The elegance of the hedgehog (by Muriel Barbery)

(Amazon UK link)

I had never heard of Muriel Barbery, but her book ‘The elegance of the hedgehog’ was chosen for our local reading group. I liked the cover when my (used) copy of the book arrived, and thought the blurb on the back sounded very interesting. It was originally written in French, so I have been reading a translation; it’s also all set in Paris. 

Indeed, it’s not just set in Paris: almost everything in the book is set in a luxurious apartment block in Paris. There are two main protagonists in the book, and at first sight they seem quite different. Renée is the concierge; she’s middled-aged, widowed and tell us that she’s somewhat overweight. 

Paloma is a twelve-year-old girl who lives in one of the flats with her parents and older sister. Her parents are supposedly socialists, but they’re also very wealthy. Paloma has decided that she’s going to kill herself on her 13th birthday, as she sees a tedious adulthood ahead of her, and doesn’t think she can escape. 

What connects the two is their intellect, and the fact that they’re both trying to hide their intelligence. Paloma is mostly ignored by her parents, and considered stupid by her sister anyway, so she takes refuge in writing.  It’s useful that her sections are in a different font from Renée’s sections, and are classed as notes. Both protagonists are in the first person. 

Renée’s situation is more complicated, and until nearer the end I couldn’t imagine why she wanted to hide who she was. She came from a very impoverished, neglectful background but thrived in school. She loves fine art, and literature, and classical music. She also likes good food. But she hides all this from the residents of the apartments. She dresses dowdily, runs the television all the time, and pretends that she eats offal (although she buys it for her cat). She also takes care to talk as if she’s subservient and unintelligent. 

It seems like an odd thing to do, and even stranger that she’s afraid of being unmasked. The only person who knows her is a Portuguese cleaning woman called Manuela who is her closest friend. The two share a lot of secrets and some interests; but Manuela is comfortable in her own skin, and knows that she’s pretty much invisible to the people she works for.

So there are some potentially interesting characters, and quite thought-provoking observations about the divide between the rich and the poor, which was evidently a significant issue twenty years ago when this book was first published. It probably still is. There’s also the rather irrational expectation that poor people in menial jobs are not very intelligent, and could not possibly be interested in the classics. 

Unfortunately the rest of the characters - primarily the people who live in the apartments - are mostly indistinguishable and two-dimensional. And there’s a lot of digression into artistic or literary raptures, which, in my view, come across as pretentious. They don’t add to the story at all, but aren’t written in such a way that I wanted to learn any more about artists or works that I am not familiar with. 

So by around a hundred pages into the book I was beginning to skim, looking for any advancement in the plot, or anything that would hold my attention. Then one of the residents dies, and a Japanese man called Mr Ozu moves in. He’s the subject of a lot of conjecture as he has major changes in his flat. And he’s the only person who actually notices Renée as a person, and begins to wonder if she is not quite as she seems. Mr Ozu persuades Renée to do things she had not previously considered, and she - helped by Manuela - changes her appearance somewhat. Not that any of the other residents notice… 

The writing is good, but long-winded and a bit turgid in places. I felt could have done with some editing; perhaps it's simpler in the original French. Artistic digressions continue, though mostly quite short. By this stage I had realised that I could skip them altogether without losing anything. 

I appreciated Mr Ozu’s friendship with Renée, and I also liked the way that, almost by accident, Paloma also uncovers her secret and befriends her too. By the time I’d read another hundred pages or so, I was quite interested to know what was happening. I quite liked Paloma’s gradual realisation that she could, perhaps, take charge of her life. I also liked Renée’s transformation, and her explanation of why she doesn’t want to mix with wealthy people (even if it’s somewhat irrational). 

And then the ending. I didn’t like it at all. It made me feel as if I’d been cheated in reading this story. Yes, the climax is sensitively written, for the most part, and it has a positive outcome for another character. But it still left me with an unpleasant feeling, with such lost potential. I know it's a sign of good writing when a character gets under one's skin, even in a negative way. But this felt almost like a cop-out, a way of ending the book without having to tie up any ends, or look to the future. 

It was an interesting read at times, but not a book I’m likely to read again.

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