Product Description

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 façade lies the real Renée: 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 lodge, apart from weekly visits by her one friend Manuela, Renée 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 will dramatically alter their lives forever. The Gourmet, Muriel Barbery's first novel is published on 1st September 2009.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #546 in Books
• Published on: 2009-05-14
• Original language: French
• Binding: Paperback
• 320 pages

Review
Resistance is futile...you might as well buy it before someone recommends it for your book group. It s charm will make you say yes --The Guardian Clever, informative and moving... this is an admirable novel which deserves as wide a readership here as it had in France --The Observer This breathtakingly singular novel...is totally French yet completely universal --Good Housekeeping --Good Housekeeping

Clever, informative and moving... this is an admirable novel which deserves as wide a readership here as it had in France --The Observer

This breathtakingly singular novel...is totally French yet completely universal --Good Housekeeping

About the Author
Muriel Barbery teaches philosophy. L'Elegance du herisson is her second novel. Her first book, Une gourmandise (Gallimard, 2000) has been translated into twelve languages.

Customer Reviews

A must read but not for the light reader!
This is a really excellent novel. I read it in french and thoroughly enjoyed it.

It is written in two voices. The main voice is that of a physically challenged 54 year old concierge in a high class appartment block in Paris. Renee is a self taught intellectual of great intellignece who choses to conceal her knowledge and tastes from her upper class employer in the interest of 'keeping her place and hence leading a quiet life'. Her comments and observations on the residents are sharp and often hilarious and her search and analisys for the 'meaning and value of life' develops throughout the novel. In parallel, we have the deep thoughts of the 12 year old highly intelligent daughter of one of the resident families. She totally disillusioned by the meaninglessness of life, the triteness of her family and the world in general; so much so that she is planning her own suicide at the age of 13. Her musings and thoughts are equally sharp and amusing despite her continuous and bewildered search for meaning.

Their paths unite as a result of the death of a resident which precipitates a new arrival in the person of a wealthy japanese man with a very different perspective on life from the typical bourgeois inhabitants of the appartments. He quickly identifies the two (concierge and girl)for their intelligence and originality of thought and an unlikely friendship is formed. This friendship is the catalyst to the thoughts and musing of the concierge and the girl and brings each one to an equilibrium.

The novel has many highly amusing observations and the characters are highly appealing but it is not a novel in which the storyline forms the main purpose of the book. The main purpose is the philosophical search for meaning of the characters. As such it is not a book I would recommend for light reading. It requires a more than average level of both cultural and philosophical understanding. The language used is extremely rich and complex in places. I did find myself reaching for the dictionary on many occasions. It might be that in the english translation this is not such a problem but certainly in french (and I am a native speaker) it was very challenging parts.

It is because of this last point that I didnt award a full five stars. Having researched the words and then rebuilt the philosophical points in simpler language, I found on several occasion that the complex language dressed-up some interesting but not terribly deep philosophy which could have been said more simply. This is very french of course!

I thoroughly recommend this to anyone who is not phased by my comments in the last paragraph. It is a very good book but not one for those who dont want to use a dictionary or re-read a page now and then to sort out exactly what is being said. If you can cope,it is fun and very satisfying.

Not Spiky Enough
Do you remember an episode of `Hancock's Half Hour' called `The Poetry Society'? In it, Tony Hancock had become acquainted with a group of pretentious pseudo-intellectuals who thought such utterances as, "Life is purple, I am orange," indicated genius. I was reminded of this quite often when reading `The Elegance of the Hedgehog'.

I freely admit that I may not be clever enough to have fully grasped the vast tracts of philosophical insight spouted by our two heroines. Renee is a fifty-four year-old concierge who is wildly aware of her standing among her social betters who occupy apartments in the block that she serves. Paloma is a precocious twelve-year old girl who lives in the same tenement. She spends her time filling her diary with tut-tutting observations of her life and family and thoughts of suicide and arson.

Class boundaries are what this novel has at its heart. Renee is of lower-class stock, but she is naturally clever. Much cleverer, at least in her own mind, than any of the higher-ups that she meets during her day-to-day duties. Her knowledge of Nietzsche, Kant and phenomenology rattles around in her mind but must remain hidden from those about her. Unfortunately it is not kept from the reader. I was bored witless as I waded through this literary swamp while Renee worried that her so-called betters would find her out and think that she has ideas above her station. Ah, I thought, as soon as Renee meets Paloma, she'll put her on the straight and narrow in a `Sophie's World' sort of way.

And so, you wait for these two kindred spirits to cross paths. And you wait, and you wait. It happens eventually, but far too late in the novel for any character development to take shape. Amid the monotone monotony of inverse snobbery and cultural references that, I'm afraid for the most part, were over my head, nothing much happens.

So far, so dull. Perhaps it was the author's intention to render in the reader a state of deadened emotion. If so, she did a great job in the final third as she strikes with sledgehammer-blow to the senses. I suddenly began to care about these characters and I read the last hundred pages in one sitting; I'd previously been struggling through a few pages at a time. The book's ending is incredibly moving. I would have probably given this novel two stars had it continued in its stagnant vein, but the final section yanked it up to three. It's a pity that the middle section could not have been paced a little more urgently. In my opinion, it became too bogged down as each of the main protagonists were caught in their own worlds and the reader's anticipation is whetted only to be denied for no real reason.

Curious
I'd read a fair bit about this book well before I got hold of my copy so began reading with a great deal of curiosity and an open mind. I won't tell the story as other Amazon reviewers have saved me the bother but having finished it, I found it too thin to fill a whole novel which was as well padded as a ski-jacket. It takes far too long to crank up and get moving and then ends far too suddenly and shockingly as if the author had to resort to emergency measures to put an end to what could have droned on forever. This is a common fault in new writers and an editor really should have stepped in to sort out the imbalance.

Much has been made of the philosophy. Both narrators begin by sharing a restricted and naive view of the world: That life is meaningless, the rich are shallow and the poor suffer and never the twain shall meet. Both end up understanding that class barriers can easily be crossed and that there's a reason behind everyone's behaviour, however reprehensible. I may be wrong but I think most intelligent people have come to much the same conclusion by the time they've reached maturity.

What did I like? The humorous touches made me smile, if not laugh. Some of the residents were funny in a 'Desperate Housewives' sort of manner. I was amused by the 'Mozartian flush' although it did seem OTT for the refined tastes of the epicurean Mr Ozu. I appreciated the fairy-tale structure in which his sudden arrival on the scene resembles that of the stranger/traveller/magician who transforms everything for the better.

What didn't I like? Like most reviewers here I found Paloma a pain in the neck at first so that by the time she was finally seen in her true light it was far too late. I wanted to kick Renee for her strange superiority/inferiority complex.

My conclusion? A curious novel that I neither loved nor hated and am still scratching my head as to why it has proved so popular in Europe.