Fashion, book, movie and music addicts!

There was so much fuss last year over "L'Elegance du Herisson" that even I, immersed as I am in Anglophone literature, was obliged to go to my favorite french bookstore to take a look at it. After having read it though, I have to confess to no great love for it. And it made me wonder why a good number of french readers positively adored it.

The story is told in alternating chapters between Madame Renée Michel, the concierge at no 7 rue de Grenelle and Paloma Josse, the precocious daughter of one of the bourgeois families of the building. Renée hides a fierce intelligence, love of literature (notably of Leo Tolstoy) and love of Japanese culture. But, she is forced such shining facets of her personality under the veneer of what the French have come to expect from a concierge—stupid, old, ugly and sour. She only has her friend Manuela, to relieve the tedium and penury of her existence. Paloma on the other hand, is an extremely intelligent (in her own words) young girl who is disillusioned by her family and their privileged, if pointless, way of life and as such has decided to end her existence in a fiery blaze on her 13th birthday. Each seem set on their respective course till an elegant Japanese gentleman comes to live in their building. From such a random occurrence their collective lives change as they discover that there is more to the other than meets the eye.

The main problem with this book was its basic premise that a person, deemed lowly in social station, could not possibly be more than what society thinks the person should be. This book assumes that its (French) readers would take it as a matter of course that a concierge would be lacking intelligence and culture. I mean, who on earth decided on this? Even worse was the way it was repeated all throughout the text. Barberry takes pains to drive home the lowliness of Renee’s station every so often that becomes absolutely jarring. There were a good number of cringe inducing passages where you had Renee rejecting any sort of encroachment on her largely self inflicted isolation because "she was just a concierge" and was therefore doomed to the lowliest possible state. I mean, seriously. It really disturbed me to read this, after all, we're no longer in the 18th or even 19th century where class status was of so much importance. Perhaps as an Anglophone reader, there is a cultural context here that I am missing. And here, I tried to place the book into a context I would recognize but I couldn't. What was worse was the idea (fear, even) that grew as I read that this is really how french people thought!

The fact that the whole story hinges on this presumption greatly undermines what Barberry set out to do—which in essence is to write a meditative tale on philosophy, art and unlikely friendships. There are passages in the book that are quite lovely especially her philosophy musings on art and beauty and what these concepts mean to us. Or how beauty can be found in the most fleeting of moments. Barberry is in her element when it comes to writing these parts of the book and as such they are the most interesting to read. If only she had written all the other parts in an equally nice manner.