Muriel Barbery’s The Elegance of the Hedgehog
explores matters of taste
Muriel Barbery’s The Elegance of the Hedgehog is not my
cup of tea.
I don’t drink tea. I drink coffee.
I like dogs, not cats; prefer the country to the city, newspapers to philosophical texts and irreverence to elegance.
That said, Hedgehog is an elegant little book bristling with ideas that almost
won me over.
Almost.
Hedgehog
is alternately told in the form of journal entries by Renee Michel and
Paloma Josse, two residents of a building of luxury apartments at 7, rue de
Grenelle, Paris.
Renee,
age 54, is the concierge for the eight families that live there.
She looks like a concierge.
Acts like a concierge. Sounds
like a concierge. She even used to smell
like a concierge.
She self describes as short, ugly
and plump with bunions. She has a large lolling cat named Leo. She runs a
television all day to conform to the resident’s’ expectations but seeks silence
and solitude, books, music and movies in her back room. She uses plain language when speaking to her
employers, but high rhetoric when writing. She used to cook stinky dishes like
cabbage soup until a first floor occupant complained, and she was relieved of
the necessity of that deception. An autodidact and aesthete, she conceals
intellectual passion and disdain for the rich by conforming to the stereotype
of her profession. And she writes things like this:
“This
afternoon Monsieur Arthens is wearing a large polka-dot lavaliere that is too
loose on his patrician neck and does not suit him at all: the abundance of his
leonine mane and the floppiness of the silk cloth conspire to create a sort of
vaporous tutu, causing the gentleman to forfeit his customary virility.
Confound it, that Lavaliere reminds me of something. I almost smile as it comes
back to me. It’s Legrandin, and his lavaliere. In “Remembrance of Things Past,”
the work of a certain Marcel, another notorious concierge, Legrandin is a snob
who is torn between two worlds, his own and the one he would like to enter: he
is a most pathetic snob whose lavaliere expresses his most secret vacillations
between hope and bitterness, servility and disdain.”
She may inhabit the loge, but Renee
lives in her head – and has a great deal in common with Legrandin.
She’s not alone. Upstairs, Paloma, age
12, a spoiled but brilliant little rich girl at the height of adolescent
cynicism raves on about the limitations of adults, the vulgarity of French
cuisine, the nastiness of others, the limitations of psychoanalysis and how
dreadful and annoying her older sister is. Like Renee, she also dumbs down so
as not to attract too much attention. So pointless and terrible is the adult
world that Paloma dramatically declares she never wants to enter it. On her 13th
birthday, she plans to kill herself and set fire to the building. In the
meantime she writes in her two journals: one titled “Profound Thoughts” and the
second, “Journal of the Movement of the World.” In writing she seeks a reason
for changing her mind about suicide.
Separated
by floors and social class, Renee and Paloma often observe the same scenes and
comment on similar topics: social class, dogs and cats, the food critic, etc. Both
drink tea and are attracted to Japanese culture. While Renee privately swoons over the movies
of arthouse director Ozu and the tea ceremony, Paloma reads manga and studies
Japanese.
As if by magic, into their limited
worlds steps a real Japanese man, a man of taste, who sees them for what they
both really are and finally brings them together.
The new tenant, Kakuro Ozu, has the right name for and
starts out on the right foot with the crotchety concierge when he displays a mutual
love for the great literature of Tolstoy. He deciphers the origin of Renee’s
cat’s name, Leo, as if it s a secret code; even better, he, too, has named his
cats after characters in Tolstoy.
Paloma confirms his suspicions that
the concierge is not what she seems; Paloma’s the one who describes Renee as
the book’s title does: “Madame Michel has the elegance of the hedgehog: on the
outside, she’s covered in quill, a real fortress, but my gut feeling is that on
the inside, she has the same simple refinement as the hedgehog: a deceptively
indolent little creature, fiercely solitary –and terribly elegant.”
Soon Renee and Kakuro discover they
share a love for the same music – Mozart -- and finally this book takes a turn
for the better. Their adventures in trading new cultural icons confirm their
pact.
Labeled elsewhere as a
philosophical fable or a novel with a series of essays, Hedgehog’s cross-genre writing is part of its appeal. I find it
also has a lot in common with fairy tales. Renee’s metamorphosis is as
transformative as that of any frog to prince.
Or one can look at it as an intellectual Cinderella featuring a middle-aged
dumpy concierge.
I enjoyed the last third of the
book -- the part in which that transformation happens. All the intellectual ruminating
was too pretentious, too tedious for my taste. I could get my mind to go there
– but it kept telling me it was time to take a walk. Hedgehog is one of those
books I take more pleasure in having read and thinking about than reading.
Paloma’s philosophical quest may be
simply to find what makes life worth living. Renee’s forays into problems of
existence and aesthetics include Kant, Edmund Husserl, and William of Ockham.
As appropriate to cross-genre writing, there are multiple lovely connections between
philosophy explored and characters’ considerations.
For example, Ockham –the medieval
Franciscan friar best known for his philosophical razor -- discusses metaphysical
universals and specifics. Is a table just a table in its singularity or is
there also an essence? How do we know
that a table is a table? (Or a concierge
is really a concierge?) You get the point. It’s just not enough to make up for
the preciousness of Renee’s chauvinism.
What I will most fondly take away from
this book is the confirmation of the magic that happens when you discover
there’s someone out there who adores the same cultural touchstones you do. (In
a snob’s case it’s even better if it’s esoteric enough that it isolates you.) When
you discover your soul mates, you can form your own cult of cultural beings.
Anyone out there have suggestions
for great, heavily plotted, irreverent novels with dogs and coffee that take
place in the country?
