Muriel Barbery

Renée is the concierge of an elegant Parisian apartment building, inhabited by well-to-do bourgeois families. Outwardly, she behaves like a typical concierge: obliging, reserved, and humble. In reality, Renée is a woman of vast culture and refined intellect: she reads high literature, takes an interest in philosophy, listens to fine music, and appreciates quality cinema. She never reveals these pursuits, preferring to live hidden, far from the “indifference that surrounds us,” like a hedgehog. In the same building lives Paloma, a young girl endowed with a keen critical spirit, an “absolute pitch for contradictions.” For two hundred pages, the novel develops along two parallel tracks: the life and reflections of Renée, often too steeped in intellectualism to captivate the reader, and the diary of Paloma, who depicts family life with the attitude of an angry adolescent already disillusioned with the world. Elegance—understood also as subtle irony, disdain for the unsightly, and the quest for beauty—characterizes the narratives of both characters, always delivered in the first-person singular: at times, it almost seems as though the novel is merely an opportunity for the author to assemble and present a series of philosophical and literary reflections, reducing the characters to mere vehicles of communication, devoid of a life of their own. The arrival in the building of a Japanese man and the fortuitous meeting between Renée and Paloma trigger a change in the characters’ lives as well as in the narrative pace. At the root of Renée’s peculiar behavior lies a family tragedy. At last, Renée manages to recount to Paloma the events that led to her sister’s death and her decision to become a “clandestine figure,” since > as I could no longer cease being what I was, I understood that my destiny was secrecy, I had to keep silent about who I was and never mingle with the other world . With this confession, Renée emerges from her hedgehog shell and begins to live, forging ties outside her social station with the wealthy Japanese man and the bourgeois adolescent. It is not, therefore, culture that dismantles social hierarchy, but rather the pursuit of spiritual affinities, of deeper commonalities. Yet just as Renée begins to live, she loses her life in a banal accident. At the moment of death, she feels the longing for a cup of tea, for performing once more a ritual forever identical to itself, shared by rich and poor alike, during which > silence falls, the wind howling outside can be heard, autumn leaves rustling and taking flight, the cat sleeps in a warm light. Time is sublimated . Is the life of the hedgehog, then, the best one? Of this book, one can say that it is very elegant, often rich in evocative ideas and reflections, yet devoid of life—almost an intellectual exercise. Why read it? It consists of a series of fragments that come together in the final part. The elegance of the style, the author’s consistently witty reflections, and the singularity of the situations make it possible to stay the course until the very end.