The Elegance of the Hedgehog

The Elegance of the Hedgehog
Muriel Barbery

Translated from French by Alison Anderson

A Literature Review


“Eternity eludes us”, says Renée Michel, the widowed, bunion-footed, clandestine autodidact concierge of the posh 7 rue de Grenelle, Rive Gauche, Paris. In The Elegance of the Hedgehog, Muriel Barbery compiles many essaylettes on literature, film, music, art into an intricately woven story of class consciousness and the bearing of philosophy on everyday life. Sprinkled throughout, there are also themes of snobbism, luxury (in all senses of the word), and the development of sophisticated substantial taste.


What initially drew me to this work was the split narration format. The narration comes from two points of view. One is from Renée Michel, the intellectual hermit concierge of the building, and the other is from Paloma Josse, an acute 12-year old of the building who is absorbed in absurdism. When the voices change over, the typeface follows suit. Through this, the story adopts a double-edged perspective of the bourgeois world from varying circumstances of age, class, occupation and personality.

Some of the targets of criticism are a little weak, from French nouvelle cuisine being too hoighty-toighty to overpriced psychoanalysts prolonging and enjoying already drawn-out suffering. But at other times, the observations are spot on:

Speaking of our lust for forever, and the pursuit and purpose of creating Art, Renée posits:

“Human longing! We cannot cease desiring, and this is our glory, and our doom. Desire! ...We soon aspire to pleasure without the quest, to a blissful state without beginning or end, where beauty would no longer be an aim or a project but the very proof of our nature.” (p. 203)

Or when Paloma was with her Flaubert-quoting pretentious mother at Angelina’s, a tea room on the rue de Rivoli, she ponders why this café succeeds:

“…all these well-dressed people…who were here only for the significance of the place itself – belonging to a certain world, with its beliefs, its codes, its projects, its history, and so on. It’s symbolic. When you go to have tea chez Angelina, you are in France, in a world that is wealthy, hierarchical, rational, Cartesian, policed.” (p. 256)

Or when Renée is in a bout of depression after learning one of the building’s long time tenants are dying, she starts to contemplate what constitutes life at its most basic principles:

“Thus we use up a considerable amount of our energy in intimidation and seduction, and these two strategies alone ensure the quest for territory hierarchy and sex that gives life to our conatus…a crude vanity…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 cast out from the world.” (p. 97-98)

Although it treads the fine line between commercial and literary fiction, it is none the less a bit of a crash course on the basics of philosophy in the midst of a platonic love story. And presenting a very chocolate-box Paris, there is an air of something very French, very tender but very satirical. Strangely, it seems to build on the notion that Japanese culture represents some sort of transcendence. Renée’s love for Yasujiro Ozu films and the progression of the tea ceremony, Paolma’s obsession with manga and haikus. It is as if European culture will always be too brash to understand certain subtleties life presents. But perhaps one could look at that as the specific route of eminence for those characters alone, and the reader can interpret that and replace it with any other model they aspire to. From this novel, I begin to see that the strive towards luxury and the entire realm of exaggeration and embellishment beyond necessity is all in the effort to distinguish ourselves not just from each other, but of our basic biological destiny. And like my thesis, it explores what moves us, in this nest we build for ourselves. And lastly, on the topic of researching culture, Renée infers:

“The only thing that matters is your intention: are you elevating thought and contributing to the common good, or rather joining the ranks in a field of study whose only purpose is its own perpetuation and function the self-reproduction of a sterile elite.” (p. 252)

The aim, I hope, is the former.