book review the elegance of the hedgehog

Barbery chose to present each of her heroine’s narratives within alternating short chapters. It seems like a grandiose task to find out what makes life worth living, and Barbery does it through two logical, unassuming characters. The charm of this book is its simplicity. She is an extraordinarily perceptive intellectual but pretends both at school and at home to not be as clever as she really is. She spends a good deal of her time seeking solitude and quiet within her home (which proves to be difficult), contemplating the world and people around her, and planning her death by suicide upon her thirteenth birthday. Paloma Josse is the youngest daughter of the Josse family. The Hedgehog ’s second heroine is just a twelve-year-old little girl.

We enter into her life just as she is letting her facade crack, with subtle hints appearing now and again, almost revealing her true intellectual nature. Behind the mask she has easily donned for 27 years, she is an autodidact who watches Japanese films, is up to par on philosophers such as Marx and William of Ockham, and has a cat named after Leo Tolstoy. There is Madame Renee Michel, a 50-something who dutifully plays the role of what she believes is expected of her: an unrefined, dumb, and grumpy widow concierge of the hôtel particulier. They view the world as it is, with its many unpleasant and uncomfortable realities, yet also full of simple, refreshing moments of beauty. Set in Paris within a posh, upper-class hôtel particulier, the world is seen through the brilliant minds of two seemingly forgettable people who both live in the hôtel particulier. Part of this surely lies in Barbery’s seemingly effortless capability to explore the meaning and joy behind life’s simplicity.

It became a New York Times bestseller and a beloved book among readers beyond its French borders. The French novelist and philosophy teacher, Muriel Barbery wrote The Elegance of the Hedgehog in 2006. Translated from French into English by Alison Anderson This review is part of our Goodreads, Love Yourshelf bookclub and our ongoing Book Reviews project.

Book review the elegance of the hedgehog