Why this book: Selected by my literature reading group.  Patsy – you have lobbied hard for a couple of real winners, and this is another one! I understand why you were willing to read it for the 3rd time!

Summary in 3 sentences. Two very intelligent, well read and eccentric women share their perspectives on their worlds, how they think and how they live. One is a 54 year old concierge of an apartment building in Paris, who describes herself  (more or less) as a frumpy, ugly, and poor; the other is an extremely precocious 12 year old girl in a wealthy family who is cynical and disenchanted.  In the first part of the book, the narrative alternates between the perspectives of these two women, and the chapters are brilliant, almost standing alone as essays on the world these women are viewing – until about halfway through the book, their lives converge in an unexpected way.

My Impressions: I loved this book. One of my favorite reads in recent years.  If you  enjoy getting inside the heads and hearing the perspectives of intelligent, thoughtful and observant women, and reading their thoughts beautifully expressed in wonderful prose, I expect that you would thoroughly enjoy this book.

Two main characters occupy center stage for most of this book:

Renee: The lead character is Renee Michel, a 54 year old woman who presents herself to the world as overweight, unattractive and uninteresting –  a typical grumpy concierge – who has managed her apartment building for 27 years.  She indeed believes herself to be dumpy, frumpy, and unattractive, but not unintelligent.  She is a voracious reader, who avidly studies history, philosophy, and literature (especially Tolstoy), and is a connoisseur of the arts.  She is is a sensitive thinker and student of life, with a Buddhist monk’s appreciation of beauty, simplicity, and the joy that can be found in moment or insight.

BUT,  she actively hides this side of herself from the world, preferring to remain a non-entity, playing the role of the grumpy and dull concierge, so that people will  ignore her and leave her alone.  She is careful not to arouse anyone’s interest and is determined to protect and hide who she really is.   People in her apartment see her as little more than a bland functionary, a non-person, not worthy of their attention, or even their respect. Nurturing this perception gives Renee the privacy, freedom and space to explore the world of ideas and the arts on her own terms, without being invited, nor expected to participate in the superfluous social rituals that characterize much of modern urban living. “Thus am I,  poor concierge, resigned to a total lack of luxury – but I am an anomaly in the system, living proof of how grotesque it is, and every day I mock it gently, deep within my impenetrable self.” (p 124)

Paloma:  The other main character in The Elegance of the Hedgehog is the youngest daughter of a well-to-do family living in the apartment building Renee manages. With a precocious wisdom beyond her years, she is disenchanted with the lives and values of her parents, her older sister, and others in her social class, and simply sees no way out for herself.  She is angry and frustrated but feels powerless, except to express her cynicism and anger in her journal.  We hear her voice through her journal, each journal entry a separate chapter in the book, full of her humorous and condescending observations of her family and upper-middle class values in general.  The world she observes and comments on is so superficial and pretentious that she wants no part of it. She unemotionally plans her suicide as a statement to shake up the complacency of her family, for whom she has so little respect.  Her voice is not as sophisticated as Renee’s, and though the author/translator attempts to give her something of a teenage girl’s irreverent voice, it isn’t very convincing.  It’s just a bit hard to believe how a young girl of her age can have arrived at her sense of history, social awareness and philosophy.  Her cynicism and insights are merciless and often deliciously biting and on target.  I distinctly heard the influence of the French existentialists I’ve read (Sartre and Camus) in her commentaries, though they were never mentioned by name.

These two very different women share an alienation from the values, behaviors and pretentiousness of normal society and polite social intercourse.  And they express their alienation in very different ways.  As we get to know them individually, we know that their lives will eventually and somehow converge. And they do.

A couple of important supporting players help provide context for getting to know these two fascinating women.  About halfway through the story, a third important character – a successful and worldly Japanese business man – enters the story and unconsciously and with little fanfare, changes the dynamic of all the relationships in the story.

Camellia lying on moss.  Renee’s image of a beautiful camellia lying on bed of moss is an image that returns in the story again and again, and gives meaning to this story, from multiple perspectives.  And by the way, Renee is the “hedgehog.”

I loved this book.

———————

A few quotes. It was a joy to go back and review the many passages I had marked.  I was again struck by how well Muriel Barbery (and her translator) captured the Buddhist wisdom of Renee and the existential cynicism of Paloma.  I know I include a lot of quotes here, but these are but a few of those I marked as noteworthy or remarkable:

Paloma:  – even for me life is already all plotted out and so dismal you could cry: no one seems to have thought of the fact that if life is absurd, being a brilliant success has no greater value than being a failure. It’s just more comfortable.  And even then: I think lucidity gives your success a bitter taste, whereas mediocrity still leaves hope for something.  p 24

Paloma: We are, basically programmed to believe in something that doesn’t exist, because we are living creatures; we don’t want to suffer.  So we spend all our energy persuading ourselves that there are things that are worthwhile and that is why life has meaning.  p 24

Renee: (referring to her Portuguese cleaning woman) Manuela …is an aristocrat.  an authentic one, of the kind whose entitlement you cannot contest: it is etched onto her very heart, it mocks titles and people with handles to their names   What is an aristocrat?  A woman who is never sullied by vulgarity, although she may be surrounded by it. p 32

Paloma: With the exception of love friendship and the beauty of Art, I don’t see much else that can nurture human life. I’m still too young to claim to know much about love and friendship. But Art…if I had more time to live, Art would be my whole life.  p 37

Renee: I have read so many books…And yet, like most autodidacts, I am never quite sure of what I have gained from them.  There are days when I feel I have been able to grasp all there is to know in one single gaze, as if invisible branches suddenly sprung out of nowhere, weaving together all the disparate strands of my reading – and then suddenly the meaning escapes, the essence evaporates, and no matter how often I reread the same lines, they seem to flee ever further with each subsequent reading, and I see myself as some mad old fool  who thinks her stomach is full because she’s been attentively reading the menu.  p 53

Renee:  We are all prisoners of our own destiny; must confront it with the knowledge that there is no way out and, in our epilogue must be the person we have always been deep inside, regardless of any illusions we may have nurtured in our lifetime. Just because you have been around fine linen does not mean you are entitled to it – no more than a sick person is to health.  p 90

Renee: Elsewhere the world may be blustering or sleeping, wars are fought, people live and die, some nations disintegrate, while others are born, soon to be swallowed up in turn – and in all the sound and fury, amidst eruptions and undertows, while the world goes its merry way, bursts into flames, tears itself apart and is reborn, human life continues to throb….   So, let us drink cup of tea. p 91

Paloma: In our world, that’s the way you live your grown-up life; you must constantly rebuild your identity as an adult, the way it’s been put together it is wobbly, ephemeral, and fragile, it cloaks despair and, when you’re alone in front of the mirror, it tells you the lies you need to believe.  p 92.

Renee: We talk about love, about good and evil, philosophy and civilization, and we cling to these respectable icons the way a tick clings to the nice big warm dog.  p 97

Renee: The camellia against the moss of the temple, the violet hues of the Kyoto mountains, a blue porcelain cup – this sudden flowering of pure beauty at the heart of ephemeral passion; is this not something we all aspire to? and something that, in our Western civilization, we don not know how to attain? P 101

Renee: I find this a fascinating phenomenon: the ability we have to manipulate ourselves so that the foundation of our beliefs is never shaken. p 108

Renee: ….there are marvelous poets born in stinking caravans, or high-rise slums who do have for beauty the sacred respect that it is so rightfully owed….To the rich, therefore, falls the burden of Beauty.  And if they cannot assume it, then they deserve to die.  p.110

Paloma: What is love? How will we love? Who will it be? When? Why? Our opinions differ. Oddly enough Marguerite has an intellectual vision of love, whereas I’m an incorrigible romantic.  She sees love as the fruit of a rational choice (of the http://www.sharedtastes.com variety) whereas I think it springs from a delicious impulse.  There is one thing we do agree on, however: Love mustn’t be a means, it must be an end.  p 194

Paloma: Our other favorite topic of conversation is fate, and people’s prospects in life…and if you want my opinion, the most awful thing is not that we’re playing this game, but that it isn’t a game. p 194

Renee: But when we gaze at a still life….we delight in its beauty…we find pleasure in the fact that there was no need for longing, we may contemplate something we need not want, may cherish something we need not desire….In the scene before our eyes – silent, without life or motion – a time exempt of projects is incarnated, perfection purloined from duration and its weary greed – pleasure without desire, existence without duration, beauty without will…. For art is emotion without desire.  p 204

Renee: Entrusting ones life is not the same its opening up one’s soul, and although I love Manuela like a sister, I cannot share with her the things that constitute the tiny portion of meaning and emotion that my incongruous existence has stolen from the universe.  p 224

Paloma: Personally I think there is only one thing to do: find the task we have been placed on this earth to do, and accomplish it as best we can, with all our strength, without making things complicated or thinking there’s anything divine about our animal nature.  This is the only way we will ever feel that we have been doing something constructive when death comes to get us. Freedom, choice, will, and so on? Chimeras. We think we can make honey without sharing in the fate of bees, but we are in truth, nothing but poor bees, destined to accomplish our task and then die. p 238

Renee: Like any form of Art, literature’s mission is to make the fulfillment of our essential duties more bearable…something has to save us from the woeful eternal fever of biological destiny.  p 248

Renee: Every gray morning, day after gloomy day, secretaries, craftsmen, employees, petty civil servants, taxi drivers and concierges shoulder their burden so that the flowor of French youth, duly housed and subsidized, can squander the fruit of all that dreariness upon the alter of ridiculous endeavors.  p 249