The Hedgehog Book: 1

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The world view of the book is conservative. Renee worships the accepted canons of Western art, music, and thinking. She herself epitomizes the upper-middle class women she regards with such scorn. She is one of the most obnoxious characters I've come across in a book. The author expects the reader to sympathize with Renee, but she is boring and self-pitying, among other faults. The story revolves mainly around the characters of Renée Michel and Paloma Josse, residents of an upper-middle class Left Bank apartment building at 7 Rue de Grenelle – one of the most elegant streets in Paris. A cultured Japanese businessman named Kakuro Ozu, whom Renée and Paloma befriend, then takes a room in the same apartment building. Ozu comes to share Paloma's fascination with Renée: that the concierge has the "same simple refinement as the hedgehog".

And be careful of them: for they will, despite their attempts to push you away with their overly intellectual babbling, their deliberate hiding, their desperate and unconscious need to repress their true natures to protect themselves from long-buried pain or more recent and ongoing torment, sneak up on you, seize your heart and send you reeling at the depth of what they reveal about being human, about being loved, about being validated, about being. The plot is light on what you might call "action." It's a novel of conversations and self-reflections, and takes place almost entirely within the confines of the apartment building. But it moves like a life, in the best possible way. Their outsized crania were not always easy to carry. Renee, the concierge, was not to the manor born (probably more like the servants’ quarters) and she never seemed to forget it. She had a real thirst for knowledge, though –- an accomplished autodidact in philosophy, film, art, and music. But she never felt comfortable sharing any of these joys with anyone given what she felt the attitudes towards a woman of her social standing would be. The girl was a different story. Her cross to bear was how to carve out a niche for herself in a family that was all too comfortable with its elevated status. Her main weapon against the soullessness of life in the upper crust was cynicism. She wielded it well, sometimes to humorous effect. At times she may not have seemed real, but then you could say the same about the Coneheads, and if you recall, they too were from France. There is a 2009 film that I haven't seen, merely called "The Hedgehog": http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1442519/?...What changes everything is when one of the old residents dies and the apartment is bought by a wealthy Japanese man. The fact he is outside the French class system only serves to emphasise its importance in this story. The three misfits have the chance of change. It's overtly philosophical, but is at least as much about class, art (books, films, paintings), and about breaking free to be yourself - regardless of the price. Then again, everything I'm reading at the moment seems to have an aspect of breaking free: either the universe is speaking to me, or I'm speaking to myself. To start with, pure beauty striking the summer sky, awe-filled respect absconding with your heart, a feeling of insignificance at the very heart of the sublime, so fragile and swollen with the majesty of things, trapped, ravished, amazed by the bounty of the world. What does Art do for us? It gives shape to our emotions, makes them visible and, in so doing, places a seal of eternity upon them, a seal representing all those works that, by means of a particular form, have incarnated the universal nature of human emotions.

When something is bothering me, I seek refuge. No need to travel far; a trip to the realm of literary memory will suffice. For where can one find more noble distraction, more entertaining company, more delightful enchantment than in literature? Paloma is the only tenant who suspects Renée's refinement. Although they share interests in philosophy and literature, nothing happens between them until the death of a celebrated restaurant critic who had been living upstairs.

Concerning the questions I had before I read the book - I don't think the disparate views on this book have anything to do with the translation or cultural differences. I think it is simply that people are different. We value different things. We are interested in different issues. It's that simple. As always, I am saved by the inability of living creatures to believe anything that might cause the walls of their little mental assumptions to crumble. Concierges do not read 'The German Ideology', hence, they would certainly be incapable of quoting the eleventh thesis of Feuerbach.

Then, too, my inner cynic has to cavil just a little bit at the unlikely perfection of the emotional harmonic convergence towards the book's ending. Mr Ozu seems more than a little too good to be true. And, for that matter, once you get away from the hypnotically, charmingly persuasive voices of the two narrators, the thought might cross your mind that maybe the other residents of the building aren't quite the shallow monsters they are made out to be throughout the book. Maybe the much maligned older sister, Colombe, deserves a break as well.Chapters on art, literature and advertising as well as myths and legends bring an interesting angle to proceedings. The hedgehog references found in various Shakespeare plays were unknown to me! We are in the center of Paris, in an elegant apartment building inhabited by bourgeois families. Renée, the concierge, is witness to the lavish but vacuous lives of her numerous employers. Outwardly she conforms to every stereotype of the concierge: fat, cantankerous, addicted to television. Yet, unbeknownst to her employers, Renée is a cultured autodidact who adores art, philosophy, music, and Japanese culture. With humor and intelligence she scrutinizes the lives of the building's tenants, who for their part are barely aware of her existence.

Whence comes the sense of wonder when we encounter certain works of art?... The enigma is constantly renewed: great works are the visual forms which attain in us the certainty of timeless consonance... Certain forms... return again and again throughout the history of art." Paloma's efforts to appear average are more understandable, and quite a common tactic of gifted children. This diagram shows that they eat a lot of beetles, along with caterpillars and earthworms. Most people are aware that hedgehogs are mostly insect eaters.When you set out to deal with phenomenology, you have to be aware of the fact that it boils down to two questions: What is the nature of human consciousness? What do we know of the world? From Paloma: If you want to understand my family, all you have to do is look at the cats. Our two cats are fat windbags who eat designer kibble and have no interesting interaction with human beings. The only purpose of cats is that they constitute mobile decorative objects, a concept which I find intellectually interesting, but unfortunately our cats have such drooping bellies that this does not apply to them. My mother, who has read all of Balzac and quotes Flaubert at every dinner, is living proof every day of how education is a raving fraud. All you need to do is watch her with the cats. She's vaguely aware of their decorative potential, and yet she insists on talking to them as if they were people, which she would never do with a lamp or an Etruscan statue.