A precocious girl, she hides her intelligence to avoid exclusion at school. Twelve-year-old Paloma lives on the fifth floor with her parents and sister whom she considers snobs. Her perspective is that "o be poor, ugly and, moreover, intelligent condemns one, in our society, to a dark and disillusioned life, a condition one ought to accept at an early age". She effects this by pretending to indulge in concierge-type food and low-quality television, while in her back room she actually enjoys high-quality food, listens to opera, and reads works by Leo Tolstoy and Edmund Husserl. Likewise, she wants to be alone to avoid her tenants' curiosity. She is an autodidact in literature and philosophy, but conceals it to keep her job and, she believes, to avoid the condemnation of the building's tenants. The widow Renée is a concierge who has supervised the building for 27 years. Divided into eight luxury apartments, all occupied by distinctly bourgeois families, the building has a courtyard and private garden.
The story revolves mainly around the characters of Renée Michel and Paloma Josse, residents of an upper-middle class Left Bank apartment building at 7 Rue de Grenelle – one of the most elegant streets in Paris. It has been translated into more than forty languages, and published in numerous countries outside France, including the United Kingdom (Gallic Books, London) and the United States (Europa Editions, New York), and has attracted critical praise. In the case of Paloma, the narration takes the form of her written journal entries and other philosophical reflections Renée's story is also told in the first person but more novelistically and in the present tense.įirst released in August 2006 by Gallimard, the novel became a publishing success in France the following year, selling over two million copies.
The changes of narrator are marked by switches of typeface. The events and ideas of the novel are presented through the thoughts and reactions, interleaved throughout the novel, of two narrators, Renée and Paloma. It incorporates themes relating to philosophy, class consciousness, and personal conflict. Paloma is the daughter of an upper-class family living in the Parisian hôtel particulier where Renée works.įeaturing a number of erudite characters, The Elegance of the Hedgehog is full of allusions to literary works, music, films, and paintings. The book follows events in the life of a concierge, Renée Michel, whose deliberately concealed intelligence is uncovered by an unstable but intellectually precocious girl named Paloma Josse. The Elegance of the Hedgehog (French: L'Élégance du hérisson) is a novel by the French novelist and philosophy teacher Muriel Barbery.
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