The Elegance of the Hedgehog #

Muriel Barbery #

August 19, 2022

1.5/5

There are many reasons why this book is not enjoyable, and many folks have already given many reasons to that effect, but for me it was mostly the characters and one passage in particular (which gave me reason to doubt a lot of the book).

Firstly, the characters are not great. One is a concierge named Renee, who does not wish for the rich people living in the building she works at to discover she has read a couple Dostoevskys and understands some Wikipedia articles on philosophy. She believes that she needs to present herself as ignorant and stupid, so that nobody inquires into her. This genuinely makes no sense to me (even when the reason for her actions are explained later in the book). I cannot comprehend how anybody would think that other people would care for the fact that you can read. No rich person gives two hoots of a whistle that you have read big books in the past, and the fact that the character genuinely believes that this information could ruin her life is ridiculous.

The other character is a young girl named Paloma, who lives in the same building and wants to kill herself and burn down the building. Fantastic. She is also supposedly quite smart and spends the entire book trying to find a meaning to live on. She also feels the need to hide her intelligence from her family (and her sister in particular), again for no reason really.

I can understand that irritating characters don’t necessarily make a book bad, but these two people don’t seem to have any logical reasoning behind their actions, which frustrated me to no end throughout my reading.

Secondly, there is a passage in the book that goes as follows:

“When we Westerners walk, our culture dictates that we must, through the continuity of a movement we envision as smooth and seamless, try to restore what we take to be the very essence of life: efficiency without obstacles, a fluid performance that, being free of interruption, will represent the vital élan thanks to which all will be realized. For us the standard is the cheetah in action: all his movements fuse together harmoniously, one cannot be distinguished from the next, and the swift passage of the great wild animal seems like one long continuous movement symbolizing the deep perfection of life. When a J apanese woman disrupts the powerful sequence of natural movement with her jerky little steps, we ought to experience the disquiet that troubles our soul whenever nature is violated in this way, but in fact we are filled with a unfamiliar blissfulness, as if disruption could lead to a sort of ecstasy, and a grain of sand to beauty. What we discover in this affront to the sacred rhythm of life, this defiant movement of little feet, this excellence born of constraint, is a paradigm of Art.”

Now a lot of this book touches on psychology and philosophy, things that I find interesting, but really don’t understand or have any fundamental knowledge in. But this passage did tread on some knowledge that I do have, walking (as it feels adjacent to flaneur). Given that, this entire passage made genuinely no sense to me, and did not logically connect.

Firstly, the passage begins by attacking the western mode of walking, apparently we all walk “smooth and seamless”, because we all want to be efficient and fast. That is patently ridiculous. The flaneur (the very antithesis to this form of walking attributed to westerners) was born in the west, and in Paris for that matter! The very city this book takes place in. Also this is conflating all westerners together. You can’t imagine that someone from Waco, Texas walks the same as someone from New York City or someone from London.

While this seems like something really stupid to complain about, this very discussion of walking appears to me to be a way that the author wants to critique western life (or modern western life), in that through our mode of walking, one can determine that we are all people that want efficiency, smoothness, and speed in our lives. This is, of course, false. Barbery appears to imagine that all westerners work at places like Wall Street and continuously name drop “the grindset” whilst chugging a Starbucks latte.

This form of walking is then juxtaposed with the Japanese form, which she describes as “jerky”, and is thus an “affront to the sacred rhythm of life”, because it isn’t smooth or fast. That also sounds absurd and over generalizes Japan the same way it did with the west previously. I’d imagine that businessmen in Tokyo may fit the author’s previous complaint on western walking, while someone in a smaller town would not. This phase of the passage was also incredibly uncomfortable to read, at least for me.

This may not seem like a lot, and perhaps I am making a mountain out of a mole hill, but what it revealed to me is that on a single passage in which I had some very minimal knowledge on the background discussion, I could notice countless flaws that made the passage make no sense to me. That made me wonder how many more errors of this kind were present in the mass bulk of the novel, especially in areas I didn’t understand? Probably a lot, and reading some of the other reviews, I don’t seem to be too far off in that thought.

Overall, this book was not very good. I went into the book thinking that, and it was reaffirmed, but I did have some fun with how ridiculous some passages and thoughts were.

I can understand why some people may like this book, it is interesting in some regards, and the ending was better then the beginning and middle, so all I can suggest is to maybe read this.

Thanks!