From what I can gather, Muriel Barbery is a French philosophy lecturer who, like a surprisingly large number of other such professors, chose to dramatise aspects of philosophy in a 2006 novel. Unexpectedly, her The Elegance of the Hedgehog became a French bestseller. Only now has it reached English audiences and my book club chose it for our May reading.
The first impression is exactly what one expects, namely the establishment of a fictional environment in which philosophical ideas can be discussed, explored and used, in a way that inevitably hampers a decent plot. The two protagonists of The Elegance of the Hedgehog are auto didacts, self-taught super-bright individuals who despair of everyone else. Renée is a 54-year-old concierge of apartments for the well-heeled in Paris. She describes herself as ugly, deliberately hides away by personifying the dumb, grumpy ground-floor dweller, and in her back rooms pursues culture – literature, movies, manga, music – with a passion bordering on the self destructive. Paloma, a twelve-year-old who lives in one of the apartments, is precocious beyond her years, so intelligent she has embraced a nihilist point of view that can see no meaning in life. The author uses two distinct, vibrant voices – Renée’s passionate yet panicky diarising and Paloma’s seemingly random thoughts and intellectual philosophies. Into their lives moves a new tenant, the immensely wealthy, highly sophisticated yet genteel Kakuro Ozu, and the crawling plot accelerates as the two closet thinkers intersect with Kakuro and discover each other. The climax occurs quickly.
Like many such novels, the plot is essentially a contrivance, and in this case a rather clumsy one, and the novel suffers from the weight of not much happening but a lot being discussed. In other words, it flirts very strenuously with boredom. Only in the last third do proper human interactios take place and Barbery handles these well, but even then the narrative is slight. The two main characters are colourfully drawn but mainly through their ruminations; I felt rather distanced throughout. The shallow life of an upper-class French apartment is well captured. All in all, this is a novel I should have read quite slowly (it’s philosophy, get it?), with mild enjoyment at best, and with little impact.
Unexpectedly, after a hundred pages I became quite caught up in the enterprise, and I think I know why. Renée and Paloma are geeks and so am I and the ideas, cultures and philosophies explored are genuinely interesting. Barbery’s treatment is not didactic; we’re not spoonfed ‘lessons.’ Instead, refined aspects of modern culture and life are teased out and then left hanging, exactly as they should be. Despite an ending that had me snorting with disbelief, I wound up enjoying The Elegance of the Hedgeh0g. If you enjoy ideas and art, particularly if you like cross-referencing between many modes of artistic expression, you would find much to enjoy in this sophisticated concoction.