The Elegance of the Hedgehog – a book review

Title: The Elegance of the Hedgehog
Author: Muriel Barbery
Publisher: Europa Editions
Pages: 325
ISBN: 978-1-933372-60-0
Price: $18.50 CDN

I picked this book up on a whim (and because the main character shares my first name and it’s interesting to me to see Renée’s lurking about in literature).

This is possibly the best money I’ve spent on a book since Audrey Niffenegger’s The Time Traveler’s Wife. I’ve spent the last two days reading it every moment I’ve been awake.

The story centres around Renée, who tells us up front that she is a “short, ugly and plump [with] bunions on [her] feet” and that she is the concierge at a “fine hôtel particulier” in Paris. We also find out that she is a closet intellectual purposely hiding behind a mask  of mediocrity (after all, who expects a concierge to be reading Tolstoy?).

Amongst the inhabitants of Renée’s building lives an extraordinarily intelligent 12 year old named Paloma who also hides her intelligence behind a facade (an average young girl doing fairly average things for her age) – whilst secretly planning to end her life on her thirteenth birthday as an escape from a world that she sees as rather pointless and shallow.

A new resident in the building – a wealthy and fascinating Japanese man named Ozu – causes them both to begin coming out from behind the masks they wear with very interesting results.

In addition to talk of literature, philosophy, music, food and art are the questions that everyone asks themselves: “Why am I here?”, “What is my purpose on this earth?”, “Am I more than mere biology, or am I simply an animal pretending to be more?” and, of course “What gives my life meaning?”.

Renée, Paloma and Monsieur Ozu come to these questions over and over again -all of them learning different things about what it means to be human, what beauty is and searching for those elusive “moments of always within never” – those perfect moments of stillness where the smallest things contain beauty and worlds within themselves. Whether a painting by Vermeer, or nibbling at particularly fine dark chocolate, there are moments where everything has a beautiful clarity and simplicity to it.

I also loved the way words are treated in this story – there is a quiet reverence for how words are put together, their meanings and effects. How a well structured sentence, even about something mundane like picking up dry-cleaning, have an elegance to them if well written.

Words are not just a means to an end, but have purpose and beauty.

After finishing this book, it made me think about the things I give so much time to in my head; things that are past – mostly moments of “never again” – and lost chances and possibilities that I have spent so much time labouring over at the expense of what is here and now. Missing moments of quiet and beauty now to dwell on moments of quiet and beauty that never happened in the past – simply because I wanted them so badly then.

There were moments of always in those nevers – those singular moments where there were possibilities that were so real I felt as if they had happened, and when I realized they hadn’t and never would, I held on to them rather than seeing them and letting them go.

How much time do we spend deceiving ourselves and chasing the “right” life, job, lover, friend or things? Too much I think (I always suspected we spent too much time chasing shadows and now I know we do).

This is a book I will come back to again and again – a book with characters that can give me a good talking to when I am being an ass and wasting the time I have here on earth chasing my own tail.