Paloma, in particular, is far too literate and cynical to be believable even the most precocious twelve year-old (indeed, many wunderkinds almost by definition) will not have the emotional intelligence or articulacy to launch the scathing critiques of classism that she does. At times, these read like a rather transparent vehicle for the author’s pet subjects – lengthy ruminations on Art interrupt one of the more active scenes in the book a philosophical tangent which felt like a hindrance to the plot rather than an illumination of it – and the integrity of the characters’ voices sometimes suffers as a result. The concierge’s philosophical digressions and Paloma’s secretly recorded “Profound Thoughts” form a series of self-contained essays on subjects ranging from psychoanalysis to manga.

Believing that she has nothing to live for, Paloma has been stealing her mother’s sleeping pills in preparation for a glorious suicide that will, she hopes, teach her selfish family a lesson. Her observations on the lives of the other residents is offset by those of Paloma Josse, the precocious 12-year-old daughter of one of the most bourgeois families in Renée’s building (her father is a diplomat, her mother a champagne socialist, and her sister attends the École normale supérieur) who plans to kill herself on her thirteenth birthday. Long since resigned to a life of drudgery and servitude, Madame Michel’s one true vice is the clandestine pursuit of knowledge. Her character reminded me of the surly frouws who man the public toilets in Brussels: thick of heel and whiskered of chin, and universally known as Mesdames Pipi (my maison d’maitre was not staffed by a concierge, but one didn’t have to go far to encounter Renée’s Belgian cousins). An admirer of Tolstoy, Mahler, and Japanese cinema, she hides her refined intellectual tastes behind a veil of mediocrity. Renée Michel is a 54-year-old concierge living and working in a block of Parisian luxury apartments.

It is a charming paean to friendship and beauty, and as picturesque an attack on the French class system as Francophiles could hope for. I’ve come a little late to this book – although translated into English in 2008, Muriel Barbery’s second novel was first published in French back in 2006 – but there is perhaps some advantage to reading a novel after the popular and critical love-ins have receded.Ī hybrid of literary and commercial fiction that has been compared to Sophie’s World, The Elegance of the Hedgehog sold over a million copies in France last year, has been translated into over thirty languages, and continues to collect awards. The Elegance of the Hedgehog, by Muriel Barbery

Reviews elegance of the hedgehog