![]() ![]() ![]() She is also an autodidact - “a permanent traitor to my archetype,” as she drolly puts it - who takes refuge in aesthetics and ideas but thinks life will be easier if she never lets her knowledge show. (Alain de Botton’s handy guide “How Proust Can Change Your Life” comes to mind.) The novel’s two narrators alternate chapters, but the book is dominated by Renée, a widowed concierge in her 50s who calls herself “short, ugly and plump,” a self-consciously stereotypical working-class nobody. ![]() “The Elegance of the Hedgehog,” a best seller in France and several other countries, belongs to a distinct subgenre: the accessible book that flatters readers with its intellectual veneer. Will Americans embrace a heroine who skulks like a spy among the intelligentsia, an apparently unlettered concierge who secretly disdains Husserl’s philosophy, adores Ozu’s films and is so passionate about Tolstoy she named her cat Leo? Or will Muriel Barbery’s studied yet appealing commercial hit be a purely European phenomenon, exposing a cultural fault line? ![]()
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