The Elegance of The Hedgehog by Muriel Barbery

Published by Gallic Fiction
ISBN: 978-1-906040-1-85

Tolstoy separates a lot of his characters into either foxes or hedgehogs. Foxes are quick, they rush at life and want to be modern whereas hedgehogs are more circumscribed, taking life slowly with a need to get to know people before unfurling their prickles.

You don’t need to read Isiah Berlin’s ‘The Fox and The Hedgehog’ or any Tolstoy in
order to appreciate this months’ recommendation - although someone once said that if you miss out all the French and all the war descriptions ‘War And Peace’ is quite a good story. It’s one of the few books I abandoned without finishing, although that was almost 20 years ago - maybe it’s time to give it another chance?

Anyway, onto this months review...

Renée is a hedgehog masquerading as the concierge of number 7, Rue de Grenelle in Paris. She acts out the life of any everyday concierge pretending to watch soap operas on the television whilst actually reading Proust, Hursserl, Kant (and modern detective stories) She listens to Mahler and enjoys Japanese art-house films. She has a cat for appearances sake, named Leo after her great literary hero, Leo Tolstoy and cooks him the sort of food the tenants expect the concierge to eat whilst she dines on red mullet in lemon juice and coriander.

Paloma is the 12 year old daughter of a government minister and a woman who makes a profession of having issues and being in therapy, she is of above average intelligence and is determined not to follow the rest of her family into a bourgeois future. She keeps a diary where she records a profound thought every day, and is planning to commit suicide and set fire to the apartment on her 13th birthday. (The plan includes saving the family cats from the fire) She also has a sneaking suspicion that Renée is not the sour unapproachable creature she portrays.

When a tenant dies his apartment is sold instead of being handed onto a family member in the usual way of things and the arrival of the new owner throws everyone’s lives into confusion.

This story features many cats and a spaniel named Neptune who is hilarious, always trying to mount a highly nervous whippet or rummage in the rubbish looking for scraps of food, Renée uses his behaviour to expound her theories of life.

This is a belter of a story, it makes you laugh out loud, smile wryly to yourself and (I’m sorry to do this to you again) cry buckets. Every character is beautifully portrayed, some of the Parisian ladies made me feel ill-dressed and slobby for having the audacity to lay on the sofa beneath a cat whilst reading this novel, their manners and attitudes are so well described by Paloma in her diaries. There is an incident set in a store during the sales between two society women both of whom want the same piece of underwear - it’s priceless.

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Reviewed by Dianne Blashill
dmblashill@hotmail.co.uk

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