy professor with a working knowledge of hedgehogs and Tolstoy would not have known it?) In Berlin's famous definition of two kinds of thinkers - foxes gather multiple unrelated ideas, while hedgehogs subsume everything into a controlling vision.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [October 27, 2009]
Review by Booklist Review
In a bourgeois apartment building in Paris, we encounter Renée, an intelligent, philosophical, and cultured concierge who masks herself as the stereotypical uneducated super to avoid suspicion from the building's pretentious inhabitants. Also living in the building is Paloma, the adolescent daughter of a parliamentarian, who has decided to commit suicide on her thirteenth birthday because she cannot bear to live among the rich. Although they are passing strangers, it is through Renée's observations and Paloma's journal entries that The Elegance of the Hedgehog reveals the absurd lives of the wealthy. That is until a Japanese businessman moves into the building and brings the two characters together. A critical success in France, the novel may strike a different chord with some readers in the U.S. The plot thins at moments and is supplanted with philosophical discourse on culture, the ruling class, and the injustices done to the poor, leaving the reader enlightened on Kant but disappointed with the story at hand.--Paulson, Heather Copyright 2008 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
This dark but redemptive novel, an international bestseller, marks the debut in English of Normandy philosophy professor Barbery. Renee Michel, 54 and widowed, is the stolid concierge in an elegant Paris hotel particulier. Though "short, ugly, and plump," Renee has, as she says, "always been poor," but she has a secret: she's a ferocious autodidact who's better versed in literature and the arts than any of the building's snobby residents. Meanwhile, "supersmart" 12-year-old Paloma Josse, who switches off narration with Renee, lives in the building with her wealthy, liberal family. Having grasped life's futility early on, Paloma plans to commit suicide on her 13th birthday. The arrival of a new tenant, Kakuro Ozu, who befriends both the young pessimist and the concierge alike, sets up their possible transformations. By turns very funny (particularly in Paloma's sections) and heartbreaking, Barbery never allows either of her dour narrators to get too cerebral or too sentimental. Her simple plot and sudden denouement add up to a great deal more than the sum of their parts. (Sept.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
Published in France in 2006, this work quickly captured the European imagination, and the advance praise is sufficiently glowing to guarantee attention in the English-speaking world. The novel itself is more problematic. Philosophy professor Barbery--the author of one previous novel, Une gourmandise--has fashioned a slow and sentimental fable out of her own personal interests--art, philosophy, and Japanese culture--about a widow who serves as caretaker of a Parisian apartment building and a troubled girl living in the building. Barbery attempts to make the story appear more cutting-edge by introducing dizzying changes in typography, but the effect seems precious from the outset and quickly grow tiresome. Recommended for public libraries where literature in translation is in demand and for academic libraries to complement their French collections.--Sam Popowich, Univ. of Ottawa Lib., Ont. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
The second novel (but first to be published in the United States) from France-based author Barbery teaches philosophical lessons by shrewdly exposing rich secret lives hidden beneath conventional exteriors. Rene Michel has been the concierge at an apartment building in Paris for 27 years. Uneducated, widowed, ugly, short and plump, she looks like any other French apartment-house janitor, but Mme Michel is by no means what she seems. A "proletarian autodidact," she has broad cultural appetites--for the writings of Marx and Kant, the novels of Tolstoy, the films of Ozu and Wenders. She ponders philosophical questions and holds scathing opinions about some of the wealthy tenants of the apartments she maintains, but she is careful to keep her intelligence concealed, having learned from her sister's experience the dangers of using her mind in defiance of her class. Similarly, 12-year-old Paloma Josse, daughter of one of the well-connected tenant families, shields her erudition, philosophical inclinations, criticism--and also her dreams of suicide. But when a new Japanese tenant, Kakuro Ozu, moves in, everything changes for both females. He detects their intelligence and invites them into his cultured life. Curious and deeply fulfilling friendships blossom among the three, offering Paloma and Rene freedom from the mental prisons confining them. With its refined taste and political perspective, this is an elegant, light-spirited and very European adult fable. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Review by New York Times Review
Review by Booklist Review
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Review by Library Journal Review
Review by Kirkus Book Review
