L'ELEGANCE DU HERISSON, L'ELEGANZA DEL RICCIO, THE ELEGANCE OF THE HEDGEHOG

I usually do not like reading best-sellers or better I’m often disappointed by them. I can think of very few exceptions and I’m convinced I’ve just ended one of those few: THE ELEGANCE OF THE HEDGEHOG by Muriel Barbery. Actually, I read L’ELEGANZA DEL RICCIO, that is the Italian translation of this French comedy which was an extraordinary successful literary hit in 2007.

I am sure I have already written somewhere in this blog that in literature the “how” is much more important than the “what”. I mean, how the novel is written is much more important than what happens in it: words are more powerful than facts in my opinion. My pencil had a hard time with me reading this book and now its pages are full of underlined wonderful sentences and side or foot-notes.

The reader shares the secret thoughts of the two protagonists. Renée is a widowed concierge in her 50s who calls herself “short, ugly and plump,” a self-consciously stereotypical working-class nobody. She is also an autodidact — “a permanent traitor to my archetype,”as she puts it — who takes refuge in aesthetics and ideas but thinks life will be easier if she never lets her knowledge show. Even the slippers she wears as camouflage, she says, are so typical, “only the coalition between a baguette and a beret could possibly contend in the domain of cliché.” Her unlikely counterpart is Paloma, a precocious 12-year-old whose family lives in the fashionable building Renée cares for. Paloma believes the world is so meaningless that she plans to commit suicide when she turns 13.

It is a two-voice novel. Two women. Renée and Paloma. So distant for so many reasons but so similar, quite twin souls. The most significant feature they share is an extreme solitude due to the fact both have extraordinary sensitiveness and intelligence which they try to hide. Then they share a wonderful gift, that of recognizing Beauty when they meet it.

Someone has written this book belongs to a distinct subgenre: the accessible book that flatters readers with its intellectual veneer. Le Figaro has described it as 'the publishing phenomenon of the decade'. Elsewhere, there were comparisons to Proust. It sold more than a million copies in France and has won numerous awards. It is a profound but accessible book which elegantly treads the line between literary and commercial fiction.

What I can say is that I loved reading it. It was a delight! Muriel Barbery - a Paris-born one-time philosophy teacher who now lives in Japan –explores her favourite theme: philosophy as applied to everyday life. It is full of philosophical clever and profound remarks, art, music, cinema, literature references but it is also an amusing enjoyable comedy at the same time – I laughed out loud more than once! It is a pity I read it in Italian and I couldn’t find a good translation on line to share some excerpts with you. Don’t ask me to translate them. I wouldn’t dare. Ok. I’ll make an effort. Just a sentence, when Paloma decides to go on living and to forget about committing suicide:

“ … life is like this: much desperation but also some instants of beauty when time is never the same. It’s as if the musical notes created a time-parenthesis, a suspension, an elsewhere inside the here, an always inside the never.

Yes. It’s just like that. An always inside a never. Don’t worry Renée. I won’t kill myself and I won’t burn anything at all. Since now on, for you, I’ll seek the always in the never. The beautiful, here, in this world.”