Muriel Barbery

L’eleganza del riccio

   (L’élégance du hérisson / The Elegance of the Hedgehog)

edizioni e/o, 2007 (2006)    [tale, Ita, I3]

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The Elegance of the Hedgehog, a refined French comedy, was the literary event in France in 2007: it sold hundreds of thousand copies thanks to an impressing passing words ed it won the Bookseller Prize granted by booksellers.

We are in Paris in a fashionable building inhabited by top class families. Staying into her lodge, the concierge Renéè looks at the luxury vacuity of the life flowing in the building. She looks like the standard concierge: fat, careless, grumpy and tv-addicted. But, unknown to everybody, Renée is a well-read self-taught, who loves art, philosophy,music, and japanese culture.

Then there is Paloma, the daughter of a blunt minister; she is twelve years old, sharp, bright, extremely smart, and tired of living at a point that she is determined to kill herself (on June 16, on her thirteenth birthday). Up to that moment she will pretend being a poor young girl, imbued with very teen-aged subculture.

Thus these two unknown characters, though different, share the same undeceived look and, not knowing each other pretence, in the end they’ll meet because of mister Ozu, a rich japanese man, who’ll be able to unmask Renée and her old, painful secret.

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