The Elegance of the Hedgehog, translated from the French novel by Muriel Barbery, is a remarkable book in so many ways.
It lingered on the New York Times bestseller lists for over a year, and that's a rarer achievement given that it's a novel translated from the French.
It's also a novel with twin and very different protagonists: a young French girl and the concierge of her expensive Parisian apartment building. The young girl, Paloma, is painfully precocious and the concierge, Renee, is surprising, too: a woman who pretends to have no interests "above her station" and yet is an avid reader of philosophy and viewer of Japanese film.
And, finally, it is not only a novel that discusses philosophy and philosophers but is itself about the central question of philosophy: how should we live?
All this highfalutin' philosophy and class consciousness is wrapped up in a sprightly and very conventionally plotted novel. The exposition at the beginning of the novel may move a little slowly but the pace of events picks up very strongly after that. The suspense I felt about what was going to happen to the concierge, whom I'd grown to love, was just as gripping as if I were reading a mystery and waiting to discover the true identity of the killer.
Let me assure you that I'm no philosopher: I dropped two philosophy classes in college. I dreaded reading this novel because I feared the philosophy I'd heard it contained: I thought it would be way over my head and would put me to sleep.
I can't tell you that I understood the philosophy but I can tell you that the story held my attention from start to finish. If we used this phrase in talking about novels, I'd call this novel well-made. And, while I'm no philosopher, the struggle of our protagonists to decide how to live was moving to me and very immediate. I cared tremendously about both of these characters.
My book group read this book for their inaugural book. I was a little disappointed that no one else seemed to love it quite as much as I did. I think I was more than prepared to overlook some of the lack of sentiment Paloma expressed because I thought that what she had to say was interesting.
I wondered if I found it a little more accessible because the question of how we should live never seems to come up again after college and I was actually eager to hear some earnest and also jaded people talk about that.
It lingered on the New York Times bestseller lists for over a year, and that's a rarer achievement given that it's a novel translated from the French.
It's also a novel with twin and very different protagonists: a young French girl and the concierge of her expensive Parisian apartment building. The young girl, Paloma, is painfully precocious and the concierge, Renee, is surprising, too: a woman who pretends to have no interests "above her station" and yet is an avid reader of philosophy and viewer of Japanese film.
And, finally, it is not only a novel that discusses philosophy and philosophers but is itself about the central question of philosophy: how should we live?
All this highfalutin' philosophy and class consciousness is wrapped up in a sprightly and very conventionally plotted novel. The exposition at the beginning of the novel may move a little slowly but the pace of events picks up very strongly after that. The suspense I felt about what was going to happen to the concierge, whom I'd grown to love, was just as gripping as if I were reading a mystery and waiting to discover the true identity of the killer.
Let me assure you that I'm no philosopher: I dropped two philosophy classes in college. I dreaded reading this novel because I feared the philosophy I'd heard it contained: I thought it would be way over my head and would put me to sleep.
I can't tell you that I understood the philosophy but I can tell you that the story held my attention from start to finish. If we used this phrase in talking about novels, I'd call this novel well-made. And, while I'm no philosopher, the struggle of our protagonists to decide how to live was moving to me and very immediate. I cared tremendously about both of these characters.
My book group read this book for their inaugural book. I was a little disappointed that no one else seemed to love it quite as much as I did. I think I was more than prepared to overlook some of the lack of sentiment Paloma expressed because I thought that what she had to say was interesting.
I wondered if I found it a little more accessible because the question of how we should live never seems to come up again after college and I was actually eager to hear some earnest and also jaded people talk about that.
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