(Europa Editions, $29.95)
Every now and then along comes a book so special you just can’t wait for everyone else to read it so you can talk about it.
oy friend Miranda told me about The Elegance of the Hedgehog more than a year ago and I asked for it at a Christchurch bookshop soon after but they didn’t have it. While I was there, though, another customer piped up that they’d heard of it too and then someone working in the back room popped around the corner and said so had they. Hence an order was made.
Still, it took me a while to get my hands on a copy and then it ended up low down in the stack but finally I got to read this gorgeous book and now, well, I want everyone else to catch up.
Renee is 54, fat and frumpy, the dour concierge of a posh Paris apartment building full of self-satisfied rich people who treat her like the microbe she appears to be.
She hides in her impoverished servant’s lair pretending to watch crappy television and cook peasant food – which is exactly what is expected of her – when she is really watching DVDs, reading Prussian philosophy, listening to classical music and losing herself in “the miraculous presence of Art”.
In other words, she is no ordinary concierge. Meanwhile, upstairs, precocious 12-year-old Paloma despairs at the pretentiousness of her rich family, struggles to appear stupider than she really is, delights in all things Japanese and plots her own suicide to escape the idiocy of adulthood.
It’s only a matter of time before these two offbeat inhabitants of 7 Rue de Grenelle find each other – and a reason to stop hiding their lights under a bushel. I laughed and laughed, and wept and wept.
A beautiful translation of a slow-burning bestseller that has enchanted all who have persevered with the quills and discovered the beauty beneath. Actually prescribed by one Parisian psychotherapist as an alternative to Prozac. Read it.
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