The Elegance of the Hedgehog, by Muriel Barbery

Translated from French, The Elegance of the Hedgehog is a philosophical novel. Ideas about life, beauty, and art are channeled through two characters: Renee Michel, the 50-something concierge in a building of fancy flats in Paris, and Paloma Josse, a bright 12-year-old who lives in the building and is planning to burn her family's apartment and commit suicide on her 13th birthday.

For much of the novel, the two have no connection, though they have much in common. Both are hiding their true selves. Renee presents herself as a stereotypical Parisian concierge while actually spending her time reading Russian novels, watching Japanese films, and critiquing phenomenology. She is disdainful of the residents of the building but at the same time fears they will discover she is not who she purports to be. Paloma, meanwhile, is hiding from her family and the "despicable vacuousness of bourgeois existence." She chastises her French teacher for misunderstanding the importance of grammar, as Renee gasps over the misplacement of a comma in a resident's note. The two were clearly meant to be friends.

Just as I began to find the philosophical musings a bit tedious, Kakuro Ozu moves into the building, creating more of a story line. Ozu is wealthy, kind, and amazingly insightful. He befriends both Paloma and Renee and sees that the two of them would benefit from spending time together. These new connections bring Paloma and Renee a "certainty of self" they had previously lacked.

Renee, Paloma, and Kakuro are charming, if somewhat unbelievable, characters, and Barbery offers her philosophical mini-treatises with a strong dose of humor. I was troubled by the sudden pop-psychological explanation for Renee's fear of being recognized as the sophisticated thinker she is; the final series of events could be read as suggesting that her fear was well=founded, which made the ending unsatisfying for me. Overall, however, the book is worth reading and I look forward to Novel Conversations' discussion of The Elegance of the Hedgehog.

Favorite passages:

Pity the poor in spirit who know neither the enchantment nor the beauty of language.

When movement has been banned from a nature that seeks its continuity, when it becomes renegade and remarkable by virtue of its very discontinuity, it attains the level of esthetic creation.

Because art is life, playing to other rhythms.