The Elegance of the Hedgehog
Encyclopedia
The Elegance of the Hedgehog is a novel by the French
novelist and professor of philosophy Muriel Barbery
. The book follows events in the life of a concierge
, Renée Michel, whose deliberately concealed intelligence is uncovered by an unstable but intellectually precocious girl named Paloma Josse. Paloma is the daughter of an upper-class family living in the upscale Paris
ian apartment building where Renée works.
Featuring a number of erudite characters, The Elegance of the Hedgehog is full of allusions to literary works, music, films, and paintings. It incorporates themes relating to philosophy, class consciousness
, and personal conflict. The events and ideas of the novel are presented through the thoughts and reactions, interleaved throughout the novel, of two narrators, Renée and Paloma. The changes of narrator are marked by switches of typeface. In the case of Paloma, the narration takes the form of her written journal entries and other philosophical reflections; Renée's story is also told in the first person but more novelistically and in the present tense.
First released in August 2006 by Gallimard
, the novel became a publishing success
in France the following year, selling over a million copies. It has been translated into several languages, and published in a number of countries outside France, including the United Kingdom and the United States, attracting critical praise for both the work and its author.
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 if they were to discover how cultured she is. 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 "[t]o 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, in her words, beyond the "vacuousness of bourgeois existence", she will commit suicide on her 13th birthday on June 16. She steals her mother's pills, and she plans to burn down the apartment before dying. For the time being she journals her observations of the outside world, including her perceptions of Renée.
Paloma is the only one of the educated tenants who suspects Renée's refinement, and for most of the novel, the two "cross each other but don’t see each other" in the words of Time Out reviewer Elisabeth Vincentelli. Although they share an interest in philosophy and thoughts about literature, nothing much happens to 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, and Ozu comes to share Paloma's fascination with Renée: that the concierge has the "same simple refinement as the hedgehog".
Towards the end of the novel, Barbery brings Renée out of her internal seclusion, and the older woman guides young Paloma toward realizing that not all adults pursue vanity at the expense of their intelligence and humanity. However, only shortly after Renée realizes that the beauty of life and her connections with the world makes life worth living, she dies in the same way that Roland Barthes
did. This leaves Paloma and Ozu devastated but leads Paloma not to commit suicide.
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Renée Michel is a 54-year-old widowed concierge. She has never been to college because she considers herself to always have been poor, discreet, and of no significance. Renée, however is self-taught; she reads works of the German
philosopher Immanuel Kant
and Russia
n writer Leo Tolstoy
(and even names her cat "Leo"), disdains the philosophy of Edmund Husserl
, adores 17th-century Dutch
paintings, likes Japan
ese art-house films by Yasujirō Ozu
, and listens to the music of composers Henry Purcell
and Gustav Mahler
.
Renée, who conceals her true self to conform to the lowly image of typical concierges, introduces herself as "a widow, short, ugly, chubby", with "bunions on my feet and, on certain difficult mornings, it seems, the breath of a mammoth". Her outward appearance is summarized by The Guardian
reviewer Ian Samson as "prickly and bunioned". When Paloma eventually discovers Renée's identity, she describes the latter in her journal as having the "elegance of the hedgehog
"—although like the spines of the hedgehog, she is covered in quills and prickly, within, she has in the words of the English translation of the book quoted by Viv Groskop "the same simple refinement as the hedgehog: a deceptively indolent little creature, fiercely solitary—and terribly elegant".
arian father (a former government minister), and a Flaubert
-quoting mother, Paloma has a penchant for absurdism
. She regards her sister's scholarship as "cold and trivial" and deems her mother's culture as conventional and useless. Paloma herself values Japanese works, and reads manga
, haiku
, and tanka
. She keeps two diaries, one called "Journal of the Movement of the World" to record her observations of the world around her, and the other called "Profound Thoughts" to record her many and wide-ranging reflections on art, poetry, people, etc.
She has a sadistic mind almost, and is always criticizing people, including her own family.
businessman, and Manuela, a Portuguese
cleaner. Ozu, a tenant, shares Paloma's fascination with Renée's masked intelligence and brings her out of her shell (and also happens to set the entire book in forward motion), while Manuela is responsible for cleaning the apartments' toilets and is Renée's only real friend.
magazine, Barbery added that she created characters "who love the things [she does], and who allowed [her] to celebrate that through them". Barbery dedicates the book to her husband, Stéphane, a sociologist, with whom she wrote the book.
The novel's two narrators, Renée and Paloma, alternate in each mostly short chapter, although the former dominates throughout. The novel consists of the "diaries" of the protagonists, and the heading styles and fonts change as it develops, signalling the change of the narrators' character.
Most critics considered Barbery's narrative presentation to be essayistic; the individual chapters are more akin to essay
s than fiction
, as The New York Times
Caryn James expresses it, "so carefully build[ing] in explanations for the literary and philosophical references that she seems to be assessing what a mass audience needs". The early pages of the novel contain a short critique by Renée on the topic of phenomenology.
, for instance, abound throughout, getting increasingly dense as the story progresses. Barbery confesses to having "followed a long, boring course of studies in philosophy", and comments that "I expected it to help me understand better that which surrounds me: but it didn't work out that way. Literature
has taught me more. I was interested in exploring the bearing philosophy could really have on one's life, and how. I wanted to illuminate this process. That's where the desire to anchor philosophy to a story, a work of fiction, was born: to give it more meaning, make it more physically real, and render it, perhaps, even entertaining."
Themes of class consciousness
and conflict are also present in the book. Critics interpreted the stance the novel took against French class-based discrimination and hypocrisy as quite radical, although some French critics found that this made the novel an unsubtle satire of fading social stereotypes. There are also literary allusions in the novel, referencing comic books, movies, music, and paintings.
. The initial print run of the novel was 4000 copies, but by the following year, over a million had been produced. On September 25, 2007, Gallimard released the fiftieth reprint of the novel.
The French Voice program extended help to Gallimard in the translation of the novel to other languages and publication outside France. In partnership with the PEN American Center
, French Voice funds the translation and publication of up to ten contemporary French and Francophone works each year. The Elegance of the Hedgehog was one of 30 works chosen between 2005 and 2008 by the organization, spearheaded by a committee in its selection process of professional experts.
The novel's translation rights have been sold to 31 countries, and it has been translated to a half-dozen languages. Novelist Alison Anderson translated L'Élégance du hérisson into English as The Elegance of the Hedgehog, and this version was released in September 2008 by Europa Editions
. Europa is an independent press based in Italy and New York, which focuses on translated works. In the United States, it will be among French novels receiving patronage from a major American writer, as yet unspecified. In the United Kingdom, the rights were bought by Gallic Books, a publisher specializing in French translations.
The novel was a best-seller and long-seller in France, amassing sales of 1.2 million copies in hardback alone. It stayed on the country's best-seller for 102 straight weeks from its publication, longer than American novelist Dan Brown
's best-selling books. According to reviewer Viv Groskop
, the philosophical element in the novel partly explains its appeal in France, where philosophy remains a compulsory subject. Anderson agreed, commenting that the novel became popular in France because it is "a story where people manage to transcend their class barriers". The novel also received a warm response in Korea, and sold over 400,000 copies in Italy. The release of the novel helped increase the sales of Barbery's first novel, Une Gourmandise.
A week after the novel was published in the United Kingdom, The Guardian ran an article about French best-sellers published in English, focusing on The Elegance of the Hedgehog. In it, writer Alison Flood contended that "fiction in translation is not an easy sell to Brits, and French fiction is perhaps the hardest sell of all". Promotions buyer Jonathan Ruppin predicted that the novel would struggle to gain a readership in the United Kingdom because, according to him, in the UK market "the plot is what people want more than anything else" and the novel's storyline is not its central aspect.
, Maurizio Bono writes that "[t]he formula that made more than half a million readers in France fall in love with [The Elegance of the Hedgehog] has, among other ingredients: intelligent humor, fine sentiments, an excellent literary and philosophical backdrop, taste that is sophisticated but substantial". French magazine Elle
reviewer Natalie Aspesi pronounced it one of "the most exhilarating and extraordinary novels in recent years". Aspesi, however, tagged the novel's title as "most curious and least appealing". Praising the novel in his review for The Guardian, Ian Samson wrote that "The Elegance of the Hedgehog aspires to be great and pretends to philosophy: it is, at least, charming." In an earlier review in the same paper, Groskop opined that the novel is a "profound but accessible book ... which elegantly treads the line between literary and commercial fiction". He added that "clever, informative and moving, it is essentially a crash course in philosophy interwoven with a platonic love story". A review in The Telegraph
conjectured that "[i]f [the novel were] a piece of furniture, it would be an Ikea
bestseller: popular, but not likely to be passed down the generations". A review in The Times Literary Supplement
went further, calling the book "pretentious and cynical, with barely any story. It reads more like a tract than a novel, but lacks even a tract’s certainty of purpose. The characters are problematic: most are puppets, and those that aren’t are stereotypes".
Michael Dirda
of The Washington Post
complimented Barbery, saying, "Certainly, the intelligent Muriel Barbery has served readers well by giving us the gently satirical, exceptionally winning and inevitably bittersweet Elegance of the Hedgehog." Louise McCready of The New York Observer praised Anderson's translation of the novel as "smooth and accurate". Caryn James of The New York Times
hailed the novel as "studied yet appealing commercial hit", adding that it "belongs to a distinct subgenre: the accessible book that flatters readers with its intellectual veneer". Los Angeles Times
Susan Salter Reynolds wrote that "[The Elegance of the Hedgehog] is a high-wire performance; its characters teeter on the surreal edge of normalcy. Their efforts to conceal their true natures, the pressures of the solitary mind, make the book hum".
(Le hérisson) released in France in July 2009, starring Josiane Balasko
as Renée Michel, Garance Le Guillermic
as Paloma Josse, and Togo Igawa
as Kakuro Ozu, with a score by Gabriel Yared
. The rights for the film were bought by NeoClassics Film and it will be released by the company in America on August 19th. Its reception at festivals was positive and it won the Filmfest DC 2011, the Best of Fest Palm Springs 2011, the Seattle International Film Festival 2010, and the 2010 Col-Coa Film Festival. Moira Macdonald of the Seattle Times called it "Whimsical and touching... Mona Achache's adaptation is wistful perfection." Stephen Holden
of The New York Times
said it "suggests a sort of Gallic Harold and Maude".
French language
French is a Romance language spoken as a first language in France, the Romandy region in Switzerland, Wallonia and Brussels in Belgium, Monaco, the regions of Quebec and Acadia in Canada, and by various communities elsewhere. Second-language speakers of French are distributed throughout many parts...
novelist and professor of philosophy Muriel Barbery
Muriel Barbery
Muriel Barbery is a French novelist and professor of philosophy.-Biography:Barbery studied at the Lycée Lakanal, entered the École Normale Supérieure de Fontenay-Saint-Cloud in 1990 and obtained her agrégation in philosophy in 1993...
. The book follows events in the life of a concierge
Concierge
A concierge is an employee who either works in shifts within, or lives on the premises of an apartment building or a hotel and serves guests with duties similar to those of a butler. The position can also be maintained by a security officer over the 'graveyard' shift. A similar position, known as...
, Renée Michel, whose deliberately concealed intelligence is uncovered by an unstable but intellectually precocious girl named Paloma Josse. Paloma is the daughter of an upper-class family living in the upscale Paris
Paris
Paris is the capital and largest city in France, situated on the river Seine, in northern France, at the heart of the Île-de-France region...
ian apartment building where Renée works.
Featuring a number of erudite characters, The Elegance of the Hedgehog is full of allusions to literary works, music, films, and paintings. It incorporates themes relating to philosophy, class consciousness
Class consciousness
Class consciousness is consciousness of one's social class or economic rank in society. From the perspective of Marxist theory, it refers to the self-awareness, or lack thereof, of a particular class; its capacity to act in its own rational interests; or its awareness of the historical tasks...
, and personal conflict. The events and ideas of the novel are presented through the thoughts and reactions, interleaved throughout the novel, of two narrators, Renée and Paloma. The changes of narrator are marked by switches of typeface. In the case of Paloma, the narration takes the form of her written journal entries and other philosophical reflections; Renée's story is also told in the first person but more novelistically and in the present tense.
First released in August 2006 by Gallimard
Éditions Gallimard
Éditions Gallimard is one of the leading French publishers of books. The Guardian has described it as having "the best backlist in the world". In 2003 it and its subsidiaries published 1418 titles....
, the novel became a publishing success
Bestseller
A bestseller is a book that is identified as extremely popular by its inclusion on lists of currently top selling titles that are based on publishing industry and book trade figures and published by newspapers, magazines, or bookstore chains. Some lists are broken down into classifications and...
in France the following year, selling over a million copies. It has been translated into several languages, and published in a number of countries outside France, including the United Kingdom and the United States, attracting critical praise for both the work and its author.
Plot
The story revolves mainly around the characters of Renée Michel and Paloma Josse, residents of an upper-middle class Left BankRive Gauche
La Rive Gauche is the southern bank of the river Seine in Paris. Here the river flows roughly westward, cutting the city in two: looking downstream, the southern bank is to the left, and the northern bank is to the right....
apartment building at 7 Rue de Grenelle – one of the most elegant streets in Paris
Paris
Paris is the capital and largest city in France, situated on the river Seine, in northern France, at the heart of the Île-de-France region...
. 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
Concierge
A concierge is an employee who either works in shifts within, or lives on the premises of an apartment building or a hotel and serves guests with duties similar to those of a butler. The position can also be maintained by a security officer over the 'graveyard' shift. A similar position, known as...
who has supervised the building for 27 years. She is an autodidact
Autodidacticism
Autodidacticism is self-education or self-directed learning. In a sense, autodidacticism is "learning on your own" or "by yourself", and an autodidact is a person who teaches him or herself something. The term has its roots in the Ancient Greek words αὐτός and διδακτικός...
in literature and philosophy, but conceals it to keep her job and, she believes, to avoid the condemnation of the building's tenants if they were to discover how cultured she is. 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
Leo Tolstoy
Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy was a Russian writer who primarily wrote novels and short stories. Later in life, he also wrote plays and essays. His two most famous works, the novels War and Peace and Anna Karenina, are acknowledged as two of the greatest novels of all time and a pinnacle of realist...
and Edmund Husserl
Edmund Husserl
Edmund Gustav Albrecht Husserl was a philosopher and mathematician and the founder of the 20th century philosophical school of phenomenology. He broke with the positivist orientation of the science and philosophy of his day, yet he elaborated critiques of historicism and of psychologism in logic...
. Her perspective is that "[t]o 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, in her words, beyond the "vacuousness of bourgeois existence", she will commit suicide on her 13th birthday on June 16. She steals her mother's pills, and she plans to burn down the apartment before dying. For the time being she journals her observations of the outside world, including her perceptions of Renée.
Paloma is the only one of the educated tenants who suspects Renée's refinement, and for most of the novel, the two "cross each other but don’t see each other" in the words of Time Out reviewer Elisabeth Vincentelli. Although they share an interest in philosophy and thoughts about literature, nothing much happens to 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, and Ozu comes to share Paloma's fascination with Renée: that the concierge has the "same simple refinement as the hedgehog".
Towards the end of the novel, Barbery brings Renée out of her internal seclusion, and the older woman guides young Paloma toward realizing that not all adults pursue vanity at the expense of their intelligence and humanity. However, only shortly after Renée realizes that the beauty of life and her connections with the world makes life worth living, she dies in the same way that Roland Barthes
Roland Barthes
Roland Gérard Barthes was a French literary theorist, philosopher, critic, and semiotician. Barthes' ideas explored a diverse range of fields and he influenced the development of schools of theory including structuralism, semiotics, existentialism, social theory, Marxism, anthropology and...
did. This leaves Paloma and Ozu devastated but leads Paloma not to commit suicide.
Renée Michel
German language
German is a West Germanic language, related to and classified alongside English and Dutch. With an estimated 90 – 98 million native speakers, German is one of the world's major languages and is the most widely-spoken first language in the European Union....
philosopher Immanuel Kant
Immanuel Kant
Immanuel Kant was a German philosopher from Königsberg , researching, lecturing and writing on philosophy and anthropology at the end of the 18th Century Enlightenment....
and Russia
Russia
Russia or , officially known as both Russia and the Russian Federation , is a country in northern Eurasia. It is a federal semi-presidential republic, comprising 83 federal subjects...
n writer Leo Tolstoy
Leo Tolstoy
Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy was a Russian writer who primarily wrote novels and short stories. Later in life, he also wrote plays and essays. His two most famous works, the novels War and Peace and Anna Karenina, are acknowledged as two of the greatest novels of all time and a pinnacle of realist...
(and even names her cat "Leo"), disdains the philosophy of Edmund Husserl
Edmund Husserl
Edmund Gustav Albrecht Husserl was a philosopher and mathematician and the founder of the 20th century philosophical school of phenomenology. He broke with the positivist orientation of the science and philosophy of his day, yet he elaborated critiques of historicism and of psychologism in logic...
, adores 17th-century Dutch
Dutch language
Dutch is a West Germanic language and the native language of the majority of the population of the Netherlands, Belgium, and Suriname, the three member states of the Dutch Language Union. Most speakers live in the European Union, where it is a first language for about 23 million and a second...
paintings, likes Japan
Japan
Japan is an island nation in East Asia. Located in the Pacific Ocean, it lies to the east of the Sea of Japan, China, North Korea, South Korea and Russia, stretching from the Sea of Okhotsk in the north to the East China Sea and Taiwan in the south...
ese art-house films by Yasujirō Ozu
Yasujiro Ozu
was a prominent Japanese film director and script writer. He is known for his distinctive technical style, developed during the silent era. Marriage and family, especially the relationships between the generations, are among the most persistent themes in his body of work...
, and listens to the music of composers Henry Purcell
Henry Purcell
Henry Purcell – 21 November 1695), was an English organist and Baroque composer of secular and sacred music. Although Purcell incorporated Italian and French stylistic elements into his compositions, his legacy was a uniquely English form of Baroque music...
and Gustav Mahler
Gustav Mahler
Gustav Mahler was a late-Romantic Austrian composer and one of the leading conductors of his generation. He was born in the village of Kalischt, Bohemia, in what was then Austria-Hungary, now Kaliště in the Czech Republic...
.
Renée, who conceals her true self to conform to the lowly image of typical concierges, introduces herself as "a widow, short, ugly, chubby", with "bunions on my feet and, on certain difficult mornings, it seems, the breath of a mammoth". Her outward appearance is summarized by The Guardian
The Guardian
The Guardian, formerly known as The Manchester Guardian , is a British national daily newspaper in the Berliner format...
reviewer Ian Samson as "prickly and bunioned". When Paloma eventually discovers Renée's identity, she describes the latter in her journal as having the "elegance of the hedgehog
Hedgehog
A hedgehog is any of the spiny mammals of the subfamily Erinaceinae and the order Erinaceomorpha. There are 17 species of hedgehog in five genera, found through parts of Europe, Asia, Africa, and New Zealand . There are no hedgehogs native to Australia, and no living species native to the Americas...
"—although like the spines of the hedgehog, she is covered in quills and prickly, within, she has in the words of the English translation of the book quoted by Viv Groskop "the same simple refinement as the hedgehog: a deceptively indolent little creature, fiercely solitary—and terribly elegant".
Paloma Josse
Paloma Josse, an advanced twelve-year-old, belongs to one of the conventional families living in the posh apartment building where Renée works. Daughter of an important parliamentParliament
A parliament is a legislature, especially in those countries whose system of government is based on the Westminster system modeled after that of the United Kingdom. The name is derived from the French , the action of parler : a parlement is a discussion. The term came to mean a meeting at which...
arian father (a former government minister), and a Flaubert
Gustave Flaubert
Gustave Flaubert was a French writer who is counted among the greatest Western novelists. He is known especially for his first published novel, Madame Bovary , and for his scrupulous devotion to his art and style.-Early life and education:Flaubert was born on December 12, 1821, in Rouen,...
-quoting mother, Paloma has a penchant for absurdism
Absurdism
In philosophy, "The Absurd" refers to the conflict between the human tendency to seek value and meaning in life and the human inability to find any...
. She regards her sister's scholarship as "cold and trivial" and deems her mother's culture as conventional and useless. Paloma herself values Japanese works, and reads manga
Manga
Manga is the Japanese word for "comics" and consists of comics and print cartoons . In the West, the term "manga" has been appropriated to refer specifically to comics created in Japan, or by Japanese authors, in the Japanese language and conforming to the style developed in Japan in the late 19th...
, haiku
Haiku
' , plural haiku, is a very short form of Japanese poetry typically characterised by three qualities:* The essence of haiku is "cutting"...
, and tanka
Waka (poetry)
Waka or Yamato uta is a genre of classical Japanese verse and one of the major genres of Japanese literature...
. She keeps two diaries, one called "Journal of the Movement of the World" to record her observations of the world around her, and the other called "Profound Thoughts" to record her many and wide-ranging reflections on art, poetry, people, etc.
She has a sadistic mind almost, and is always criticizing people, including her own family.
Minor characters
Other characters developed by Barbery in the novel include Kakuro Ozu, the cultured JapaneseJapanese people
The are an ethnic group originating in the Japanese archipelago and are the predominant ethnic group of Japan. Worldwide, approximately 130 million people are of Japanese descent; of these, approximately 127 million are residents of Japan. People of Japanese ancestry who live in other countries...
businessman, and Manuela, a Portuguese
Portuguese people
The Portuguese are a nation and ethnic group native to the country of Portugal, in the west of the Iberian peninsula of south-west Europe. Their language is Portuguese, and Roman Catholicism is the predominant religion....
cleaner. Ozu, a tenant, shares Paloma's fascination with Renée's masked intelligence and brings her out of her shell (and also happens to set the entire book in forward motion), while Manuela is responsible for cleaning the apartments' toilets and is Renée's only real friend.
Style and character development
Barbery developed the character of Renée because she was "inspired by the idea of a reserved, cultured concierge who turned stereotypes on their head and at the same time created a compelling comic effect"; for the author, Renée "opened the door on a kind of social criticism". In an interview with TimeTime (magazine)
Time is an American news magazine. A European edition is published from London. Time Europe covers the Middle East, Africa and, since 2003, Latin America. An Asian edition is based in Hong Kong...
magazine, Barbery added that she created characters "who love the things [she does], and who allowed [her] to celebrate that through them". Barbery dedicates the book to her husband, Stéphane, a sociologist, with whom she wrote the book.
The novel's two narrators, Renée and Paloma, alternate in each mostly short chapter, although the former dominates throughout. The novel consists of the "diaries" of the protagonists, and the heading styles and fonts change as it develops, signalling the change of the narrators' character.
Most critics considered Barbery's narrative presentation to be essayistic; the individual chapters are more akin to essay
Essay
An essay is a piece of writing which is often written from an author's personal point of view. Essays can consist of a number of elements, including: literary criticism, political manifestos, learned arguments, observations of daily life, recollections, and reflections of the author. The definition...
s than fiction
Fiction
Fiction is the form of any narrative or informative work that deals, in part or in whole, with information or events that are not factual, but rather, imaginary—that is, invented by the author. Although fiction describes a major branch of literary work, it may also refer to theatrical,...
, as The New York Times
The New York Times
The New York Times is an American daily newspaper founded and continuously published in New York City since 1851. The New York Times has won 106 Pulitzer Prizes, the most of any news organization...
Caryn James expresses it, "so carefully build[ing] in explanations for the literary and philosophical references that she seems to be assessing what a mass audience needs". The early pages of the novel contain a short critique by Renée on the topic of phenomenology.
Themes
Barbery incorporates several themes into the novel. References to philosophyPhilosophy
Philosophy is the study of general and fundamental problems, such as those connected with existence, knowledge, values, reason, mind, and language. Philosophy is distinguished from other ways of addressing such problems by its critical, generally systematic approach and its reliance on rational...
, for instance, abound throughout, getting increasingly dense as the story progresses. Barbery confesses to having "followed a long, boring course of studies in philosophy", and comments that "I expected it to help me understand better that which surrounds me: but it didn't work out that way. Literature
Literature
Literature is the art of written works, and is not bound to published sources...
has taught me more. I was interested in exploring the bearing philosophy could really have on one's life, and how. I wanted to illuminate this process. That's where the desire to anchor philosophy to a story, a work of fiction, was born: to give it more meaning, make it more physically real, and render it, perhaps, even entertaining."
Themes of class consciousness
Class consciousness
Class consciousness is consciousness of one's social class or economic rank in society. From the perspective of Marxist theory, it refers to the self-awareness, or lack thereof, of a particular class; its capacity to act in its own rational interests; or its awareness of the historical tasks...
and conflict are also present in the book. Critics interpreted the stance the novel took against French class-based discrimination and hypocrisy as quite radical, although some French critics found that this made the novel an unsubtle satire of fading social stereotypes. There are also literary allusions in the novel, referencing comic books, movies, music, and paintings.
Publication
The Elegance of the Hedgehog was first published in August 2006 under the title L'élégance du hérisson by the leading French publisher Éditions GallimardÉditions Gallimard
Éditions Gallimard is one of the leading French publishers of books. The Guardian has described it as having "the best backlist in the world". In 2003 it and its subsidiaries published 1418 titles....
. The initial print run of the novel was 4000 copies, but by the following year, over a million had been produced. On September 25, 2007, Gallimard released the fiftieth reprint of the novel.
The French Voice program extended help to Gallimard in the translation of the novel to other languages and publication outside France. In partnership with the PEN American Center
PEN American Center
PEN American Center , founded in 1922 and based in New York City, works to advance literature, to defend free expression, and to foster international literary fellowship. The Center has a membership of 3,300 writers, editors, and translators...
, French Voice funds the translation and publication of up to ten contemporary French and Francophone works each year. The Elegance of the Hedgehog was one of 30 works chosen between 2005 and 2008 by the organization, spearheaded by a committee in its selection process of professional experts.
The novel's translation rights have been sold to 31 countries, and it has been translated to a half-dozen languages. Novelist Alison Anderson translated L'Élégance du hérisson into English as The Elegance of the Hedgehog, and this version was released in September 2008 by Europa Editions
Europa Editions
Europa Editions is a publishing company founded in 2005 by husband and wife Sandro Ferri and Sandra Ozzola Ferri, who also founded the Italian publisher Edizioni E/O. The New York-based Europa Editions specializes in bringing works by European writers to American readers...
. Europa is an independent press based in Italy and New York, which focuses on translated works. In the United States, it will be among French novels receiving patronage from a major American writer, as yet unspecified. In the United Kingdom, the rights were bought by Gallic Books, a publisher specializing in French translations.
Reception
An acclaimed literary work, The Elegance of the Hedgehog has been considered by critics and press alike as a publishing phenomenon. Upon the novel's release, it had received significant support from booksellers. The novel has earned Barbery the 2007 French Booksellers Prize, the 2007 Brive-la-Gaillarde Reader's Prize, and the Prix du Rotary International in France. The Elegance of the Hedgehog has been adapted into the film Le hérisson (2009).The novel was a best-seller and long-seller in France, amassing sales of 1.2 million copies in hardback alone. It stayed on the country's best-seller for 102 straight weeks from its publication, longer than American novelist Dan Brown
Dan Brown
Dan Brown is an American author of thriller fiction, best known for the 2003 bestselling novel, The Da Vinci Code. Brown's novels, which are treasure hunts set in a 24-hour time period, feature the recurring themes of cryptography, keys, symbols, codes, and conspiracy theories...
's best-selling books. According to reviewer Viv Groskop
Viv Groskop
Viv Groskop is a British journalist and writer. She has written for publications including The Guardian, Evening Standard, The Observer, Daily Mail, Mail on Sunday and Red magazine...
, the philosophical element in the novel partly explains its appeal in France, where philosophy remains a compulsory subject. Anderson agreed, commenting that the novel became popular in France because it is "a story where people manage to transcend their class barriers". The novel also received a warm response in Korea, and sold over 400,000 copies in Italy. The release of the novel helped increase the sales of Barbery's first novel, Une Gourmandise.
A week after the novel was published in the United Kingdom, The Guardian ran an article about French best-sellers published in English, focusing on The Elegance of the Hedgehog. In it, writer Alison Flood contended that "fiction in translation is not an easy sell to Brits, and French fiction is perhaps the hardest sell of all". Promotions buyer Jonathan Ruppin predicted that the novel would struggle to gain a readership in the United Kingdom because, according to him, in the UK market "the plot is what people want more than anything else" and the novel's storyline is not its central aspect.
Critical reviews
The Elegance of the Hedgehog was well-received by critics. In the earliest known review, for the Italian newspaper La RepubblicaLa Repubblica
la Repubblica is an Italian daily general-interest newspaper. Founded in 1976 in Rome by the journalist Eugenio Scalfari, as of 2008 is the second largest circulation newspaper, behind the Corriere della Sera.-Foundation:...
, Maurizio Bono writes that "[t]he formula that made more than half a million readers in France fall in love with [The Elegance of the Hedgehog] has, among other ingredients: intelligent humor, fine sentiments, an excellent literary and philosophical backdrop, taste that is sophisticated but substantial". French magazine Elle
Elle (magazine)
Elle is a worldwide magazine of French origin that focuses on women's fashion, beauty, health, and entertainment. Elle is also the world's largest fashion magazine. It was founded by Pierre Lazareff and his wife Hélène Gordon in 1945. The title, in French, means "she".-History:Elle was founded in...
reviewer Natalie Aspesi pronounced it one of "the most exhilarating and extraordinary novels in recent years". Aspesi, however, tagged the novel's title as "most curious and least appealing". Praising the novel in his review for The Guardian, Ian Samson wrote that "The Elegance of the Hedgehog aspires to be great and pretends to philosophy: it is, at least, charming." In an earlier review in the same paper, Groskop opined that the novel is a "profound but accessible book ... which elegantly treads the line between literary and commercial fiction". He added that "clever, informative and moving, it is essentially a crash course in philosophy interwoven with a platonic love story". A review in The Telegraph
The Daily Telegraph
The Daily Telegraph is a daily morning broadsheet newspaper distributed throughout the United Kingdom and internationally. The newspaper was founded by Arthur B...
conjectured that "[i]f [the novel were] a piece of furniture, it would be an Ikea
IKEA
IKEA is a privately held, international home products company that designs and sells ready-to-assemble furniture such as beds and desks, appliances and home accessories. The company is the world's largest furniture retailer...
bestseller: popular, but not likely to be passed down the generations". A review in The Times Literary Supplement
The Times Literary Supplement
The Times Literary Supplement is a weekly literary review published in London by News International, a subsidiary of News Corporation.-History:...
went further, calling the book "pretentious and cynical, with barely any story. It reads more like a tract than a novel, but lacks even a tract’s certainty of purpose. The characters are problematic: most are puppets, and those that aren’t are stereotypes".
Michael Dirda
Michael Dirda
Michael Dirda , a Fulbright Fellowship recipient, is a Pulitzer Prize–winning book critic for the Washington Post.-Career:Having studied at Oberlin College for his undergraduate degree, Dirda took a Ph.D. from Cornell University in comparative literature. In 1978 Dirda started writing for the...
of The Washington Post
The Washington Post
The Washington Post is Washington, D.C.'s largest newspaper and its oldest still-existing paper, founded in 1877. Located in the capital of the United States, The Post has a particular emphasis on national politics. D.C., Maryland, and Virginia editions are printed for daily circulation...
complimented Barbery, saying, "Certainly, the intelligent Muriel Barbery has served readers well by giving us the gently satirical, exceptionally winning and inevitably bittersweet Elegance of the Hedgehog." Louise McCready of The New York Observer praised Anderson's translation of the novel as "smooth and accurate". Caryn James of The New York Times
The New York Times
The New York Times is an American daily newspaper founded and continuously published in New York City since 1851. The New York Times has won 106 Pulitzer Prizes, the most of any news organization...
hailed the novel as "studied yet appealing commercial hit", adding that it "belongs to a distinct subgenre: the accessible book that flatters readers with its intellectual veneer". Los Angeles Times
Los Angeles Times
The Los Angeles Times is a daily newspaper published in Los Angeles, California, since 1881. It was the second-largest metropolitan newspaper in circulation in the United States in 2008 and the fourth most widely distributed newspaper in the country....
Susan Salter Reynolds wrote that "[The Elegance of the Hedgehog] is a high-wire performance; its characters teeter on the surreal edge of normalcy. Their efforts to conceal their true natures, the pressures of the solitary mind, make the book hum".
Film adaptation
The novel was adapted into a film The HedgehogThe Hedgehog
The Hedgehog is a French film directed by Mona Achache, loosely based on the novel The Elegance of the Hedgehog by Muriel Barbery. Made in 2008, the film was released in theatres in 2009.- Synopsis :...
(Le hérisson) released in France in July 2009, starring Josiane Balasko
Josiane Balasko
Josiane Balasko is a French actress, writer and director.She was born Josiane Balašković in Paris. One of Balasko's most recognized roles among English speakers is as a lesbian in 1995's Gazon maudit...
as Renée Michel, Garance Le Guillermic
Garance Le Guillermic
Garance Le Guillermic is a French child actress.She starred in six movies but is best known for her role as witty 11-year-old Paloma in Mona Achache's 2009 film The Hedgehog along with Josiane Balasko.-Filmography:...
as Paloma Josse, and Togo Igawa
Togo Igawa
, born in Tokyo on 26 September 1946, is a Japanese actor who works primarily in British films and television.In recent years he has had roles in major motion pictures such as Revolver, Memoirs of a Geisha, The Last Samurai, and Sunshine...
as Kakuro Ozu, with a score by Gabriel Yared
Gabriel Yared
Gabriel Yared is a Lebanese composer, best known for his work in French and American cinema.Born in Beirut, Lebanon, his work in France included the scores for Betty Blue and Camille Claudel. He later began working on English language films, particularly those directed by Anthony Minghella...
. The rights for the film were bought by NeoClassics Film and it will be released by the company in America on August 19th. Its reception at festivals was positive and it won the Filmfest DC 2011, the Best of Fest Palm Springs 2011, the Seattle International Film Festival 2010, and the 2010 Col-Coa Film Festival. Moira Macdonald of the Seattle Times called it "Whimsical and touching... Mona Achache's adaptation is wistful perfection." Stephen Holden
Stephen Holden
Stephen Holden is an American writer, music critic, film critic, and poet.Holden earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in English from Yale University in 1963...
of The New York Times
The New York Times
The New York Times is an American daily newspaper founded and continuously published in New York City since 1851. The New York Times has won 106 Pulitzer Prizes, the most of any news organization...
said it "suggests a sort of Gallic Harold and Maude".
External links
- Muriel Barbery, including the author's personal blog and photos
- The Elegance of the Hedgehog at Europa Editions (US publisher)
- The Elegance of the Hedgehog at Gallic Books (UK publisher)
- The Elegance of the Hedgehog at Gallimard