The Elegance of the Hedgehog
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- ISBN13: 9781933372600
- Condition: NEW
- Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
Product Description
The enchanting international bestseller.
We are in the center of Paris, in an elegant apartment building inhabited by bourgeois families. Renée, the concierge, is witness to the lavish but vacuous lives of her copious employers. Outwardly she conforms to every stereotype of the concierge: stout, cantankerous, addicted to television. Yet, unbeknownst to her employers, Renée is a cultured autodidact who adores art, philosophy, composition, and Japanese culture. With humor and intelligence she scrutinizes the lives of the building’s tenants, who for their part are barely aware of her being.
Then thereÂ’s Paloma, a twelve-year-ancient genius. She is the daughter of a tedious parliamentarian, a talented and incredibly lucid child who has chose to end her life on the sixteenth of June, her thirteenth birthday. Until then she will continue behaving as everyone expects her to behave: a mediocre pre-teen high on adolescent subculture, a excellent but not an outstanding student, an obedient if obstinate daughter.
Paloma and Renée hide both their right talents and their finest qualities from a world they suspect cannot or will not appreciate them. They learn 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, amusing, triumphant novel that exalts the silent victories of the inconspicuous among us.
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I ordered this book for myself but have not had time to read it. I hope it’s a wonderful as the reviews say it is.
Reader’s Rating: 4 / 5
Arrived in excellent time to give as a birthday gift and it was received with pleasure.
Reader’s Rating: 5 / 5
What stikes one at first is the way Barbery is able to change her style of narration, depending on whether it is Paloma, the precocious child of 12 or Renee, the concierge, is the protagonist.While the ‘Profound thought’ and “The journal of the movement of the world’ of Paloma are in simple direct language, the reflections by Renee are couched in heavy, sometimes dense language. For instance, at one point she says, “meaning is merely another impulse, an impulse carried to the highest degree of achievement…” And again, “the efficiency of intelligence offers us the possibility of complexity lacking foundation..”.These may be attriburable to inelegant translation. Of course, several observations of Renee on Painting and Composition and on life and thoughts in all-purpose are profound and deserve deep thought.She says “Every painting by a Dutch Master is an incarnation of beauty and..opens a tiny window onto eternity and the timelessness of sublime form”. “What does Art do for us? It gives shape to our emotions, makes them visible”. And hearing a choir she says,”Everyday life vanishes into song, you are suddenly overcome with a feeling of brotherhood…”.And again “You might note that the most noble concepts regularly emerge from the most coarse and commonplace things”.
But as a depiction of the snobbery of the rich the novel is a failure. [...]
Reader’s Rating: 3 / 5
This book is one of the best I’ve read in reasonably some time. I couldn’t wait to get back to it each day. The tale is reasonably original, yet just a small slice of life and a reminder that we should never judge a book by its take in.
Reader’s Rating: 5 / 5
the book came on time and I was able to send it as a gift.
Reader’s Rating: 5 / 5