Å·±¦ÓéÀÖ

Oh, God, where do I even begin?

Can one give a book half a star? A quarter? How does something so pretentious and egomanical become a popular bestseller, lauded by critics, even makes the list of so-and-so-books to read...? All I can think of is the Catcher in the Rye Syndrome: a book riding on the waves of that trite unconventionality which makes everybody such a unique snowflake, like everybody else.

The problems with this piece of... I am not even sure I can call it a novel with sufficient impunity, let us, by all means, call it a book and be done with it, sheltering behind semantic ambiguity. This piece of a book has so many things wrong with it, that I am trying hard to figure out which one to enumerate first.

I suppose I should begin at the beginning; here is our first protagonist, a fifty-something woman who hasn't yet gotten over her neuroses and is busily projecting to the world a persona completely dissonant with her real interests and tastes. She goes to a great deal of effort to make that personal possible; buys food she hates, cooks meals she never eats just to create the "right" kind of smell; purchases a second television so that she can be seen watching brainless programmes. Next thing you know, when people treat her like she wants to be perceived, she is chagrined, upset, incensed, even, at the lack of respect she is accorded. What would you say to that lady? If it were me, I'd smack her on the head with a book and say "You don't want to watch brainless programs? So don't! You don't want people to think you're an uneducated fool? Don't! And for god's sake, get a shrink, because lady, you have a problem."

But this is not the tack the author takes. We hear compassion, understanding, even approval. Approval of what? Of raging hypocrisy that is even more upset because it isn't rewarded. Of a woman so judgmental that she condemns one of the tenants in the house because she misplaced a comma in a sentence. The author never bothers to explore her gloriously unrepentant social stigmas. Who cares if the ones stigmatized are rich people? A stigma is a stigma, and Barbery writes stereotypes. She scatters them on the page, wafts them around like incense, and feels superior and subversive. Oh, gag me with a spoon.

Then of course there's Paloma, a 12 year old uber-privileged nuisance who could benefit from a few therapeutic smacks on the backside. Her main occupation seems to be sneering at her decent enough parents, passing judgment upon every single person she comes across in thirty seconds, whining about how special she is due to her high intelligence, and contemplating - once again, in an echo of the aforementioned Catcher in the Rye - burning down her parents' home and committing suicide. because that would, rather than devastate her parents and immerse them in their own troubles, supposedly open their worldview up and sensitize them to other people.

These two vastly hypocritical, obnoxious characters, are brought together by Prince Charming from a distant land: Mr. Kakuro Ozu who is as stinking rich as any other tenant in the building, but by virtue of his being Japanese, is automatically superior to them culturally. He also seems to be one of the few decent people about - which our heroines most definitely are not - and because he's new on the scene, and hasn't been pushed off by the perfect image the concierge builds around herself, he actually interacts with her in a meaningful way. Whether or not she could ever have any meaningful interaction with any other tenant is unclear, since she thoroughly exerted herself to prevent it.

Here the author's mania for things Japanese expresses itself to the fullest extent: no aspect of Japanese culture is bad, and they are all somehow automatically better than the French versions: the girl, Paloma, spends three pages writing a diatribe about how French cuisine is heavy, ostentatious and old-fashioned, whereas Japanese cuisine is... simply eternal (the ellipses do not appear in the text but are implied). I wanted to laugh. Japanese culture has much in it that is worthy and wonderful, and a great selection of it, as it's very ancient, but for a book busily attempting to break down class stereotypes and classism to admire the rigidly class-conscious Japanese culture to such an extreme - to present it as the pinnacle of politeness and geniality - seems a little absurd.

In the end, the book itself, which rallies so heavy-handedly against cliches, succumbs to cliches to an unforgivable extent. The heroines never discover the humanity of people around them, they don't understand that class is meaningless because all the people around them - including the shallow, vain ones living in the building - are just people. They remain with their feelings of superiority, merely ameliorated by the fact that there are now several of them. What's more, the heroines themselves remain entirely passive and stagnant until such time as a Prince from a Far Away Land appears to rescue them from their dolour. They don't discover internal drive or strength, grow of their own accord, they are forced, like Cinderella, for God's sake, to open up with the wave of a magic wand.

There's even a bloody makeover scene.

To top it all off, the book's inadvertent levels of double-standard are staggering. Whatever the heroines do - being judgmental jerks, contemplating causing huge levels of suffering to their family - is sacred. Whatever other people do, no matter how innocent, is seen as automatically insipid, vain and shallow. For example, the cats: the names of Ozu's and Renee's cats are held up to be symbols of refinement (they're named after Tolstoy and Anna Karenina characters), but the cats of the parents, named Constitution and Parliament (which, I think, are actually very cool names) as well as the dogs Neptune and Athena, are made into symbols of pretentiousness.

Please, Barbery, if you're going to hold X as a social totem, stick with it all the way.

This book is rapidly shooting up to be the "worst read of the year" on my list. I feel, not without justification. It's all the things a social commentary shouldn't be: ham-handed, stereotyping, cruel, unforgiving, and, to be honest, rather out-of-date. The daughter of peasants daren't eat dinner with the son of a diplomat? Oh, please. Could we move on? I certainly intend to.