Brilliant disguise
Renee Michel, 54, is everyone’s idea of a concierge: sour, dour, and smelling of cabbage soup. She sits like a toad in the loge of an elegant Parisian apartment building, wearing her insignificance like a cloak of invisibility. Only her cat Leo and her best friend Manuela the cleaning lady know that Renee is an intellectual and a passionate lover of art. In the safety of her apartment, she consumes — and is consumed by — Tolstoy, Mahler, Purcell, Visconti and Ozu. She is one of the two heroines of Muriel Barbery’s enchanting novel, The Elegance of the Hedgehog.
Occasionally she slips up and reveals that she is not what she seems. When one of the rich residents declares that Karl Marx has “completely changed the way he views the world,” she advises him to read The German Ideology. Immediately she regrets having given herself away.
Fortunately the young man, like most members of his class, is too smug to notice that this lowly servant is his intellectual superior. Such is the power of assumptions. “I am not liked, but I am tolerated nonetheless... I am one of the multiple cogs that make the great universal illusion turn, the illusion according to which life has a meaning that can be easily deciphered.”
Meanwhile, on the fifth floor, Paloma Josse, 12, is planning to kill herself on her next birthday. She has every advantage one can imagine — she is extremely intelligent, talented, born into a family of rich, overeducated liberals — but she sees no point in going on if she is to end up just like her parents. “We are, basically, programmed to believe in something that doesn’t exist, because we are living creatures; we don’t want to suffer. So we spend all our energy persuading ourselves that there are things that are worthwhile and that that is why life has meaning.” Like Renee, Paloma hides her true self in order to fit in with society’s comforting assumptions. She scales back her performance in school so as not to appear extraordinary, and adopts the manners of a pop-culture-obsessed teenager.
For the first half of the novel, our two heroines live in near-total isolation, unaware of the existence of a kindred spirit nearby. Outwardly nothing happens: this is not the sort of writing that meets common definitions of “action.” All the activity is mental, and it’s as thrilling as any car chase. Paloma studies Japanese, observes adult behavior with clinical accuracy, and contemplates “motionless movement” while watching a rugby match. Renee reads philosophy, muses on the art of tea, and considers how the border between high culture and low has irreversibly blurred. “How distressing to stumble on a dominant social habitus, just when one was convinced of one’s own uniqueness in the matter!”
Then something happens to shake up their alien worlds. A resident dies, his apartment is sold, and an old Japanese gentleman moves in.
He sees through our heroines immediately. He befriends Paloma and outs Renee as a Tolstoy reader. Paloma has had suspicions about Renee, and they are confirmed. “Madame Michel has the elegance of the hedgehog: on the outside, she’s covered in quills, a real fortress, but my gut feeling is that on the inside, she has the same simple refinement as the hedgehog: a deceptively indolent little creature, fiercely solitary — and terribly elegant.”
The hedgehog begins to shed her quills and wonder if it might be possible to change her fate after all. Which is not to say that The Elegance of the Hedgehog takes a turn for the chick-lit, Renee gets a makeover and finds true love, and Paloma becomes the prom queen. Their lives never lacked romance to begin with, because they had the consolations of art.
“Literature, for example, serves a pragmatic purpose. Like any form of Art, literature’s mission is to make the fulfillment of our essential duties more bearable... We know that we are beasts who have this weapon for survival, and that we are not gods creating a world with our own thoughts, and something has to make our own wisdom bearable, something has to save us from the woeful eternal fever of biological destiny. Therefore, we have invented Art: our animal selves have devised another way to ensure the survival of our species.”
Renee and Paloma discover that they are not alone after all: the worlds they have created for themselves out of books, movies, music, and paintings harbor other inhabitants.
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