She's a 'Camellia-on-moss' kind of person. Renée narrates the other half of the novel to Paloma, in a secret world of tea-ceremonies, devotion to literature, and appreciation of aesthetic beauty. It's the upper classes in their swanky rooms upstairs who are really the boors. Renée's best friend is a Portuguese cleaning lady, but also a hidden aristocrat. Yes, Paloma is right-Madame Michel is a kindred spirit at the heart of her cabbage-a lover of Tolstoy, open to Socratic dialogue with fellow enlightened souls. And most repugnant of all is the misunderstood nobility of the working class.
There is the epicurean restaurant-reviewer, the spoilt children of the intelligentsia and the homeless man who philosophises from inside his cardboard box. If Pepe Le Pew is your idea of a true Frenchman, then Barbery's caricatures won't bother. Imagine the film Amelie, and substitute Sartre and de Beauvoir chainsmoking outside Les Deux Magots for that pretty girl on her bicyclette. Barbery gives us a potted analysis of phenomenology, critical appreciations of Japanese film and a child who mocks the intellectual pretensions of her family with haughty dismissals of particular schools of psychoanalysis. Harris dropped references to John Donne and the etchings of Willam Blake as easily as the jargon of FBI criminal profilers, and the reader felt very clever. It reminded me of Thomas Harris's Hannibal Lecter books, which also glance across intellectual refinements with a conspiratorial breeziness. Like your favorite bistro, its furniture is well-worn, the menu hardly glanced at. Its trajectory is sentimental, its characters 'types' rather than fully fleshed, but there's something comforting about such a book. Welcome to the world of Muriel Barbery's The Elegance of the Hedgehog, set amongst the Parisian bourgeoisie. Paloma suspects Renée of hedgehog-like tendencies perhaps her boiled cabbage is only a smokescreen. They live in a small flat off the foyer, with a blaring TV and something evil-smelling boiling on the stove. If you've been sucked into the SBS late-night sexy movie you will have come across the concierge. She is musing on the inner life of one of the few working-class people in her refined world, Renée Michel, the concierge in her building. Anna Hedigan: According to Paloma, the 12-year-old diarist in this blockbuster French novel, the hedgehog has refinement that belies its fierce appearance-under the quills it is 'terribly elegant'.
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