The Elegance Of The Hedgehog - Pick Of The Week

The Age

Saturday September 13, 2008

Cameron Woodhead

The Elegance of the Hedgehog

Muriel Barbery

Gallic Books, $19.95

IN HIS ESSAY ON Tolstoy, Isaiah Berlin divided people into hedgehogs and foxes. Hedgehogs view the world through the prism of one big idea; foxes flirt with many ideas. Muriel Barbery's The Elegance of the Hedgehog, a bestseller in Europe, is about a fox pretending to be a hedgehog. Renee is a dowdy middle-aged concierge. To the residents of her upscale Parisian apartment building, she comes across as an uncomplicated prole. Little do they realise this is a front. On the inside, Renee is more highbrow than the highbrow - she can summarise phenomenology in two pages, adores the films of Ozu, and has read every page of War and Peace. Upstairs, 12-year-old Paloma is bored with her pretentious parents and is thinking about committing suicide at her next birthday. The novel flits between the almost essayistic musings of these two kindred spirits. It's a philosophical tragicomedy, brimming with beauty and wit and the pleasures and pains of the life of the mind.

© 2008 The Age

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