LÉlégance du hérisson By Muriel Barbery
Muriel Barbery ´ 5 Read & Download
after giving this book a chance, i have decided that the only chance it deserves is to be methodically shredded page by page and subsequently dissolved, in its entirety, in a pool of ammonia.
the rampant fetishism of japanese culture aside (which is seriously so disturbing and surprising to come across in a bestseller that was written within the past 5 years), the plot is entirely centered on the interior monologues of two characters, two characters who are so unctuously trite and platitudinizing in their petit daily observations that I believe only the heartiest of misanthropes will take any joy in following the oppressive journey this book calls its narrative. 9782070391653 2 gee whiz...wtf do I say stars !!!
Ok I am going to be cryptic or perhaps not ! The concierge, the little girl and the new neighbor upstairs will of course figure it out as will the multiple cats and don't forget those bloody camelias !
- Mama don't preach
-Get off the bloody soapbox
-Go on a date with Paulo Coelho (yes I did like Veronika Decides to Die more than this one)
- don't fetishize the Japanese
-pretentious prattle galore
-the protagonist is just as bloody snobby as the people she despises
Despite the above commentary there were a few passages of supreme beauty that prevented this little novel from moving into one star territory !!
9782070391653 Another unexpected DNF for a book that I've been looking forward to read since 2014. Stopped around page 100 so no rating. It did not work for me because of the pretentious, hypocritical, snobbish characters who accuse others of snobbery. Plus they don't feel real. The most popular 4 reviews of this novel sum up perfectly what I disliked about it so read those if interested.
9782070391653 If you bite into this expecting a light, buttery, wholly unhealthy croissant, be forewarned -- it has some fiber in it, too. It’s about two unlikely intellectuals. One is a dowdy concierge in an upscale Paris apartment and the other is an unusual 12-year-old girl living there with her well-to-do family. I like how their brainpower comes through in their ideas and observations rather than from the author just telling us how “wicked smaht” they are (to borrow Chuckie’s phrase from Good Will Hunting).
Their outsized crania were not always easy to carry. Renee, the concierge, was not to the manor born (probably more like the servants’ quarters) and she never seemed to forget it. She had a real thirst for knowledge, though –- an accomplished autodidact in philosophy, film, art, and music. But she never felt comfortable sharing any of these joys with anyone given what she felt the attitudes towards a woman of her social standing would be. The girl was a different story. Her cross to bear was how to carve out a niche for herself in a family that was all too comfortable with its elevated status. Her main weapon against the soullessness of life in the upper crust was cynicism. She wielded it well, sometimes to humorous effect. At times she may not have seemed real, but then you could say the same about the Coneheads, and if you recall, they too were from France.
As everyone knows, smart people don’t always figure out ways to be happy. This is one of the themes. However, they might just meet someone with a clear-sighted appreciation for hidden beauty, an easy manner, and a rich vein of empathy for kindred spirits. Much of the meeting up takes place late, but is powerful when it finally does. The spoiler police prevent me from saying as much as I'd like.
In addition to interesting characters, a solid plot, and real wisdom to impart, the book was well-written to boot. I rarely think to appreciate how difficult a translator’s job must be to project a distinctive voice, but this work really stood out. Comment on dit “2 thumbs up” en Francais? At least I know how to say croissant + fibre = still délicieux.
9782070391653 An expert, uproarious parallel play of two extremely astute yet heartwarming consciousnesses! There are so many quotable lines here, observations that are immeasurably insurmountably profound. It is a book of paradigms, life lessons, needle point philosophies arriving from two different backgrounds. The Point: no matter where you are from, you can attain an envious intelligence & plenty a poetic articulation.
About the plot must be simplified by simpler minds (my own, etc.) as: la femme francois version of the English novel by Nick Hornby (& the adorable film with Hugh Grant it spawned) About a Boy. (Although the two main protagonists don't reference each other til after the first half of the book.) Refined & elegant (doi!), L'Élégance du hérisson astounds! You will very likely want to reread this one once again in your lifetime... 9782070391653
I must admit this wasn't a 5-star read until the last 50 pages, which may actually make this a 6-star read. This book is beautiful for its underlying truth: we are all worthy of love, love that will surely be given, if we will but believe we are worthy.
My friend Rose, repeated the quote that referenced Renee Michel as being prickly like a hedgehog, but so elegant on the inside. For me, the section that spoke volumes was the Profound Thought by Paloma in defense of grammar:
Personally I think that grammar is a way to attain beauty. When you speak, or read, or write, you can tell if you've said or read or written a fine sentence. You can recognize a well-turned phrase or an elegant style. But when you are applying the rules of grammar skillfully, you ascend to another level of the beauty of language. When you use grammar you peel back the layers, to see how it is all put together, see it quite naked, in a way.
She continues, but enough here. Thank you Paloma, you reminded me of my mother. I can see her nodding her head in such agreement. 9782070391653 L' Elegance du Herisson = The Elegance of the Hedgehog, Muriel Barbery
The Elegance of the Hedgehog is a novel by the French novelist and philosophy teacher Muriel Barbery.
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.
Divided into eight luxury apartments, all occupied by distinctly bourgeois families, the building has a courtyard and private garden.
The widow Renée is a concierge who has supervised the building for 27 years.
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.
Likewise, she wants to be alone to avoid her tenants' curiosity.
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.
Her perspective is that To 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.
Twelve-year-old Paloma lives on the fifth floor with her parents and sister whom she considers snobs.
A precocious girl, she hides her intelligence to avoid exclusion at school.
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.
Planning to burn down the apartment before dying, she also steals her mother's pills. For the time being she journals her observations of the outside world, including her perceptions of Renée.
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.
A cultured Japanese businessman named Kakuro Ozu, whom Renée and Paloma befriend, then takes a room in the same apartment building. Ozu comes to share Paloma's fascination with Renée: that the concierge has the same simple refinement as the hedgehog.
تاریخ نخستین خوانش: بیستم ماه دسامبر سال 2010 میلای
عنوان: ظرافت جوجه تیغی؛ اثر: موریل باربری؛ مترجم: مرتضی کلانتریان؛ تهران، آگاه، 1388، در 360ص، شابک9789644162978؛ موضوع داستانهای نویسندگان فرانسه - سده 21م
داستان در آپارتمان شماره هفت، در خیابان «گرونل پاریس» جریان دارد، که آپارتمانی در منطقه ی مرفه نشین شهر است؛ خانم «رنه میشل» سرایدار پیر، چاق و زشتروی ساختمان، روحی بزرگوار دارند؛ ایشان عاشق ادبیات، سینما و موسیقی هستند؛ اما کوشش میکنند، کس این را نداند؛ از خط قرمزهای اجتماعی خویش پا فراتر نمیگذارند؛ «پالوما» نیز دختری بسیار باهوش، و دوازده ساله، و یکی از ساکنین همین ساختمان است؛ «پالوما» دختری مهربان، و ساکت است، که به این نتیجه رسیده، که خانواده اش زندگی مسخره ای دارند، و او نمیخواهد به سرنوشت آنها دچار شود، او تصمیم دارد در روز تولدش، خانه را بسوزاند، و خودکشی کند؛ «کاکورور اوزو» نیز، یک «ژاپنی» فرهیخته ی و کتابخوان، و ساکن تازه وارد ساختمان است؛ او یک حلقه ی دوستی بین خود، «رنه» و «پالوما» ایجاد میکند؛ و ...؛
تاریخ بهنگام رسانی 03/06/1399هجری خورشیدی؛ 03/06/1400هجری خورشیدی؛ ا. شربیانی 9782070391653 if you are an artist, a thinker, someone who longs for more, an aestheticist, a dreamer, a seeker.... then read this book. it made me laugh and cry in a way that only a well crafted, well loved, well written book can. 9782070391653 This is another moment when I wonder what is wrong with me... Everyone in France recommends this book! The premise is original enough that I was hoping the book would be a real find: within the same super high end Parisian apartment building live 2 misfits: the 54 year old concierge who reads Kant and Tolstoi in secret and a 12 year old girl with abnormally high IQ and suicidal tendencies. The first half of the book is an excuse for the author's long academic digressions on Kant, phenomenology, William Ockham, oh and Tolstoi. Nothing is really going on... When finally a semblance of plot surfaces, it is so banal that you want to cry... So much for this latest ode to French high culture! The only redeeming point about the book for me is that it made me want to re-read Tolstoi!
9782070391653 I recently had a brief relationship with a young lady who had studied philosophy at a university in southern California. The relationship was destined to be a brief one, as she left for the Philippines to join the Peace Corps just a week or so ago. On one of our last evenings together, she thanked me for something that I found curious.
She said, Isaiah, have you ever met someone at a party or something who finds out you studied philosophy -- and then they just try to talk to you the whole rest of the night about random philosophers they happen to know about, when all you want to do is play beer pong and find someone to make out with?
I'm not sure I would have voiced the sentiment in exactly the same words, but I know what she was talking about. Actually, for me these days my background in philosophy is fairly inconspicuous, but the exact same thing happens to me for my work in the space industry. I'll meet someone at a bar or a house party who has a subscription to Scientific American, and he'll find out where I work and then he'll tag behind me for the entire rest of the party asking my opinion about aliens, or string theory, or any number of subjects almost totally unrelated to my actual specialty or areas of interest except they happen to fall under the general heading of space sciences. Or perhaps in a rare case he might want to talk about space policy, or advanced propulsion systems, or something else that I do actually care about. But it's Friday night, man. Can't you just chill out? Let me get drunk? Wait... do you by any chance have a sister?
Anyway, she continued, thanks for not ever doing that.
Now to understand why I find it curious that she would thank me for such a thing, you do have to realize that we had certainly had conversations about philosophy. I remember one particular rant about utilitarianism, Mills, and his relationship to his father on a concert lawn somewhere. And I'm sure I made plenty of my categorically unfunny cracks about Kantian imperatives.
But the point was that I didn't bring it up when it was totally irrelevant and then refuse to drop it the whole night because I didn't understand that even people that love philosophy don't walk around thinking about philosophy all day (barring, of course, our dear MFSO), nor do they give two shits that you are marginally acquainted with a few Wikipedia entries on phenomenology. And even if they did, couldn't it wait until after we meet your sister and I've got a decent buzz going?
Well, this book is that guy. He follows you around at a party boring you with his pent-up discussion questions from a survey course on philosophy that his professor didn't care enough to work out of him.
Don't misunderstand me. My issue with this book is not the literary name-dropping or the dime store philosophizing. Some authors can get away with this stuff, even brilliantly. Kundera, for example. The difference is that Kundera is interesting. Whereas nothing and no one in this book is anything but a one-dimensional bore.
Who cares about these people? Why should I care about them? One's a concierge, the other's a privileged brat with the exact same hormones as every other 12 year-old girl on the planet. Now, you might say, that's the point, Barbery is trying to show that these people are marginalized, and look how beautiful they actually are in their minds and spirits. But they're not beautiful. I don't give a damn that they're smart. You know what, lots of people are smart. Smart people are a dime a dozen. That doesn't make you, or me, or Renee or Paloma a special beautiful flower. It makes them smart, but they're still completely uninteresting.
I mean, that's really the crux of the irritant right there. Barbery spends half of this book droning on and on about how this concierge and schoolgirl are so unseen because of social expectations, and she would have them be redeemed because they are both intelligent and tender. But that's absurd. That's like Good Will Hunting without the dénouement. I'll say it right now, I don't care about Renee, because she's a concierge in a building in France. I read the whole book and I still don't care. Is it because I'm stilted by my class astigmatism? Please. I'm barely middle-class. I grew up in trailers and fertilized lawns for a living. I don't care about her because she is a concierge and has done nothing interesting with her life except sit in her apartment with a fat cat and read Tolstoy. And the ultimate stupidity -- the most absurd thing in this entire book -- is this ridiculous and unbelievable artifice that Renee has to hide who she is, because of the expectations of the upper class. As if they're going around with spyglasses on trying to root out concierges who have read too much Marx. What garbage! If I found out my concierge had read Marx, I would (a) not give a shit and (b) avoid her as much as humanly possible, out of fear that she would talk to me in exactly the way Renee talks to the reader in this book: interminably.
If anything, Id be more interested in her if she were an ignorant working-class stiff. I'd like to know what her life is like, then. Carver writes about people like that all the time, and its enthralling. Because he makes you care about these people and their motivations. Intelligentsia pretensions in a do-nothing concierge? Excuse me while I pour some more bourbon in this drink.
Same goes for Paloma. She's precocious, fine. That's charming, I guess, but it's not redeeming. She wants to kill herself and burn down her family's house. Wow. That's really unique. I guess I should care about her plight. Or... just maybe... she's exactly the same as every other precocious 12 year-old brat in the bourgeoise world and she'll get over it as soon as she discovers penis and marijuana.
I've read this book be described as very French in its casting of the class divides, but I think that's totally incorrect. The invisibility of people who aren't interesting is universal. The ethic espoused in this book -- that Renee and Paloma are profoundly worthwhile because they are intelligent and tender is unequivocally American. Only in modern western cultures would we say, oh! how wonderful and individual that you are smart and feel alone! you are a special flower! everyone gets a participation ribbon! No. A brat who wants to burn her house down and a concierge who has done nothing with her life except isolate herself are not special, no matter how many books they've read. They are every single uninteresting person that I don't want to read books about.
Don't even get me started on Kakuro, the messianic father-figure (or the absurd Japanese fetish that permeates the book like one of those guys that follows you around at a party talking about natural healing because he read the Tao Te Ching and thinks sushi is real tasty). He's a paper-thin romance novel male. Dominant, austere, deep, and sexually unconscious. After reading Kakuro in Hedheog, I understand why women get so upset about male-fantasy portrayals of women in novels by male authors. This is the exact other side of that coin.
This was more of a rant than a review, so here's my summary for the book jacket: stupid, stupid, stupid. I was irritated the whole time. 9782070391653
« Je m'appelle Renée, j'ai cinquante-quatre ans et je suis la concierge du 7 rue de Grenelle, un immeuble bourgeois. Je suis veuve, petite, laide, grassouillette, j'ai des oignons aux pieds et, à en croire certains matins auto-incommodants, une haleine de mammouth. Mais surtout, je suis si conforme à l'image que l'on se fait des concierges qu'il ne viendrait à l'idée de personne que je suis plus lettrée que tous ces riches suffisants.
Je m'appelle Paloma, j'ai douze ans, j'habite au 7 rue de Grenelle dans un appartement de riches. Mais depuis très longtemps, je sais que la destination finale, c'est le bocal à poissons, la vacuité et l'ineptie de l'existence adulte. Comment est-ce que je le sais ? Il se trouve que je suis très intelligente. Exceptionnellement intelligente, même. C'est pour ça que j'ai pris ma décision : à la fin de cette année scolaire, le jour de mes treize ans, je me suiciderai. » LÉlégance du hérisson