If The Elegance of the Hedgehog had been about Renée only, I think I could have fallen in love with it.Īfter one tenant dies and his apartment is sold to a Japanese man, the people in the building are shaken out of their routines. She works hard to maintain her cover as a slightly stupid but competent concierge while the rich people in the building care on with their self-absorbed lives.

She just hides it all from everyone because she doesn’t want to be noticed. (Her cat is named Leo.) She loves art and music. Renée, on the other hand, does have things that make her life meaningful. You just have to find the things and people that make it meaningful for you. Life does have meaning, you little twerp. She irritated me for most of the book and I wanted to smack her upside the head with Man’s Search for Meaning. Paloma struck me as a person who has spent so much time in her own head she never learned empathy. It’s not a particularly good reason, but Paloma doesn’t have anyone in her life who understands her. Instead of depression or bullying or drug use, Paloma just doesn’t want to grow up and turn out like all the other adults she meets. Her reasons for suicide are not the usual ones. When we first meet Paloma, she is planning her suicide and wants to burn down the apartment building. At the beginning of the book, they seem very, very different. (To be fair, Paloma can be rude.) Over the course of The Elegance of the Hedgehog, we see how similar the two are.

Paloma hides her intelligence because her family is so terribly banal any attempt to speak up is quashed as rudeness. We learn Renée’s reasons later in the book. Unfortunately, neither feel they can express their intelligence. Nothing would have changed if Kakuro Ozu hadn’t moved in upstairs and upset the status quo.īoth Renée and Paloma are highly intelligent and well read. Renée Michel, the building’s concierge, has been hiding her intelligence from everyone in her life, disappearing into a stereotype to avoid notice.

Paloma Josse, at 12, thinks she has discovered life’s racket and makes plans to avoid her fate.

What is life for? And how should we live? Muriel Barbery’s The Elegance of the Hedgehog revolves around these two questions through two characters who live in the same apartment building.

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