The Elegance of the Hedgehog
Muriel Barbery
Language: English
Pages: 325
ISBN: 1933372605
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
We are in the center of Paris, in an elegant apartment building inhabited by bourgeois families. Renée, the concierge, is witness to the lavish but vacuous lives of her numerous employers. Outwardly she conforms to every stereotype of the concierge: fat, cantankerous, addicted to television. Yet, unbeknownst to her employers, Renée is a cultured autodidact who adores art, philosophy, music, and Japanese culture. With humor and intelligence she scrutinizes the lives of the building's tenants, who for their part are barely aware of her existence.
Then there's Paloma, a twelve-year-old genius. She is the daughter of a tedious parliamentarian, a talented and startlingly lucid child who has decided to end her life on the sixteenth of June, her thirteenth birthday. Until then she will continue behaving as everyone expects her to behave: a mediocre pre-teen high on adolescent subculture, a good but not an outstanding student, an obedient if obstinate daughter.
Paloma and Renée hide both their true talents and their finest qualities from a world they suspect cannot or will not appreciate them. They discover their kindred souls when a wealthy Japanese man named Ozu arrives in the building. Only he is able to gain Paloma's trust and to see through Renée's timeworn disguise to the secret that haunts her. This is a moving, funny, triumphant novel that exalts the quiet victories of the inconspicuous among us.
The Outsider (Penguin Modern Classics)
Paper Trail: Selected Prose, 1965-2003
Forms of culture does not necessarily represent the indelible mark of my lowly origins or of my solitary striving for enlightenment but is, rather, a contemporary characteristic of the dominant intellectual class. How did I come to know this? From the mouth of a sociologist, and I would have loved to have known if he himself would have loved to have known that a concierge in Scholl clogs had just made him into a holy icon. As part of a study on the evolution of the cultural practices of.
Aggressive nature of the primate. For primates we have been and primates we shall remain, however often we learn to find joy in a camellia on moss. This is the very purpose of education. What does education imply? One must offer camellias on moss, tirelessly, in order to escape the natural impulses of our species, because those impulses do not change, and continually threaten the fragile equilibrium of survival. I am a very camellia-on-moss sort of person. If I really think about it, there is.
Dinner, told me off: “If you’re going to open your mouth to make my guests look ridiculous, then don’t.” What should I have done? Open my mouth like Colombe to say, “To be perfectly honest, I don’t know what to think of this season’s line-up at the Théâtre des Amandiers,” when she’s utterly incapable of reciting a single line from Racine, never mind appreciating the beauty of it. Open my mouth like Maman to say, “Apparently the Biennale last year was very disappointing,” when she would kill for.
My mother on whom to base his opinions of our family, has apparently decided that the threat is real. And there, oh miracle! He moved! He clicked his tongue, uncrossed his arms, stretched one hand out toward the desk and slapped his palm against the kid leather blotter. A gesture of exasperation but also intimidation. Then he stood up, all gentle kindness vanished, and went to the door, and called Maman to come back in, and gave her some patter about my good mental health and that everything.
Then I had an enlightened thought, thinking of Maman’s incantatory care of her green plants and Colombe’s phobic manias and Papa’s stress over Mamie being in a retirement home, and a whole lot of other things like that. Maman thinks you can conjure your destiny just by going pschitt, and Colombe thinks you can push your cares to one side just by washing your hands, and Papa thinks he’s a bad son who will be punished because he’s abandoned his mother: in the end, they too have magical beliefs, the.