Review: The Elegance of the Hedgehog · 1:18am Apr 18th, 2013
From the book jacket:
Release date: September 2, 2008
Renee is the concierge of a grand Parisian apartment building, home to members of the great and the good. Over the years she has maintained her carefully-constructed persona as someone reliable but totally uncultivated, in keeping, she feels, with society's expectations of what a concierge should be. But beneath this facade lies the real Renee: passionate about culture and the arts, and more knowledgeable in many ways than her employers with their outwardly successful but emotionally void lives. Down in her loge, apart from weekly visits by her one friend Manuela, Renee lives resigned to her lonely lot with only her cat for company. Meanwhile, several floors up, twelve-year-old Paloma Josse is determined to avoid the pampered and vacuous future laid out for her, and decides to end her life on her thirteenth birthday. But unknown to them both, the sudden death of one of their privileged neighbours [no; the man who moves into his place] will dramatically alter their lives forever. By turn moving and hilarious, this unusual novel became the top-selling book in France in 2007 with sales of over 900,000 copies to-date.
TL;DR: It's like a novel made by stitching together Amit's blog posts.
I’ll confess: I didn’t read the entire book. But this is one of those books where you can skip entire chapters and not feel like you’ve missed anything.
That’s not to say it’s a bad book. It certainly isn’t plot-driven; it has only 3 plot events. It gives us a long, leisurely, intimate tour of its main character/s’ thoughts, which are usually clever, interesting, novel, funny, and well-written. Very French.
This book has four big problems. The biggest is its length. A standard novel or movie has a catalyzing event that complicates the protagonist's life and makes things interesting. Conventional wisdom is that this should be on page 10 of a 120-page screenplay, or in the first 3 chapters of a novel. Here, it's past the halfway point. So the reader spends the entire first half waiting for this event (which was given away on the book jacket). This first half is clever, but not dramatic. For example, Renee takes 2 chapters to explain why Husserl’s phenomenology is a fraud. Maybe this is a comment by the author on how Renee scorns Husserl for his detachment from reality, while she herself mirrors it. Clever, but too long and not made clear to the reader.
The second big problem is that the first half of the novel has 2 viewpoint characters who have the same strengths, weaknesses, vices, and attitudes. They think the same thoughts about the upper class, Japanese culture, and cassoulets (which I guess are some French thing). They are both self-taught geniuses who hide their intelligence from the world, and are focused entirely on themselves, never thinking of the lives of other people except as those people affect them, churning through endless cycles of scorn, condescension, and self-pity. They are the SAME PERSON. The author writes Paloma's sentences using shorter sentences and a more colloquial style. Paloma uses sentence fragments; Renee writes complete windy sentences. Paloma prefers dashes; Renee favors semi-colons. That is the only difference between them. They should either have been made distinguishable, or combined into one character, converting the novel into a short story. And Paloma should not have been stuffed into the body of a 12 year old, then made to writes sentences such as "The only purpose of cats is that they constitute mobile decorative objects," or, "That should simply incite us to take special precautions with them as we would with very fragile objects." She’s smarter than Ender and more erudite than Harry Potter of Methods of Rationality.
Problem three is that the characters never confront, and the author seems unaware of, their fatal flaw, which is that they care too much about art and not enough about people. They spend all their time studying paintings, poetry, novels, and music, and justify their lives by their erudition. It isn't clear whether Mr. Ozu breaks them of this habit or not, as their warm feelings about him are all associated with his agreements with them about art. It's a lengthy character study that nonetheless leaves us with one-dimensional characters and no convincing reasons why they have the one trait that they do have. It’s never clear whether the author realizes that her main character/s, who spend all their time looking down on the intellectual shallowness of everyone else, are themselves just one or two onion-layers deeper.
Problem four is the ending. The climax is Renee overcoming a childhood memory, in standard Freudian manner, that forbade her from believing she could have upper-class friends. Yet, though the author wrote an entire novel in which the character's arc is to realize that she can transcend class boundaries, she didn't believe it herself. Instead of transcendence, we get a sudden tear-jerker ending that has fate deny that transcendence in just the way Renee had superstitiously expected, entirely contradicting the novel's theme.
The sentences are beautiful, and the characters and their thoughts are interesting enough to sustain 40,000 words (not 90,000). But it's too long for this American, spends its time probing social foibles instead of the characters themselves, and the author wasn't, I think, certain what the story was actually about. Katherine Mansfield could have made a beautiful short story out of it.
This sounds like a terrible review. But I liked the book! (I also liked Star Trek I.) It could have been a masterpiece, with a little editing and some rewriting.
There's no real problem in that. Sometimes, we just like things are objectively worse than other things. Personal tastes don't have to be good, they just have to be things that we enjoy.
I suppose the real question is: would you have enjoyed it more, or found it somehow more meaningful, had you been french? Are the problems with the piece structural, or are they cultural?
1016186 Are the problems with the piece structural, or are they cultural?
I can only make this distinction to the extent that there are culture-free, universal principles of structure. I can see that the pacing might be French. I'd think that showing just one deep, narrow slice of the characters would be a problem in any culture. But maybe valuing cultural sophistication and witty commentary so highly is also just being French.
Good lord.
pinkie.mylittlefacewhen.com/media/f/img/mlfw9292-136208580473.jpg
I kid.
Now, if you had said Insurrection, we would have nothing more to say to each other. 
And that is probably all I can contribute to this.
Having just read the novel's preamble and also read a few of Amit's blog posts for the first time, I'm not sure Amit didn't actually write the thing. Amit scares and fascinates me...
I liked Enterprise. No judging from this corner.
That has to be the flimsiest reason for suicide I've ever seen. No "nobody loves me and my life is pain" or "I will have to live with constant agony" here. Just "I don't want to be rich, and thus must die." Wealthy-white guilt runs deep, it seems.
Damn. I haven't even read the book and I'm getting annoyed at it.
First, the important part. Cassoulets are incredibly delicious. Also French, yes, but we shan't hold that against their meaty, uhm, bean-y goodness.
Second, the review was quite negative, and yet it has left me with a strong desire to read the book[1]. I'd have bought it instantly but the Kindle edition doesn't appear to be available where I am. Most peculiar. Perhaps I can find a translation in my native language? That'd make for an interesting change.
[1] I think that that makes it a very nearly perfect review, then.
1017169 After this review, you come away wanting to actually read the book? Perhaps we are more different than I thought.
I know I don't necessarily read for the same reasons as other people, but one thing I don't do is read words for the sheer joy of those words. (I tell myself, despite having prominently advertised Amit's "Fifty Sheaves of Paper" on my userpage and in a blog post, so perhaps I'm an unreliable narrator) I think prose should serve a purpose. I'm fine with that purpose not being plot, but I want words to be more than simply self-serving. Plot is good, but I'll accept character, setting, or theme as well. All four is wonderful, but we can't always have nice things.
So: plot, character, setting, theme.
You say the book is anything but plot-driven, and the central crisis of the narrative comes after 45,000 words. Clearly I'd never read this for plot.
You say the book has two principal characters, who are the same person. You say these person are fundamentally flawed – good! – but that the author has no interest in confronting or resolving their flaws – not so good. You say that they're not particularly well developed, quite one- or two-dimensional. And you say that one of these person can't consistently speak in her own voice. Woo woo allowances for translation. Still. This sounds like a godawful book in terms of character.
You provide almost no information on setting, which suggests to me that it's not the central focus of the book. That's a shame, since the other three foci I look for seem to be areas where, whether or not the book is focusing on them, it's doing its best to self-immolate.
And you say that the climactic resolution undermines what the book has established by way of theme, so the author can go for a quick tear-jerker.
This does sound like a terrible review. So terrible, in fact, that it makes me question the very sanity of GhostOfHeraclitus. Are you sure you're not still running a fever over there?
Oh, one other thing:
1016337 Insurrection, schminsurrection. Now "Nemesis", there was an awful movie.
Picard is the expy of the Federation. So let's threaten the Federation with a clone Picard! Never mind that Picard's awesomeness comes directly from him being morally superior to everyone else in his organization. A genetic duplicate with none of his experience and moral reasoning is still going to be a good dramatic foil for him, right? Oh, it's not? Well, I guess then maybe we can kill Data to get some emotional punch out of this movie.
Ugh.
1017754
I am running a fever[1], yes, but what I got from Bad Horse's review is that the book is flawed, no doubt, but it is, let's say, gloriously flawed. I don't expect I'll enjoy the book, I generally don't have the taste for modern literature, but I am very curious. It sounds so very unlike anything I'd pick up on my own, and this curiosity, coupled with Bad Horse's recommendation[2] is enough to get me to give it a shot. Worst case, it sounds like a book I could get really angry at, and that's fun in its own way.
As for my sanity, sir, please, do not worry on its account. It's long gone.
[1] 38 degrees Celsius, in case you are wondering. I think I've become quite immune to antipyretics.
[2] He's one of a small group of people who's opinions on these sort of matters have a lot of weight for me. So are you, actually.
1018532 That is the one point I find myself conflicted on. I tend to trust your judgment, and that means by extension I tend to trust Bad Horse's judgment, and he does recommend the thing.
But he does it in such a thoroughly damning way that it basically picks apart, piece by piece, any interest I might imagine myself finding in the novel and tells me that no, I will find nothing for me there. How he comes out recommending it mystifies me, but I'm sadly too busy to find that mystery compelling enough to want to actually investigate it.
A lot of people apparently like the thing, so there must be something there to like, right? Well, except that seems like one of the big selling points for the works of Herman Melville, too, and there's an author I can only make time for if I'm feeling an excessive surge of morbid curiosity. Melville is my Joyce, and thank God I haven't tried actually reading Joyce yet. The snippets I've seen make me weep for the art of writing.
That sort of literature reminds me of the old cognitive dissonance experiments in psychology. Individuals who engage in an unenjoyable task want to rationalize their actions. If the action is in some sense a requirement, they rationalize in terms of the value of the thing that did the requiring. If they receive substantial reward, they rationalize in terms of the value of the reward. If they act voluntarily (or in some sense with a perception of free choice) – and only in this particular case – they convince themselves that the task itself must have been enjoyable, because they chose to do it. Yes, I'm generalizing a bit wildly from the 1954 Festinger and Carlsmith study, but that's basically the message behind it. We convince ourselves that our actions have value, even when there's no good evidence that they do.
There's so much stuff in the world – good books, fun hobbies, interesting art – that I have a hard time with the idea of actively choosing to engage in any activity that I have good reason to believe I'll find unfulfilling. When I'm immortal, I may revise my standards.
1018937>>1018532 I didn't recommend it. I liked it, but there are shorter books that I liked more.
I do recommend Moby Dick. It helps if you think of it as epic fantasy.
Even when you're immortal, there will be too much stuff to do it all.
1018937 Uhg, Melville.
I tried to read Moby-Dick. I really did. And there were some really great parts[1]. I have no doubt that, had I finished it, I would have good memories of it. But actually reading it was a real pain, especially after he abandoned his established (first-person) narrator for no discernible reason (no, not the part where he ran Captain Ahab's introspection, that did have a good reason. Although the scene transition sucked, even if perhaps for the same reason).
I've picked up the impression (perhaps even from our devious host?) that Joyce was mostly screwed by people focusing on his "oh new" and ignoring his halfway-decent stuff, and so he veered off into 'oh-hey-it-looks-like-I'm-insane' territory. The moocow-quote one, for example, I'm sure is pretty much fucked by his confounding choice(s) of made-up words and would be somewhat decent if told in normal language.
This reminds me somewhat of My Harshwhinnyal. It's very good what it is, I can tell that by glancing at it and looking at/talking to horizon. But (almost because of that) I can tell there is no way I will enjoy what it is. Then again, Horse did say this could've worked at 40,000 words but definitely not at 90,000 words.
[1] I loved the garden-thieves reference, for example.