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The Hedgehog Book: 1

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Paloma is the only tenant who suspects Renée's refinement. Although they share interests in philosophy and literature, nothing happens between them until the death of a celebrated restaurant critic who had been living upstairs. 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.

I'm rarely attracted to looking at a still life, but Barberry almost won me over with words: "it embodies a beauty that speaks to our desire but was given birth by someone else's desire because it cossets our pleasure without in any way being part of our own plans." 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. Madame Michel has the elegance of the hedgehog: on the outside, she's covered in quills... on the inside, she has the same simple refinement as the hedgehog: a deceptively indolent little creature, fiercely solitary - and terribly elegant."Art "gives shape to our emotions, makes them visible and, in so doing, places a seal of eternity upon them It's divided into sections, each with a brief name, and although most of the chapters are numbered, some are unnumbered and in italics. Closer inspection shows all the italic ones to have one of two titles: Profound Thought No. x or Journal of the Movement of the World No. x. Intriguing. It then turns out that the numbered chapters are differentiated by being one of two narrators, Reneé or Paloma, and the italic ones are all entries in one of Paloma's two journals (which are recorded in a non-serif font). 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. Literally no point in reading it. Renee needlessly dies at the end. I'm so angry. Perhaps I'll write a more helpful review when I don't feel like a bag of bones and tears. I've always loved that line from Annie Lennox's Why. This book is about the contents of two characters' heads: Paloma, the 12-yr old suicidal prodigy, and Renée, the 50-something cat-lady concierge. Be careful with these characters, and by that I mean: take care of them, for they are fragile, sad souls in need of understanding and in need, moreover, of someone--anyone--to see through their facades and see them for who they really are. And don't we all need that?

Dismayed by the privileged people around her, she decides that life is meaningless, and that unless she can find something worth living for, beyond the "vacuousness of bourgeois existence", she will commit suicide on 16 June, her thirteenth birthday.Muriel Barbery plonge dans bon nombre d’ouvrages, mais confie volontiers que, plus que tous les autres, Guerre et Paix du romancier russe Léon Tolstoï , la fascine encore aujourd’hui. Keep collections to yourself or inspire other shoppers! Keep in mind that anyone can view public collections - they may also appear in recommendations and other places.

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