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The Elegance of the Hedgehog, by Muriel Barbery
PDF Download The Elegance of the Hedgehog, by Muriel Barbery
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A New York Times Bestseller
We are in an elegant hôtel particulier in the center of Paris. Renée, the building's concierge, is short, ugly, and plump. She has bunions on her feet. She is cantankerous and addicted to television soaps. Her only genuine attachment is to her cat, Leo. In short, she is everything society expects from a concierge at a bourgeois building in a posh Parisian neighborhood. But Renée has a secret: she is a ferocious autodidact who furtively devours art, philosophy, music, and Japanese culture. With biting humor she scrutinizes the lives of the building's tenants—her inferiors in every way except that of material wealth.
Then there's Paloma, a super-smart twelve-year-old and the youngest daughter of the Josses, who live on the fifth floor. Talented, precocious, and startingly lucid, she has come to terms with life's seeming futility and has decided to end her own on the day of her thirteenth birthday. Until then she will continue hiding her extraordinary intelligence behind a mask of mediocrity, acting the part of an average pre-teen high on pop subculture, a good but not an outstanding student, an obedient if obstinate daughter.
Paloma and Renée hide both their true talents and their finest qualities from a world they suspect cannot or will not appreciate them. They discover their kindred souls when a wealthy Japanese man named Ozu arrives in the building. Only he is able to gain Paloma's trust and to see through Renée's timeworn disguise to the secret that haunts her. This is a moving, funny, triumphant novel that exalts the quiet victories of the inconspicuous among us.
- Sales Rank: #6205 in Books
- Brand: Brand: Europa Editions
- Published on: 2008-09-02
- Released on: 2008-09-02
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 8.25" h x .94" w x 5.21" l, .90 pounds
- Binding: Paperback
- 325 pages
- Great product!
From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. This audio version of the surprise French bestseller hits the mark as both performance and story. The leisurely pace of the novel, which explores the upstairs-downstairs goings-on of a posh Parisian apartment building, lends itself well to audio, and those who might have been tempted to skip through the novel's more laborious philosophical passages (the author is a professor of philosophy) will savor these ruminations when read aloud. Tony Award–winning actress Barbara Rosenblat positively embodies the concierge, Renée Michel, who deliberately hides her radiant intelligence from the upper-crust residents of 7 rue de Grenelle, and the performance of Cassandra Morris as the precocious girl who recognizes Renée as a kindred spirit is nothing short of a revelation. Morris's voice, inflection and timbre all conspire to make the performance entirely believable. A Europa paperback. (June)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
From Booklist
In a bourgeois apartment building in Paris, we encounter Renée, an intelligent, philosophical, and cultured concierge who masks herself as the stereotypical uneducated “super” to avoid suspicion from the building’s pretentious inhabitants. Also living in the building is Paloma, the adolescent daughter of a parliamentarian, who has decided to commit suicide on her thirteenth birthday because she cannot bear to live among the rich. Although they are passing strangers, it is through Renée’s observations and Paloma’s journal entries that The Elegance of the Hedgehog reveals the absurd lives of the wealthy. That is until a Japanese businessman moves into the building and brings the two characters together. A critical success in France, the novel may strike a different chord with some readers in the U.S. The plot thins at moments and is supplanted with philosophical discourse on culture, the ruling class, and the injustices done to the poor, leaving the reader enlightened on Kant but disappointed with the story at hand. --Heather Paulson
Review
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER
INDIEBOUND TOP TEN BESTSELLER
A WASHINGTON POST BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR
A CHRISTIAN SCIENCE MONITOR BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR
A BARNES AND NOBLE BET BOOK OF THE YEAR
A CHICAGO SUN-TIMES FAVORITE BOOK OF THE YEAR
Praise for The Elegance of the Hedgehog
"Gently satirical, exceptionally winning and inevitably bitersweet."
—Michael Dirda, The Washington Post
"The Elegance of the Hedgehog is about love. But not the sappy, head-over-heels variety. Rather, it's about the love of one's friends. It's about the love you can experience when you connect with strangers. And it's about the possibility—but just that—of romantic love."
—The Huffington Post
"Both [of the book's protagonists] create eloquent little essays on time, beauty and the meaning of life, Renée with the erudition and Paloma with adolescent brio."
—The New York Times
"Astute social satire and abstruse German philosophy are rarely found together, but here they are in this ingenious work of fiction."
—The Boston Globe
"In this supple novel of ideas, a best-seller in France...two autodidacts share an allergy to grammatical errors (the concierge considers a misplaced comma an 'underhanded attack') and a love of tea and moments of ineffable beauty. Barbery's sly wit, which bestows lightness on the most ponderous cogitations, keeps her tale aloft."
—The New Yorker
"This fable of love, frienship and the beauty of art not only gives innocence a voice, but also shows what a powerful novel can do: transport, educate and, ultimately, console."
—The Toronto Star
"The Elegance of the Hedgehog is a high-wire performance."
—Los Angeles Times
"[The Elegance of the Hedgehog tells] a beautiful story with a large cast of fascinating, complicated characters whose behavior is delightfully unpredictable...No idea is too big or small to find a home in the Parisian apartment building where most of the characters live."
—The Wall Street Journal
"This dark but redemptive novel, an international bestseller, marks the English debut of Normandy philosophy professor Barbery...By turns very funny (particularly in Paloma's sections) and heartbreaking, Barbery never allows either of her dour narrators to get too cerebral or too sentimental. Her simple plot and sudden denouement add up to a great deal more than the sum of their parts."
—Publishers Weekly
"Hedgehog is really an international book, focused as it is on universal topics of childhood, philosophy, love, and art."
—The Daily Beast
"This story, like all great tales, will break your heart, but it will also make you realize—or remember—that sometimes the pain is worth it."
—Chicago Sun-Times
Most helpful customer reviews
6 of 6 people found the following review helpful.
Very moving
By Barney Collier
I felt as if I had found kindred spirits in Renee, Paloma, and Kakuro, old friends whom I had just met. It was joy to watch them find each other, but I must also warn you that the ending, while hopeful, is not entirely happy.
This is a very remarkable book, full of deep (but not pretentious) philosophical rumination disguised as the day-to-day trivialities of life in an unremarkable apartment building in Paris.
Also, the translation is itself quite remarkable. What must have been very idiomatic French has been rendered as equally idiomatic English (American English, at that). Since I don't read French, I can't be certain about the accuracy of the translation, but I had to keep reminding myself that it was not originally written in English.
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful.
A Thought Provoking Look at the Challenges Facing the Gifted Mind Trying to Assimilate
By George J. Kenney
This book started off very strong; it had me laughing, contemplating and nodding in agreement. I often thought this person is fingering through the index files between my ears and selectively finding thoughts worthy of print. I understood the main characters and their insights. With such a strong introduction, why only 4 stars? That has to do with the ending. The author set the stage for the moral of the story but it had already been conveyed through the excellent dialogue and compassion of the characters. The surprise was more of an, "Oh, really?"
The ending aside, I loved this book and the message it conveyed. Seeing the world differently, seeing connections where others don't, is not necessarily a gift for the person so endowed. The gifted athlete is encouraged to excel but our school system, and society, too often press the gifted student toward mediocrity and despair. I see changes for the better but it is still early. Sharing an insight with someone who understands is a precious thing for a gifted individual. This book explores the depths of this unfortunate anomaly in the journals of two highly gifted individuals, an older woman and a young girl. The author's perception of the world, and the people in it, had me beside myself at times saying, "Precisely, well done!"
If you are gifted, or have a gifted child, I highly recommend this book; it won't disappoint. You will see much of what you have experienced come to life through this author's work.
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful.
Elegant, Profound, and Sublime
By Joy Cagil
I am in awe of this book, possibly because its author paid much importance to the inner lives of the characters, unlike some action-filled novels lacking in depth.
In the story, Renée Michel and Paloma Josse are the two main characters, who although living in the same apartment building do not know about each other and how much they are alike until more than halfway through the book.
Renée Michel is a 54-year-old concierge from humble beginnings but with a developed mind and tastes who hides behind her vocation. Paloma is the 12-year-old, soon-to-be-13, who comes from a rich well-educated family; she despises her family, their snobbery, and the life she is being forced to live. Both Renée and Paloma concentrate and reflect on the nature of true beauty, art, and the meaning of life and death.
Without giving much about the plot, I can only say that when one of the tenants in the building die and his apartment is bought by a Japanese man who understands and befriends both ladies, and then the two learn about each other and connect. The story has a sad but poignant ending.
Although the novel has an immense amount of sophisticated cultural, philosophical, and enlightening thought, it also has a delicately balanced emotional side to it with gentle and reflective twists and turns and remarkably touching scenes at its end.
The story is written from the two viewpoints of Renée and Paloma. The viewpoints are in different chapters and in two different typefaces; thus, it is easy to know who is the speaker. The characters are wonderfully developed and in addition to the original theme of what makes life worth living, the themes of hypocrisy, class consciousness, and the importance of arts and letters in a life make this a unique novel.
I loved this novel for its delicateness yet at the same time its intensity and for its referrals to cultural icons and thoughts and the characters’ musings on them. There are some things about the characters that coincide with who I am. This, too, may be part of the reason why I enjoyed reading this book so much.
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