Editorial Review:

Product Description:
The enthralling international bestseller.

We are in the center of Paris, in an elegant apartment building inhabited by bourgeois families. Renée, the concierge, is witness to the lavish but vacuous lives of her numerous employers. Outwardly she conforms to every stereotype of the concierge: fat, cantankerous, addicted to television. Yet, unbeknownst to her employers, Renée is a cultured autodidact who adores art, philosophy, music, and Japanese culture. With humor and intelligence she scrutinizes the lives of the building’s tenants, who for their part are barely aware of her existence.

Then thereÂ’s Paloma, a twelve-year-old genius. She is the daughter of a tedious parliamentarian, a talented and startlingly lucid child who has decided to end her life on the sixteenth of June, her thirteenth birthday. Until then she will continue behaving as everyone expects her to behave: a mediocre pre-teen high on adolescent subculture, a good but not an outstanding student, an obedient if obstinate daughter.

Paloma and Renée hide both their true talents and their finest qualities from a world they suspect cannot or will not appreciate them. They discover their kindred souls when a wealthy Japanese man named Ozu arrives in the building. Only he is able to gain Paloma’s trust and to see through Renée’s timeworn disguise to the secret that haunts her. This is a moving, funny, triumphant novel that exalts the quiet victories of the inconspicuous among us.

Everything was according to plan and the book arrived in the condition promised.
Thanks,
Tracey

Average Rating:

Rating: - The Elegance of the hedgehog
Everything was according to plan and the book arrived in the condition promised.
Thanks,
Tracey

Rating: - Stick around and wait for this book to bloom
The opening sections of "The Elegance of the Hedgehog", indeed the entire first half, is a bit of a slog due to its two central characters, 54-year old apartment building concierge Renee Michel and 12-year old tenant Paloma Josse, going on and on (in alternating chapters, in their own heads) in a dry, academic manner about art, music, philosophy, history, and the like, with nary a plot development or meaningful conversation in sight. But we soon see that the characters' closed-off musings, untouched by recent experience, have been presented to the reader quite intentionally in that manner. Each has- for her own reasons- sealed herself in a bubble, taking refuge in her own particular intelligence and worldview.

It's only when developments in the apartment building bring Renee and Paloma together, and introduce a new friend who touches both their lives, that their intelligent but dry internal monologues become intelligent, emotional, and joyful monologues, full of life and hope. It's something to see, and worth doing the work in the early going to see. The closing pages are particularly moving, reveling in experience and emotion as strongly as the book's first half avoids these things.

Alison Anderson's English translation of Muriel Barbery's original French work is smooth and engaging, mostly getting out of the way to let the reader absorb the story, yet doing appropriate service to the cathartic elements when the time comes.

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Rating: - Ugh
While there are some lovely dissertations on philosophy, art and cinema in this book, the overall theme of wealth hatred and class warfare is too negative and pervasive for my taste. Rene Michel is bitter and the care she takes to hide her intelligence is insane. Paloma is another miserable whose suicidal attitude is a turn off. Page after page of reading how badly rich people treat their staff, how stupid they are and how they don't deserve anything is very monotonous. I would skip this one.

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Rating: - For the Love of Thought
I love this book - though I realize that its teary ending is that of an elegant chick-book. Some of the funniest passages end with serious twists that mirror that moment when young Mahler, having rushed out of his house to escape a violent quarrel between his parents, suddenly heard a hurdy-gurdy playing "Ach, du lieber Augustin." The fractured idealism of Tolstoy is topped by a faint allusion to the red and white camellias of Dumas. Red eggs on white tuna. Most of all I love what is least pretentious about Barbery's concept: the protagonist is discerning woman who appreciates the beauty of art and thought with no distracting educational cue-cards to tell her what she should feel.

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Rating: - It may have been too French for me

I really wanted to like this book. From the reviews I assumed that the juxtaposition between 54 year old Madam Michel and 12 year old Paloma would be fun. Unfortunately they crossed paths too late in the novel for satisfaction sake.

Madam Michel was much too literally verbose for me and Paloma was much too precocious for a 12 year old in my opinion. The book did get fun when Kakru Ozu entered the mix, but alas, too little, too late....bg



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