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Five stars for the philosophy essays, four stars for the actual plot. I have a feeling that the philosophy professor is dominating the novelist in this highly popular novel by Muriel Barbery, yet I have really enjoyed the time spent in the company of the two main characters: and elderly concierge and a pre-teen girl, both living in a high end Paris apartment, but at opposite ends of the social scale. Madame Renee Michel hides in the basement while Paloma Josse plays hides and seek with her family in their huge penthouse. I have wondered at times if their role in the economy of the book as soundboards for the author's ideas is not diminishing their credibility as actual people.

For most of the novel the trick works, and despite the lack of a traditional plot line I had no difficulty turning the pages, eager to find out more and invested in the fate of the two women. I guess this reaction validates the bestseller status the novel has achieved in its native France and elsewhere. Barbery manages even more: makes me identify with her characters and with their search for meaning, across gender and economical differences, accentuating the universal nature of the philosophical and social issues raised here. I am neither near the bottom, nor at the top of the ladder in economic terms, but I have something of the hedgehog in my own nature, both as I remember my awkward teenage years and as I ponder on my currrent single status. It also helps that I am interested in Tolstoy and Flaubert, in Yasushiro Ozu, visual arts, cooking and classical music like Madame Renee; that I like Japanese Manga and haiku poetry like Paloma. That I have a social conscience and an aversion to affectations and sophistic arguments.

The "hedgehog" argument is easy to discern : we all have our defensive mechanisms - protective armour, camouflage colours and survival instincts that help us avoid bullies and survive in a mostly predatory and selfish society.

As always, I am saved by the inability of living creatures to believe anything that might cause the walls of their little mental assumptions to crumble. Concierges do not read 'The German Ideology', hence, they would certainly be incapable of quoting the eleventh thesis of Feuerbach.

Madame Renee had decided very early in life that she needs to hide her intelligence if she wants peace and a normal life. Insecure about her physical appearance and held down by extreme poverty, she plays the role of the dumb concierge, while in the privacy of her den she reads the classics or treatises of philosophy while she cooks secret haute-cuisine recipes. Her curling into spiny ball that keeps the world at a distance and her radical opinions on the class struggle have deeper roots that I first thought. (view spoiler)[ In one of the last chapters we find out that she has been traumatized in early childhood by the death of her older sister, seduced by a rich man and then abandoned to give birth in the middle of a blizzard, like in a cheap Victorian melodrama. Dr. Freud would have a field day analyzing her subconscious and her repressed emotions. (hide spoiler)]. Two things in particular recommended her journal entries to me : an excellent sense of humour, most often than not directed at her own person, and her ultimate refusal to give in to despair, her constant search for beauty and transcendendal moments that might redeem her negative experiences. Compare these two statements:

I am a widow, I am short, ugly, and plump, I have bunions on my feet and, if I am to credit certain early mornings of self-inflicted disgust, the breath of a mammoth. I did not go to college, I have always been poor, discreet, and insignificant. I live alone with my cat, a big lazy tom who has no distinguishing features other than the fact that his paws smell bad when he is annoyed. Neither he nor I make any special effort to take part in the social doings of our respective species.

and

The tea ritual: such a precise repetition of the same gestures and the same tastes; accesion to simple, authentic and refined sensations, a license given to all, at little cost, to become aristocrats of taste, because tea is the beverage of the wealthy and of the poor; the tea ritual, therefore, has the extraordinary virtue of introducing into the absurdity of our lives an aperture of serene harmony. Yes, the world may aspire to vacuousness, lost souls mourn beauty, insignificance surrounds us. Then let us drink a cup of tea. Silence descends, one hears the wind outside, autumn leaves rustle and take flight, the cat sleeps in a warm pool of light. And, with each swallow, time is sublimed.

Such a deep divide between the outside image we present to the world and the private landscape of our inner thoughts I believe is present in each and everyone of us, making Madame Renee a proper stand-in for the human condition. I also believe that the hedgehog in us starts to display its spines as we leave childhood behind, thus the need for a second lead character in the person of Paloma Josse. The similarities of the two cases subvert the class divide theory of Madame Renee, demonstrating that neither poverty nor a life of plenty are the deciding factors in the awakening of a higher awareness. Two further quotes should illustrate the point:

Renee Poverty is a reaper: it harvests everything inside us that might have made us capable of social intercourse with others, and leaves us empty, purged of feeling, so that we may endure all the darkness of the present day.

Paloma All our family acquaintances have followed the same path: their youth spent trying to make the most of their intelligence, squeezing their studies like a lemon to make sure they'd secure a spot among the elite, then the rest of their lives wondering with a flabbergasted look on their faces why all that hopefulness has led to such a vain existence. People aim for the stars, and they end up like goldfish in a bowl.

Both the older woman and the young girl share in a fascination with Japanese culture, a prop to balance the yin of daily tedium with the yang of artistic aspirations. Which brings me to the "elegance" argument of the novel. I may not be fully convinced by the plotting talents of the author, but I am ready to bet Barbery is a great teacher of philosophy. It's not so much the clarity of the presentation as the passion she manages to transmit for the subject, the way she makes it obvious that philosophy is not a dry academic pursuit, but a vital part of being alive, that it has bearing on everything we do and on how we interact with others.

When you set out to deal with phenomenology, you have to be aware of the fact that it boils down to two questions: What is the nature of human consciousness? What do we know of the world?

We know for sure that the world is not a nice place to live. We also know what the end will be, and an afterlife is only relevant in light of the decisions we make here on Earth. Death and a sense of failure, of wasted opportunities can be studied either on the materialistic or on the spiritual level, which is how my teachers used to boil down different philosophical schools back in my highschool days. Barbery is even more concise:

Which way lies truth, in the end? In power, or in Art?

I don't think it's much of a spoiler, or much of a surprise to the reader, to find out that the author comes down heavily on the side of Art, in particular when Madame Renee is confronted with the death of one of the tenants in her luxury building:

At times like this you desperately need Art. You seek to reconnect with your spiritual illusions, and you wish fervently that something might rescue you from your biological destiny, so that all poetry and grandeur will not be cast out from the world.
Thus, to withdraw as far as you can from the jousting and combat that are the appanages of our warrior species, you drink a cup of tea, or perhaps you watch a film by Ozu, and place upon this sorry theater the seal of art and its greatest treasures.

Escapism from the daily worries is the name of the game for many a compulsive reader. I know that in my own case more than half of the books I read are a hard sell for anything else that simple entertainment. At what point do we make the transition from reading for pleasure to reading for meaning? Is this distinction useful or desirable? Another of those simple pointers from highschool that have managed to endure over the years is that Socrates counsels moderation and finding the balance between opposite concepts, the truth being found neither at the black end nor at the white end of the spectrum: 'highbrow' & 'lowbrow' ; 'yin' & 'yang'. The best books would be then the ones that are both entertaining and instructive, and Barbery has come very close to this midpoint.

When something is bothering me, I seek refuge. No need to travel far; a trip to the realm of literary memory will suffice. For where can one find more noble distraction, more entertaining company, more delightful enchantment than in literature?

The problem of the hedgehog is that he or she may find peace in retreating from the rat race and shelter among the great thinkers of the past, but the sharp spines that provide safety are also serving to keep the world at a distance. What value has all the beauty of Art and philosophy if it stays locked up inside your head? Both Madame Renee and Paloma need to come out of the shell and remember that to live is to share - a cup of tea, a book you loved, a sunset over the sea. A beautiful haiku offered by Paloma captures this last theme:

If you want to heal
Heal others
And smile or weep
At this happy reversal of fate.

In the novel the hand of friendship is extended from Manuela, the cleaning lady who bakes exquisite patisserie and from Mr. Kakuro Ozu, an elderly Japanese businessman whose name is a homage to the great filmmaker Yasujiro Ozu. On the internet I may not share the tea cup, but I can pay it forward by recommending novels like this to friends who have similar tastes in literature.

What does Art do for us? It gives shape to our emotions, makes them visible and, in so doing, places a seal of eternity upon them, a seal representing all those works that, by means of a particular form, have incarnated the universal nature of human emotions.


- - - - -
A good reviewer knows how to stop on a good phrase, but I am still finding my way, and I still have a bunch of bookmarks and ideas floating around in my head, probably waiting for a re-read in order to fit better into this presentation.
One of these projects is to try to explain why I didn't go for 5 stars, despite liking the novel so much: I felt that Paloma was not as interesting and well developed and Madame Renee. I thought Mr Kakuro Ozu was a little too convenient and theatrical - too obvious a means to an end. Most of all (view spoiler)[ I really think it is a cop out to kill the main character in order to make a point. I felt the same way about David Nicholls and his "One Day" (hide spoiler)]

Other themes I wanted to touch :

Politics. A toy for little rich kids that they won't let anyone else play with.

Tolstoi - I must re-read Anna Karenina -

There's so much humanity in a love of trees, so much nostalgia for our first sense of wonder, so much power in just feeling our own insignicance when we are surrounded by nature ... yes, that's it: just thinking about trees and their indifferent majesty and our love for them teaches us how ridiculous we are - vile parasites squirming on the surface of the earth - and at the same time how deserving of life we can be, when we can honor this beauty that owes us nothing.

Popular entertainment:

Television distracts us from the onerous necessity of finding projects to construct in the vacuity of our frivolous lives: by beguiling our eyes, television releases our mind from the great work of making meaning.

Subjectivism:

We never look beyond our assumptions and, what's worse, we have given up trying to meet others; we just meet ourselves. We don't recognize each other because other people have become our permanent mirrors. If we actually realized this, if we were to become aware of the fact that we are only ever looking at ourselves in the other person, that we are alone in the wilderness, we would go crazy.

Violence:

Civilization is the mastery of violence, the triumph, constantly challenged, over the aggresive nature of the primate. For primates we have been and primates we shall remain, however often we learn to find joy in a camellia on moss.

The camellia reference is from one of the Ozu movies, a bleak story where the only relief comes from contemplating one of those formal Japanese temple gardens.

A reader on reading:

I enjoy reading the leaflets that come with medication, the respite provided by the precision of each technical term, which convey the illusion of meticulousness and a frisson of simplicity, and elicit a spatio-temporal dimension free of any striving for beauty, creative angst or the never-ending and hopeless aspiration to attain the sublime.

Unity in diversity:

... Can we all be so similar yet live in such disparate worlds? Is it possible that we are all sharing the same frenetic agitation, even though we have not sprung from the same earth or the same blood and do not share the same ambition?