The Elegance of the Hedgehog [Paperback]

Muriel Barbery (Author), Alison Anderson (Translator)

Book Description

Release date: September 2, 2008

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.

--This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Starred Review. This audio version of the surprise French bestseller hits the mark as both performance and story. The leisurely pace of the novel, which explores the upstairs-downstairs goings-on of a posh Parisian apartment building, lends itself well to audio, and those who might have been tempted to skip through the novel's more laborious philosophical passages (the author is a professor of philosophy) will savor these ruminations when read aloud. Tony Award–winning actress Barbara Rosenblat positively embodies the concierge, Renée Michel, who deliberately hides her radiant intelligence from the upper-crust residents of 7 rue de Grenelle, and the performance of Cassandra Morris as the precocious girl who recognizes Renée as a kindred spirit is nothing short of a revelation. Morris's voice, inflection and timbre all conspire to make the performance entirely believable. A Europa paperback. (June)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to the Audio CD edition.

From Booklist

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. --Heather Paulson

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Product Details

• Paperback: 336 pages
• Publisher: Europa Editions (September 2, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1933372605
• ISBN-13: 978-1933372600
• Product Dimensions: 8.2 x 5.3 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (622 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,212 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #65 in Books > Literature & Fiction > World Literature

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

558 of 599 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars "Art is life playing to other rhythms." September 7, 2008

By Mary Whipple HALL OF FAMETOP 100 REVIEWER

Format:Paperback

(4.5 stars) With sales of over half a million copies in Europe, this clever novel, newly released in the United States, may make Muriel Barbery as much of a literary phenomenon here as she is there, despite the novel's unusual focus on philosophy. Narrator Renee Michel is a fifty-four-year-old woman who has worked for twenty-seven years as concierge of a small Parisian apartment building. A "proletarian autodidact," Renee grew up poor and quit school at age twelve, but throughout her life she has studied philosophy secretly, searching for knowledge about who she is and how she fits into the grand scheme of life. Grateful for her job, she finds it prudent to keep her rich intellectual life hidden from the residents, maintaining the façade of the perfect concierge, someone who lives in a completely different world from them.

Alternating with Renee's thoughts about her life and studies, are the musings of Paloma Josse, a twelve-year-old who lives in the apartment building, the daughter of wealthy parents who have active professional lives. Like Renee, Paloma pretends to be just average, carefully constructing her own façade so that she can fit in at school, though she has the intellectual level of a senior in college. Ignored by her parents and her school, Paloma plans to commit suicide on her thirteenth birthday. As the lives of Renee and Paloma unfold and overlap, the rough parallels in their lives become obvious, both in their isolation and in their need to hide their talents.

When one of the apartment residents dies, Kakuro Ozu, whom Renee thinks may be related to the Japanese film maker that she most admires, moves in. Paloma, too, is impressed with Ozu, bemoaning the fact that he has moved in just as she has decided to kill herself. When Ozu suspects that Renee is not what she seems to be, he wants to know her better, and as Ozu confides in Paloma, Paloma begins to feel hope for the future.

Barbery is a skilled writer who artfully combines the philosophy of Renee's studies--from Husserl: Basic Writings in Phenomenology, to The Dilemma of Determinism and Kant's Idealism--with aesthetics and the desire of both Renee and Paloma to find beauty in art and poetry. Always, however, she remembers that this is a story, with characters who must appeal to the reader. As the characters begin to change, the reader understands them and the forces that have made them the people they are, hoping for their happiness. Motifs from Japanese film and the novels of Tolstoy combine with images celebrating the perennial beauty and death of flowers, especially the camellia, adding universality and connecting the characters to broader artistic themes. Thoughtful, ironic, and often darkly humorous, the novel creates moods which bring the characters vividly to life, even as they are contemplating death and the deepest of life's mysteries. n Mary Whipple

321 of 344 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Beauty is truth September 2, 2008

By Nigel Seel

Format:Paperback

You are smart, but unschooled, a daughter of the poorest illiterate peasantry. Over the decades you have read your Marx and Kant, appreciated Mozart, immersed yourself in 17th century Dutch painting. You smuggle literature home in your shopping bag along with the turnips and cat food. You are Renee Michel and a concierge in a Left Bank apartment block serving the rich. You are an invisible drab, and no-one must ever suspect.

You are precociously intelligent but only twelve and a half. Your sister, studying for her Masters degree at the Sorbonne, is a `beautiful person' of barren soulless talent. Your mother is a vacuous socialist snob while your father is a senior Government official hiding behind his role. You know from Dawkins and all the rest that life is just a pointless primate struggle to reproduce your genes. Surrounded by so much empty posturing and mediocrity, what is the point? You are Paloma Josse and you are determined to commit suicide on your 13th birthday.

A particularly loathsome apartment owner dies and someone new moves in. Wealthy, cultured and thoroughly civilised, perhaps Renee and Paloma, in their daily deceptions, have finally encountered someone they can't hoodwink. Primary certainties are reworked as the story moves to its shocking conclusion.

This is a beautiful piece of work: erudite, laugh-out-loud humorous and tragic by turns. It can't have been easy for Alison Anderson to capture in English the sophistication of Muriel Barbery's writing, but she's made a fine job of it. Recommended.

168 of 179 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Heartrending yet marvellous August 23, 2008

By I LOVE BOOKS

Format:Paperback

"The Elegance of the Hedgehog" transcends excellence. It is one of those rare books with a special inner quality that makes you ponder over life in a way only very few others can. After turning the last page, I was left staring into space, feeling bereft. I wished there was more to read, yet its ending befitted the whole tale. I now understand why it received so many wonderful reviews in France recently and why it became such a literary success. It fully deserves it.

Just a brief summary, as described by both main characters -Renée and Paloma - introducing themselves in the beginning of the book, which is written in a diary form by each.
Paris, present day. Renée is the widowed concierge of an elegant building in an exclusive area. Its inhabitants all belong to the upper class. She is, by her own admission, dowdy, unattractive, often grumpy and wants everybody to believe that she is the stereotype of all concierges, blending into the background, almost featureless. But Renée has a well-kept secret: she is an extremely cultured autodidact. She loves art, philosophy, literature, music. Aestheticism and beauty in all of its forms fascinate her. Renée keeps concealing this aspect of her life to the outside world, hiding behind the concierge's screen -literal and metaphorical-.
Paloma is a twelve-year-old who lives in the building with her rich family. She is distractedly well-loved by her parents and does not get along with her older sister. Paloma is an extremely bright, clear-headed, lucid child. She is so lucid it is uncomfortable -yet to the reader she also conveys tenderness, and her wittiness is remarkable- . She pretends to be the average adolescent, yet despises what she considers the subculture of her peers and does not see any sense in continuing living. Her view of life is very disillusioned, disenchanted, sardonic. She decides to commit suicide on her 13th birthday.

Renée and Paloma could not be more different, yet their way of looking at life is often very similar. Their paths never cross, if not by sight, until the day a new tenant moves into the building and...
I cannot add anything else, the tale would definitely be spoiled.

In my opinion, this book is not your typical beach-read, it deserves to be savoured slowly and quietly if possible. Yet it is a page-turner and I myself have devoured it. Often heartbreaking, yet unbelievably funny in parts. Real humour pops up unexpectedly, which renders the reading even more pleasant and lightens some heart-knotting situations. The narrative flows beautifully and is linguistically refined.

Ladies and Gentlemen, get your tissues ready if you must, but do read this book. It shall touch you profoundly yet you will not regret having read it.