The Elegance of the Hedgehog
by Muriel Barbery
325 pages · Published 2006
Added to collection 2 weeks ago
“Beauty consists of its own passing, just as we reach for it. It's the ephemeral configuration of things in the moment, when you can see both their beauty and their death.”
Renée is the concierge of a luxury Parisian apartment building. She reads Tolstoy in her loge, watches Ozu films in secret, and hides her intelligence behind a carefully maintained disguise of ordinariness — because in Paris, a concierge who quotes Husserl is an offense to the social order. Upstairs, twelve-year-old Paloma has decided to end her life on her thirteenth birthday, finding nothing in bourgeois existence worth continuing for. Their unlikely friendship, catalyzed by a cultured Japanese neighbor, becomes a meditation on beauty, class, and the hidden lives people lead behind closed doors. Barbery's novel is witty, philosophical, and deeply Parisian — a book about two people who refuse to be what their address says they should be.
