the elegance of the hedgehog book review

The reason why the joy is fleeting is not that she doesn’t love these things – on the contrary they are her lifeforce and the sustenance she needs to get through the day – is that they can’t breathe and be given their full expression lest the tenants suspect she is more than what she appears and they take advantage of that or ridicule it. Renée’s one advantage, and it’s not one that fills her with any lasting joy until a new tenant Kakuro Ozu moves into the complex and challenges her to not just own she is but to put it on public display, tropes be damned, is that in secret she reads her books on philosophy, art, social theory, watches films by celebrated Japanese director Yasujirō Ozu (particularly The Munekata Sisters) and exercises her well-disguised intellectualism at every turn. “My name is Renée … I am rarely friendly – though always polite – I am not liked, but am tolerated nonetheless: I correspond very well to what social prejudice has collectively construed to be a typical French concierge that I am one of the multiple cogs that make the great universal illusion turn, the illusions according to which life has meaning that can be easily deciphered.” (P.15) Shakespeare may have been the one to remark on it in his play As You Like It, but the truth is all of us, at least the self-aware among us, have wondered at one time or another if we are merely playing the parts assigned to us and if there’s even a shred of authenticity on display for those who care to look.įor Renée, the concierge at one upscale Parisian apartment block, brought to life in all its rarefied glory and shame by Muriel Barbery in her book The Elegance of the Hedgehog, the musing on this truth has long since finished, and she has accepted that she is playing the part of the grumpy, ill-kempt, poorly-educated concierge, the one long assigned to her by convention and the willingness of the wealthy tenants she looks after to not question it.Įach of them are playing their roles, and while Renée understands that she is an actor atop a less than flattering or advantageous stage and knows who she reeally is, the tenants do not and many of them, bar a precious few, are content to go along with their pre-conceived, ill-thought out view of the world which sees them as top of the pile, and someone like their concierge as scurrying around its tolerated only because its necessary edges.

The elegance of the hedgehog book review