Renée 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 Renée 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, Renée 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 the French publishing phenomenon of
2007: from an initial print run of 3,000 to sales of over 2 million in
hardback. It took 35 weeks to reach the number one bestseller spot but has now
spent longer in the French bestseller lists than Dan Brown.
The Book Depository
The Book Depository
My Thoughts on The Elegance of the Hedgehog:
Every
so often a book comes along which you just fall in love with, gently and
slowly. It sort of creeps up on you and you know that this book is now part of
your life, that these characters are people to you. Muriel Barbery’s book, The Elegance of the Hedgehog is one of
those for me. The main character, Renée was so real that when I was in Paris
shortly after reading this book I went looking for the apartment building where
she had lived, almost as though on a pilgrimage. Of course she is not real, of
course the other occupants of the building are not real, but the story was so real that I believed every word
of it.
Renée,
the concierge who reads Tolstoy and Kant, aware that we all have to project a
certain image to the world so that we don’t confuse those around us, those who
put us in a little box and are uncomfortable if we don’t fit into it snugly, is
so clever that she has two television sets in her apartment. On one she watches
wonderful movies and documentaries, and another one – the one which is visible
by occupants in the building in which she is the concierge – is tuned to inane
daytime soaps and reality TV shows, conforming to what is expected to be her
taste in entertainment. How clever of Ms Barbery to think of adding in detail
such as that, detail which we would not have missed if it had not been there
but which is just so right in completing the character study of this woman we
come to know so intimately.
Initially
I was quite judgemental: I loved Renée but greatly disliked the wealthy
occupants of the apartment building in which she lived and worked. I didn’t
even believe the words of Paloma, the suicidal young girl who forms the second
side of the personal triangle which makes up the structure of this book: I felt
her thought processes and reasonings were way too old for a 12 year old, and so
therefore I rejected her. I was wrong. I came back to Paloma, realising that
the very precociousness of her thoughts was part of her tragic condition, her
mental state, and then I accepted her and put her in the same box with Renée,
the box with “Approval” stamped on the lid.
As
I judged Paloma, she judged the other members of her family far more harshly.
In her isolation, she took a blinkered view of her family. Her family were indeed
dysfunctional. Her sister, Colombe, considered by Paloma to be shallow and
foolish, is just another young girl suffering from the same isolation but
dealing with it in a different way, by a seeming frivolity and noisiness, and a
growing obsession with neatness. While one sister is planning her own death,
the other is slipping into a world of self-harm. Meanwhile, to add to this
cheery mixture, their mother just quietly retreats more and more into a life
dedicated to her cats and houseplants.
Father, the consummate politician, smiles in the face of such devastation,
retreating into his games of rugby and you can’t help but feel that he will one
day end up guzzling wine with peasants on a mountain top and having unprotected
sexual relations with the local rugby players, or goats, whichever comes to
hand. What a family. They make me think of a very thin sheet of toffee - one
light tap and it will shatter. They are brittle, and each so alone. Poor sad
household - even the cat needs medication.
Renée,
of course, is just as prejudiced and biased as those she condemns, the wealthy,
the aristocratic, the bourgeoisie. What we see, of course, with Paloma's
family, with the other characters who come and go through the grand doors of
this apartment building, is that each and every one of them – of us? - is
imprisoned by their "standing" in the community just as much as Renée
is. We are left to wonder, indeed, whether Renée has the easier time of it: she
has to live up to nothing because nothing is expected of her. She does, though, have the supreme joy of
wallowing in her own intelligence, and possesses a certain smugness in knowing
that she is so superior to most of those "successful" people around
her.
The
safe life that Renée knows, the invisible walls which Paloma has built around
herself, are about to be swept aside when an intriguing new tenant, the
venerable Japanese gentleman, Ozu, moves into one of the apartments, an apartment left vacant after the death
of its previous owner. Barbery has given us Renée, has given us Paloma, Colombe,
the various others who come and go in this microcosm of society, but now she
moves the boundaries and takes us on the most wonderful ride. What a marvellous
skill to introduce a character so unexpected, so seemingly unconnected, but one
who will form the third part of the triangle, perhaps the good old “square on
the hypotenuse”.
And
then, yes, that ending, that death, that sentence which in itself is a full
stop - stark, but beautiful. All the philosophy, all the amazing words and
thoughts that we have become used to with Renée are encapsulated in two words, "I
die". Masterful!
