The Hedgehog Book: 1

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One of the saddest thoughts is the final phrase of this: "I have read so many books... And yet, like most autodidacts, I am never quite sure what I have gained from them." Then, in the aftermath of the Metal Virus Saga, the world has changed. Heroes and villains plan for the future as reconstruction begins. But one hero remains missing, even as Dr. Eggman launches a new assault, determined to take down his enemies once and for all. Faced with new challenges and the legacy of a friend, can the Resistance prevail without the full support of their allies? The book has no tension but it does have some contrived action as well as a ludicrous red herring. The prose is riddled with sentimentality and cuteness, and the awkward "plot" serves as a skeleton for a host of trite, sophomoric ideas. A few basic philosophical problems are rehashed in reductive ways, and the narrators imagine that they invented these ancient conundrums. Paloma is the only tenant who suspects Renée's refinement. Although they share interests in philosophy and literature, nothing happens between them until the death of a celebrated restaurant critic who had been living upstairs.

She is an autodidact in literature and philosophy, but conceals it to keep her job and, she believes, to avoid the condemnation of the building's tenants. What changes everything is when one of the old residents dies and the apartment is bought by a wealthy Japanese man. The fact he is outside the French class system only serves to emphasise its importance in this story. The three misfits have the chance of change. Sa manière d’écrire insolite, et qu’elle qualifie elle-même de désordonnée, ne lui fait pas penser qu’elle se lancerait un jour dans la fabuleuse aventure qu'est la sienne. Literally no point in reading it. Renee needlessly dies at the end. I'm so angry. Perhaps I'll write a more helpful review when I don't feel like a bag of bones and tears.

How to Make a Paperback Hedgehog... from an old Book!

One day Max's poor aunty tries, without success, to reach the park.She is hit by a car. This spurs Max on to investigate how humans cross the road safely. His first attempt results in a bump on the head and Max starts to muddle up his words and loses his direction. This leads to some very humorous language which children love. In the end detemined Max finds a way for hedgehogs to cross safely, with the help of a lollipop lady! When you set out to deal with phenomenology, you have to be aware of the fact that it boils down to two questions: What is the nature of human consciousness? What do we know of the world? A cultured Japanese businessman named Kakuro Ozu, whom Renée and Paloma befriend, then takes a room in the same apartment building. Ozu comes to share Paloma's fascination with Renée: that the concierge has the "same simple refinement as the hedgehog".

Last week, my grandmother showed me this. I love the simplicity and the fact that it looks so cute! I'll tell you how to do it. At times like this you desperately need Art. You seek to reconnect with your spiritual illusions, and you wish fervently that something might rescue you from your biological destiny, so that all poetry and grandeur will not be cast out from the world. I didn't even have enough time to react to this when just a few sentences later, Paloma says, "The truth is that they are just like everyone else: nothing more than kids who don't understand what has happened to them, acting big and tough when in fact all they want is to burst into tears."

Madame Michel has the elegance of the hedgehog: on the outside, she's covered in quills... on the inside, she has the same simple refinement as the hedgehog: a deceptively indolent little creature, fiercely solitary - and terribly elegant." Such a deep divide between the outside image we present to the world and the private landscape of our inner thoughts I believe is present in each and everyone of us, making Madame Renee a proper stand-in for the human condition. I also believe that the hedgehog in us starts to display its spines as we leave childhood behind, thus the need for a second lead character in the person of Paloma Josse. The similarities of the two cases subvert the class divide theory of Madame Renee, demonstrating that neither poverty nor a life of plenty are the deciding factors in the awakening of a higher awareness. Two further quotes should illustrate the point: This is a French confection that is light and pretty and sharp, but actually much, much more skillful and substantial than it first seems. The plot is slight and broadly predictable, but it gently leads the reader along more philosophical lines, many of which probably went over my head, but which I enjoyed anyway. When something is bothering me, I seek refuge. No need to travel far; a trip to the realm of literary memory will suffice. For where can one find more noble distraction, more entertaining company, more delightful enchantment than in literature? And be careful of them: for they will, despite their attempts to push you away with their overly intellectual babbling, their deliberate hiding, their desperate and unconscious need to repress their true natures to protect themselves from long-buried pain or more recent and ongoing torment, sneak up on you, seize your heart and send you reeling at the depth of what they reveal about being human, about being loved, about being validated, about being.

Television distracts us from the onerous necessity of finding projects to construct in the vacuity of our frivolous lives: by beguiling our eyes, television releases our mind from the great work of making meaning. I was fascinated by... these [Japanese] doors that slide and move quietly along invisible rails, refusing to offend space. For when we push open a door, we transform a place in a very insidious way... There is nothing uglier than an open door. An open door introduces a break in the room, a sort of provincial interference, destroying the unity of space... a door disrupts continuity, without offering anything in exchange other than freedom of movement, which could easily be ensured by other means. Sliding doors... without affecting the balance of the room, they allow it to be transformed. When a sliding door is opened, two areas communicate without offending each other. When it is closed, each retains its integrity. Sharing and reunion can occur without intrusion."We never look beyond our assumptions and, what's worse, we have given up trying to meet others; we just meet ourselves. We don't recognize each other because other people have become our permanent mirrors. If we actually realized this, if we were to become aware of the fact that we are only ever looking at ourselves in the other person, that we are alone in the wilderness, we would go crazy. Don't misunderstand me. My issue with this book is not the literary name-dropping or the dime store philosophizing. Some authors can get away with this stuff, even brilliantly. Kundera, for example. The difference is that Kundera is interesting. Whereas nothing and no one in this book is anything but a one-dimensional bore. Shakespeare mentions hedgehogs in ‘The Tempest’ and ‘Midsummer Night’s Dream’ and he refers to ‘hedgepigs’ and ‘urchins’.” Description So why do Renée and Paloma feel superior? In general, why do people who have a philosophical attitude feel they are better than those around them? Barbery, herself a philosopher, offers various explanations. Philosophers read more than most. They have a proper understanding of grammar, something that's even more important in French than in English: the hysterically funny sequence where Renée vows to kill her neighbour over a superfluous comma is one of the high points of the book. But, above all, they care about things that other people find uninteresting, or don't even notice. The story revolves mainly around the characters of Renée Michel and Paloma Josse, residents of an upper-middle class Left Bank apartment building at 7 Rue de Grenelle – one of the most elegant streets in Paris.

Paloma reads, but is more of a philosopher-cum-analyst. She has an older sister, Colombe, who she sees as a noisy neat-freak, shallow, unemotional, fake, and annoying (the last of those is mutual). Some of this is normal sibling stuff, but it also feeds Paloma's ennui. Paloma craves peace, so Colombe plays music loudly, "She can't invade anything else because I am totally inaccessible to her on a human level". As always, I am saved by the inability of living creatures to believe anything that might cause the walls of their little mental assumptions to crumble. Concierges do not read 'The German Ideology', hence, they would certainly be incapable of quoting the eleventh thesis of Feuerbach. Muriel Barbery is a French novelist and professor of philosophy. Barbery entered the École Normale Supérieure de Fontenay-Saint-Cloud in 1990 and obtained her agrégation in philosophy in 1993. She then taught philosophy at the Université de Bourgogne, in a lycée, and at the Saint-Lô IUFM. Paloma All our family acquaintances have followed the same path: their youth spent trying to make the most of their intelligence, squeezing their studies like a lemon to make sure they'd secure a spot among the elite, then the rest of their lives wondering with a flabbergasted look on their faces why all that hopefulness has led to such a vain existence. People aim for the stars, and they end up like goldfish in a bowl. Who cares about these people? Why should I care about them? One's a concierge, the other's a privileged brat with the exact same hormones as every other 12 year-old girl on the planet. Now, you might say, that's the point, Barbery is trying to show that these people are marginalized, and look how beautiful they actually are in their minds and spirits. But they're not beautiful. I don't give a damn that they're smart. You know what, lots of people are smart. Smart people are a dime a dozen. That doesn't make you, or me, or Renee or Paloma a special beautiful flower. It makes them smart, but they're still completely uninteresting.

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The Hodgehog is an endearing and very readable little story told from Max' persective. It has the added bonus of re enforcing issues of road safety to its readers and listeners. The Hodgeheg first published in 1987 is still a children's story that is regularly used and read by children both in and outside the classroom. It is read both for pleasure and as a tool for learning in literacy. Same goes for Paloma. She's precocious, fine. That's charming, I guess, but it's not redeeming. She wants to kill herself and burn down her family's house. Wow. That's really unique. I guess I should care about her "plight." Or... just maybe... she's exactly the same as every other precocious 12 year-old brat in the bourgeoise world and she'll get over it as soon as she discovers penis and marijuana. There are so many ways to think about that passage, and one of the good things about this book is that it doesn't dumb down; each reader can draw their own conclusions, and they may not be constant anyway. Rereading now, a couple of weeks after I first read it, I apply it in a very different way.