The Elegance of the Hedgehog – Muriel Barbary

Rating: 4 stars

The Elegance of the Hedgehog is about what you would expect if I told you it was a fictional book written by a French philosopher. You can practically smell the stereotypes of the baguette and cigarette wafting in between sentences on the pointlessness of life. I once had a friend who translated Rousseau’s J’étais né presque mourant as “I was born half dead,” and she used it to summarize the rest of French culture.

The first few chapters (or half of the book, really) have two independent voices, the two protagonists, Renée Michel and Paloma Josse, an older woman (Renée) who acts as the concierge at the apartment building for a bunch of upper-class, hoighty-toighty Parisians, including the daughter (Paloma) of one. You won’t know this, either of their names, or figure out much of the details of their life until the author lets you piece it together.

Most of the narration is concerned with philosophy, a lot of references to European (especially Russian) and Japanese books/films but little of the story. That accomplishes two things: first, the diatribe of the author; second, giving flavor to the characters. Renée really reminds me of my mom at times because she often disagrees intellectually with others and can be a bit pretentious inside when she’s inside of her own mind. Paloma reminds me of myself and a lot of my peers at high school, thinking that we were superior and had more perceptive minds than most everyone we knew.

Very little of the book is given in consideration of the other characters. It’s not exactly trenchant criticism to say that the protagonists of the book are the centerpiece of the novel. However, they do spend a lot of time criticizing the people they see as vacuous rich kids with their shallow, materialistic lives. There’s a part where Renée surreptitiously opens up a letter containing and reads the Master’s Thesis of Paloma’s sister, and she goes on to critique it as the typical product of universities: possessing little critical thought and more career-seeking (or name-building) than original or carefully crafted. Believe me, I have run into a lot of papers and works that seem equally squalid, but in her personal voice, the author may have dealt with the subject only superficially.

In contrast to what may seem a negative review, I really like the ending. I think it’s uplifting and happy, and while that would be a negative for a lot of American books (a sappy ending to a difficult conflict), it works here because it is happy in the context of a persistent blight that seems to sap the two intellectuals’ happiness. It illuminates a transformation in the character of Paloma, and it left me with food for thought (so much so that I’m using a pun and a cliché)