The Elegance of the Hedgehog

Author: Muriel Barbery

Rating: ⭐ 5/5

Date Read: 2013/10/01

Pages: 325

The Elegance of the Hedgehog is a novel that utilizes dual narrators: a precocious girl and an autodidactic concierge who live in a Parisian apartment where things are not what they appear to be. It sounds ridiculously pretentious, and it is. I could totally see this on the reclaimed wood shelves of your local pour-over coffee shop, right between the beyond fair trade artisan roasted coffee and the moleskine notebooks (actually, cool coffee shops don’t sell books as much as they sell cold brew coffee and the regurgitated aspirations of unwashed hipsters, but you get the idea).

The point is that Elegance might come off as pretentious, but that pretentiousness is part of its charm. It reminded me quite a bit of The Unbearable Lightness of Being, although it benefited from the fact that it recognized the absurdity of constantly waxing philosophical. These are the types of books that don’t get written in the U.S., possibly because the kinds of writers who are quirky and smart enough to write them are too busy trying to be cool.

Anyway, this really is a charming little treatise on the living of life. I laughed, I cried, I wanted to highlight everything. I closed it and immediately decided to try to find the French copy, so that I can read it again. It’s also a quick read: I mean, I accidentally read 100 pages of it in one go, when I meant to just sample the writing style.