What a delightful book!  It absconds with your heart and leaves you very sad…and happy, all rolled into one.  I guess the word for it would be bittersweet.

A precocious, suicidal twelve-year old (Paloma Josse) and a prickly, hiding-her-smarts concierge (Madame Michel) live in the same apartment building.  They meet, but only toward the end of the book.  All their exquisite reminiscing (philosophical, existential, and psychological) leads up to this chance encounter, where they’re forever changed.

The title comes from Paloma’s from-a-distance assessment of Madame Michel.  “Madame Michel has the elegance of the hedgehog: on the outside, she’s covered in quills, a real fortress, but my gut feeling is that on the inside, she has the same simple refinement as the hedgehog: a deceptively indolent little creature, fiercely solitary–and terribly elegant.”

Paloma is distressed by her mother’s addiction to anti-depressants and her inane psychiatrist, her father’s emotional barriers, and her sister’s meanness and pretentiousness.  She hides from them all, which only agitates them.  In the middle of the book, Paloma meets a new Japanese tenant, whom everyone in the building is curious about.  Kakuro talks about birch trees, and she’s enamored.

“Well, that’s just grown-up chitchat but what is great about Kakuro is that he is so polite in everything he does.  It’s really pleasant to listen to him talking, even if you don’t care about what he’s saying, because he is truly talking to you, he is addressing himself to you.  This is the first time I have met someone who cares about me when he is talking: he’s not looking for approval or disagreement, he looks at me as if he was to say, “Who are you?  Do you want to talk to me?  How nice it is to be here with you!”  That is what I meant by saying he is polite–this attitude that gives the other person the impression of really being there….

“After I’d had a chance to think about it for a while I began to understand why I felt this sudden joy when Kakuro was talking about the birch trees.  I get the same feeling when anyone talks about trees, any trees: the linden tree in the farmyard, the oak behind the old barn, the stately elm that have all disappeared now, the pine trees along wind-swept coasts, etc.  There’s so much humanity in a love of trees, so much nostalgia for our first sense of wonder, so much power in just feeling our own insignificance when we are surrounded by nature…yes, that’s it: just thinking about trees and their indifferent majesty and our love for them teaches us how ridiculous we are–vile parasites squirming on the surface of the earth–and at the same time how deserving of life we can be, when we can honor this beauty that owes us nothing.

“Kakuro was talking about birch trees and, forgetting all those psychoanalysts and intelligent people who don’t know what to do with their intelligence, I suddenly felt my spirit expand, for I was capable of grasping the utter beauty of the trees.”

And here is loveable Renée (Madame Michel, who is attempting to look and act the part of what people expect her to be…a stupid, subservient biddy).  She has just entered the newly decorated apartment of Kakuro, the Japanese tenant who has invited her for dinner.

“Directly opposite the entrance, in a ray of light, hangs a painting.

“This is the situation: here am I, Renée, fifty-four years of age, with bunions on my feet, born in a bog and bound to remain there; here am I going to dinner at the home of a wealthy Japanese man–whose concierge I happen to be–solely because I was startled by a quotation from Anna Karenina: here am I, Renée, intimidated and frightened to my innermost core, and so acutely aware of the inappropriateness and blasphemous nature of my presence here that I could faint–here, in this place which, although it may be physically accessible to the likes of me, is nevertheless representative of a world to which I do not belong, a world that wants nothing to do with concierges; as I was saying, here am I, Renée, somewhat carelessly allowing my gaze to wander beyond Monsieur Ozu and into a ray of light that is striking a little painting in a dark frame.

“Only the splendors of Art can explain why the awareness of my unworthiness has suddenly been eclipsed by an esthetic blackout.  I no longer know who I am.  I walk around Monsieur Ozu, captured by the vision.

“It is a still life, representing a table laid for a light meal of bread and oysters.  In the foreground, on a silver plate, are a half-bared lemon and a knife with a chiseled handle.  In the background are two closed oysters, a shard of shell, gleaming mother-of-pearl, and a pewter saucer which probably contains pepper.  In between the two are a goblet lying on its side, a roll showing its doughy white interior and, on the left, half-filled with a pale golden liquid, is a large goblet, balloon-shaped like an upside-down dome, with a large cylindrical stem decorated with glass lozenges.  The colors range from yellow to ebony.  The background is dull gold, slightly dusty.

“I am a fervent admirer of still lifes.  I have borrowed all the books on painting from the library and pored over them in search of still life paintings.  I have been to the Louvre, the Musée d’Orsay, the Musée d’Art Moderne, and I saw–a dazzling revelation–the Chardin exhibition at the Petit Palais in 1979.  But Chardin’s entire oeuvre does not equal one single master work of Dutch painting from the seventeenth century.  The still lifes of Pieter Claesz, Willem Claesz Heda, Willem Kalf and Osias Beert are masterpieces of the genre–masterpieces full stop, for which, without a moment’s hesitation, I would trade the entire Italian Quattrocento.

“And this picture, without a moment’s hesitation either, is unquestionably a Pieter Claesz.

“‘It’s a copy,’ says Monsieur Ozu behind me; I had totally forgotten about him.

“Must this man forever startle me?

“I am startled.”

Madame Michel feels out of her element, and she’s not aware of it yet, but she’s just entered a safe zone, of someone who will accept her, and has invited her because he sees something different in her.  No one else has paid attention to her until now.

The book will break your heart in the end (it must!), but it will be worth every second you spent engaged in these two protagonist’s lives.

I highly recommend it.

[Post image: Partial of The Elegance of the Hedgehog cover]