Review: The Elegance of the Hedgehog

May 24, 2010  
Filed under Scene

Mary Koppy|Editor-in-chief

Muriel Barbary went out of her way to tell a story about standing still.

Told from the point of view of a aging, widowed concierge at an upscale French apartment building and a twelve year old resident upstairs, Elegance details the lives of two women acutely aware both of who they are and of how their incredible intelligence exiles them.

Renee, the concierge, conceals her artistic tastes and philosophical intelligence behind a veil of obstinate and grudging service to her employers, her intellectual and social inferiors in every sense except that of commercial wealth.

Paloma, the girl upstairs, knows that she possess and unusually pragmatic and coherent grasp on a variety of advanced concepts. she also believes the world to be a pointless and ugly place and decides early on to end her own life by her thirteenth birthday.

With stunning compassion and grace, Barbary introduces both of her narrators to the quiet elegance of their world. She tells her story by looking at the innermost working of the human heart, yet the motion of the book never stalls. Despite the heavily introspective narration, the story moves resolutely forward, unaffected by its surroundings.

Barbary’s story becomes all the more incredible considering it exemplifies exactly what it describes. As Paloma journals about the “Movement of the World,” she looks for movement withing stillness and silence within noise. At the same time, Barbary writes these very characteristics, leading her narrators through a silent hurricane of life changing events and cataclysmic revelations.

The Elegance of the Hedgehog looks inward to tell an outward story, its characters moving in concentric circles, never quitecoming together, but steadily overlapping with one another to tell a story of three, four or five stories made one.

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