The Elegance of the Hedgehog

Renée Michel is the concierge of a wealthy building on the rue de Grenelle. She is fifty-four, widowed, and hides an extensive self-education behind a performance of exactly what her employers expect.

Paloma Josse is twelve, lives on the fifth floor, has concluded that adult life is futile, and intends to kill herself on her thirteenth birthday.

A concierge hiding her reading, and a twelve-year-old with a date set for her own death.

Devmark’s reading — not a quotation from the book

The novel alternates between Renée's first-person narration and Paloma's journals, with distinct registers and typographic treatment.

The alternation is strictly maintained and the two voices are genuinely different, which is the book's principal technical achievement. Paloma's journals are also formally divided into profound thoughts and a journal of the movement of the world, which is a device that characterises her precisely.

Renée's concealment is a strategy: she has concluded that a visibly educated concierge would be intolerable to the building's residents and would lose her position.

The observation is sharp and the novel is precise about how thoroughly a class role is enforced by expectation rather than by rule.

Both narrators discuss Husserl, Kant, Tolstoy, Japanese cinema and Dutch still life at length, and the digressions occupy a substantial portion of the book.

Barbery taught philosophy, and the material is genuine rather than decorative. It is also the element that most divides readers. The phenomenology material in particular occupies several chapters, and readers with no patience for it will find those sections genuinely difficult to get through.

A wealthy Japanese resident moves into the building, recognises Renée's concealment, and treats her as an equal.

His arrival is the plot's engine and his characterisation is the novel's weakest element: he is almost entirely benign and functions as a solution. His name is also a direct reference to the film director, which is characteristic of the novel's habit of signalling its own allusions.

It is not a crime novel, and it sits here because its central situation is one of sustained concealment with a genuine cost, and because the tension is about whether Renée will be exposed.

The classification is arguable. It is included as suspense in the older sense of the word rather than as a thriller.

The novel is unembarrassedly emotional and its final movement is engineered for maximum effect.

Readers divide sharply on the ending, with a substantial number finding it manipulative and others finding it earned by everything preceding. The final development is also abrupt in a way that several readers have found tonally inconsistent with the two hundred preceding pages of interior reflection.

Both narrators admire Japanese art, film and manners, and the novel's ideal of restraint and precision is explicitly borrowed.

The treatment has been criticised as idealising, and the objection is reasonable: the Japanese characters are almost uniformly wise. The novel's use of Japan as a repository of refinement is also unexamined, and the country functions largely as an idea rather than as a place.

It sold enormously in France and internationally and won several prizes, while attracting criticism from some French critics for what they regarded as middlebrow philosophising.

The divide between its commercial and critical reception is unusually wide. It sold over a million copies in France alone and has been translated into more than forty languages, which is remarkable for a novel this discursive.

Ornate, aphoristic and heavily punctuated with quotation, in Alison Anderson's translation.

The style is deliberate and is a substantial part of what readers either enjoy or find insufferable, and there is very little middle ground. The aphorisms in particular divide readers, since the book contains a great many sentences plainly written to be quoted separately from it.

A 2009 French adaptation, released as The Hedgehog, simplifies the philosophy considerably and foregrounds the relationship between the two protagonists.

It is gentler than the book and removes most of the intellectual material, which is either a mercy or a gutting depending on the reader.

Readers who want a novel of ideas with a strong emotional situation, and who do not object to extended philosophical digression.

It is the least generically conventional book in this section. Readers looking for a thriller should be clear that it is not one, and readers looking for a novel about hiding will find it substantial.