Books: The Elegance of the Hedgehog

Published on Thursday 18 September 2008 12:02

WILL BRITISH READERS FALL IN love with this story of a 12-year-old Parisian who skulks like a spy among the intelligentsia, and a lonely concierge who secretly disdains Husserl's philosophy and is so passionate about Tolstoy she named her cat Leo? Or will Muriel Barbery's studied yet appealing commercial hit be a purely French phenomenon?

The Elegance of the Hedgehog

By Muriel Barbery

Gallic Books, 320pp, 12.99

Certainly in France, this novel is, according to Le Figaro, "the publishing phenomenon of the decade", and as it has already sold a million copies, that's not empty hype. The novel's two narrators alternate chapters, but the book is dominated by Rene, a widowed concierge in her fifties who calls herself "short, ugly and plump", a self-consciously stereotypical working-class nobody. She is also an autodidact – "a permanent traitor to my archetype", as she puts it – who takes refuge in aesthetics and ideas but thinks life will be easier if she never lets her knowledge show.

Her unlikely counterpart is Paloma, a 12-year-old whose family lives in the building Rene cares for. Paloma believes the world is so meaningless that she plans to commit suicide.

Rene's story is addressed to no one, while Paloma's takes the form of a notebook crammed with what she labels "profound thoughts". Both create eloquent little essays on time, beauty and the meaning of life, Rene with erudition and Paloma with adolescent brio. Neither character realises they share such similar views, from "the pointlessness of my existence", as Rene says, to their affection for Japanese culture.

Both skewer the class-conscious people in the building: Paloma observes the inanity of her politician father and Flaubert-quoting mother, while Rene knows that such supposedly bright lights never see past the net shopping bag she carries, its Epicurean food hidden beneath turnips. Both appreciate beauty in Proustian moments of elongated time. Exceedingly self-concerned though they are, each may be less perceptive about herself than about anything around her.

Especially in the novel's early stretch, Barbery, a professor of philosophy, seems too clever for her own good. (This is her second novel; her well-received first, Une Gourmandise, will appear in English translation next year.) Her narrators mirror each other so neatly, the pattern threatens to become more calculated than graceful. Her brief chapters, more essays than fiction, so carefully build in explanations for the literary and philosophical references that she seems to be assessing what a mass audience needs. In just a few pages, Rene offers a mini-treatise on phenomenology.

Only one reference is missing. The sharp-eyed Paloma guesses that Rene has "the same simple refinement as the hedgehog" – quills on the outside but "terribly elegant" within. Yet there is no mention of The Hedgehog and the Fox, Isaiah Berlin's essay on Rene's beloved Tolstoy, which may make this the slyest allusion of all. (What are the odds that a philosophy professor with a working knowledge of hedgehogs and Tolstoy would not have known it?) In Berlin's famous definition of two kinds of thinkers – foxes gather multiple unrelated ideas, while hedgehogs subsume everything into a controlling vision – Rene, intellectually eclectic yet determined to cram her thoughts into a self-abnegating theory of life, resembles Berlin's description of Tolstoy, who was "by nature a fox, but believed in being a hedgehog".

Even when the novel is most essayistic, the narrators' kinetic minds and engaging voices propel us ahead. And the lives of both characters perk up when the rich, mysterious , charmingly attentive Mr Ozu moves into the building. His name alone is enough to tantalise Rene, and he doesn't disappoint her. "You pace up and down a corridor and suddenly enter a room full of light," she says of their friendship, and his presence also brightens the book, adding emotion and an actual story.