The Elegance of the Hedgehog by Muriel Barbery

I had Muriel Barbery's The Elegance of the Hedgehog on my reading list last month, but when I figured out that it didn't actually fit the reading challenge I wanted to use it for, I put it aside. It was bothering me that I had it sitting around unfinished, so I decided to make it my first read in July. This novel stayed on bestseller lists for over a year after it was published, and a lot of people rave about it, so I went into it expecting something really great.

Now that I'm finished with it, all I can say is...yikes. I was not a big fan. But first, a summary.

The story features two protagonists, and the narration is split between their personal writings. The first is Renée Michel, a 54-year-old concierge in a luxury Parisian apartment building. She behaves exactly as one would expect a women in her profession to act. She keeps to herself, performs her duties reliably, and is careful to appear simple-minded in public. It is her firm belief that people from different social classes should not mix together, so she feigns ignorance in front of the wealthy residents of her building. In private, however, Renée is a self-taught intellectual with a deep appreciation for fine art, literature, music, movies, and food. She indulges in these luxuries alone in her apartment and lives in a near-constant state of anxiety that she will slip and reveal her true nature in front of someone.

The other protagonist is Paloma Josse, a twelve-year-old resident of the apartment building where Renée works. Paloma possesses a genius intellect, but much like Renée, strives to hide it from everyone. She performs just well enough in school to be second in her class and plays the part of a typical adolescent at home. Privately, she is so disillusioned with life that she doesn't see the point of continuing to go through the motions and has made plans to burn down her family's apartment and commit suicide on her thirteenth birthday. Her narration takes the form of journal entries in which she catalogues profound thoughts and movements that she notices as the time before her birthday arrives.

When a new resident, a wealthy and wise Japanese businessman named Kakuro Ozu, moves into the building, he takes a special interest in both Renée and Paloma. He can sense that they are intellectually similar to himself and he begins to draw them out of their seclusion with some kindly prodding. Before long, they are all friendly with each other and enjoy deep discussions about philosophy over jasmine tea and delicate French pastries. Through this companionship, Renée begins to reconsider her views on the mixing of social classes and Paloma begins to rethink her violent plans. The Elegance of the Hedgehog is a novel about finding the beauty in the universe and the struggle to find the purpose of life.

I had many struggles with this story, the first of which was the lack of a plot. After Barbery introduces both protagonists, the action moves quite slowly until the final third of the book when Mr. Ozu appears. Many of the chapters are meditations on various topics by Renée and Paloma, such as the purpose of art or the nuances of a tea ceremony. These digressions do not move the story forward at all and are often difficult to follow as they are overloaded with uncommon vocabulary and dense philosophical theories. It felt like I was reading a book of personal musings in the guise of a novel and my mind wandered quite a bit in these sections.

Another issue I had was the characterization. To put it simply, both Renée and Paloma are mean. They both constantly belittle the other apartment residents in their writings and assume that hiding their intelligence is a necessity because none of the other, lesser people around them could possibly understand or appreciate their talents. They internally pick everyone around them apart for everything from their grammatical mistakes to their hobbies. Their beliefs are bizarre and snobbish, and it's unclear for most of the novel why they feel this way about the world. Some illumination on this point is provided for Renée at the very end of the story, but her backstory comes too late for the reader to start sympathizing with her. No reasoning for Paloma's beliefs are ever given at all. These characters are written in such a way that it's obvious the reader is meant to find them deep, complicated, and put-upon. I found them to be extremely unpleasant, which limited how much enjoyment I could get out of this book.

Mr. Ozu suffers from one-dimensional characterization as well, but in the opposite direction. He is a little too wonderful. He preternaturally senses the inner brilliance of Renée and Paloma right away, despite them having successfully fooled everyone around them for decades. He has impeccable taste in art, music, and literature. He is a gourmet chef. He always knows exactly what to do and how to act. In short, his character isn't remotely believable. I don't even want to go into the fact that two incredibly intelligent women needed to be rescued from their own ennui by a man they barely know, so I'll move on.

To be fair, not everything about this novel is bad. Barbery is obviously an academic herself and she has quite a way with words. Many of the passages from Hedgehog were beautiful and rang true to my heart. I was able to move through the novel relatively quickly and was invested in finding out what would happen in the end. This is not a bad book by any means, and I can see why many people have fallen in love with it. I've never been one for philosophy, so it's just not my style.

The Elegance of the Hedgehog is a novel for thinkers. It's for people who are more interested in the big questions it poses about life than they are about the characters who ask them. For a reader like me, who loves a good story and well-developed characters above all, it's not a great pick. Beyond that, I don't think I'm smart enough to understand what Barbery was going for in this work. I didn't get all of the philosophy and I'm not sure what I was supposed to take away from the strange ending. I'm pretty sure I'd be one of those people Renée and Paloma internally pick on for being hopelessly obtuse. I am still glad that I read it, because it was a very different kind of book, but it's not destined to become a favorite of mine. 


Challenge Tally
TBR Challenge: (previously owned) 37/60

Total Books Read in 2017: 48