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The Elegance of the Hedgehog is an absolutely breathtaking book. Just stunning. Light and airy, yet penetrating, with bits of soft brilliance on every page. My goodness, what an astonishing book.

There are two narrators. The first is Renée Michel, a middle-aged concierge at an extremely opulent luxury apartment building in Paris. She has spent her twenty-five years there cultivating a careful persona of low-class idiocy � leaving the TV on at all times, maintaining an unkempt appearance, speaking in grumbly monosyllables when any of the elite tenants ask her to water the plants or polish the elevator buttons or sign for a package. Of course, this is all an act. She is actually highly cultured, a fervent devotée of philosophy and film and Art (caps intentional). The veneer of stupidity is only to allow the people who live in the building to maintain the class hierarchy that keeps their worlds sensibly organized.

The other is Paloma Josse. She is twelve, terribly smart and terribly sad, unable to bear the simpering silliness of everyone she knows, especially her family. She has decided on her thirteenth birthday to burn down her apartment (when no one is home, of course; she doesn't want to actually hurt anyone) and then to kill herself. Her sections are told through two journals: a journal of profound thoughts and meditations, and a journal of the movement of the world. In the latter, she catalogues actual movements, those which are jarring, peculiar, or beautiful. For example, her mother takes her shopping one day, and they go to a chic lingerie shop. Her mother tries on a garish purple-flowered bra, but when she reaches for the matching panties, she finds that another lady has also just grabbed them. They then do a complex dance, wherein they have a very aggressive passive-aggressive discussion about who deserves the panties, while each tugging, white-knuckled, at the garment, not so hard as to rip the flimsy lace thing, but hard enough to keep one another aware that no one is yielding ownership. Etc. Paloma is searching for movements that are so profound that they can elevate a life predictably lived, and profundity that can remove the taint of silliness from those around her.

There is, of course, so much more than this. The denizens of the apartment building are all catalogued, in all their snobbishness, bitchery, haughtiness, and rare moments of humanity. (In this way I was reminded of Perec's Life: A User's Manual, though of course on a very tiny scale.) Renée watches archly as they all reveal their nasty attitudes and dirty secrets, and then she retires to her loge to watch Japanese art films and read phenomenology (and thoroughly debunk many reigning theories) and meditate on camellias, cats, class, grammar, beauty, and on and on.

In many ways a very still book, The Elegance of the Hedgehog manages, in its quiet way, to be about everything. It is so very soft, very quiet, and very graceful. Not so very much really happens here, at least until the last fifty pages or so, when everything twists and changes. Until then it is just a series of beautiful or saddening meditations, through the eyes of either Paloma or Renée, either of whom I was happy to listen to for pages and pages.

Because I can't think how else to describe this, here is a sample from each narrator.

From Paloma: If you want to understand my family, all you have to do is look at the cats. Our two cats are fat windbags who eat designer kibble and have no interesting interaction with human beings. The only purpose of cats is that they constitute mobile decorative objects, a concept which I find intellectually interesting, but unfortunately our cats have such drooping bellies that this does not apply to them. My mother, who has read all of Balzac and quotes Flaubert at every dinner, is living proof every day of how education is a raving fraud. All you need to do is watch her with the cats. She's vaguely aware of their decorative potential, and yet she insists on talking to them as if they were people, which she would never do with a lamp or an Etruscan statue.

From Renée: And then, summer rain...
To start with, pure beauty striking the summer sky, awe-filled respect absconding with your heart, a feeling of insignificance at the very heart of the sublime, so fragile and swollen with the majesty of things, trapped, ravished, amazed by the bounty of the world.
And then, you pace up and down a corridor and suddenly enter a room full of light. Another dimension, a certainty just given birth. The body is no longer a prison, your spirit roams the clouds, you possess the power of water, happy days are in store, in this new birth.
Just as teardrops, when they are large and round and compassionate, can leave a long strand washed clean of discord, the summer rain as it washes away the motionless dust can bring to a person's soul something like endless breathing.



(Oh, but minus one star for the most flabbergasting, devastating ending I have ever turned a page to find.)

*

From a review by a clerk at Powell's:

The plot is light on what you might call "action." It's a novel of conversations and self-reflections, and takes place almost entirely within the confines of the apartment building. But it moves like a life, in the best possible way.

Um, yes please! That sounds like all my favorite kinds of movies too.