The Elegance of the Hedgehog

By: Muriel Barbery / Narrated By: Barbara Rosenblat, Cassandra Morris

Length: 9 hrs and 34 mins

Okay, time to fess up: I am enTIREly lacking in sophistication and prefer my novels to have a plot…

Dunno, maybe it’s cuz this is translated from the French, and author Muriel Barbery is a professor of philosophy? Maybe it’s cuz I think she was going for, what? making philosophy palatable to the great unwashed? Maybe it’s cuz perhaps she was trying for a vaaaastly wry look at how we all tend to judge people by appearances and class?

Dunno Dunno Dunno

Don’t care…

Cuz what we have here is NOT what I was thinking I was gonna get into. I was thinking it was to be about a prickly hedgehog of an intelligent woman warming through a quirky relationship with an intelligent offbeat kinda outcast of a young girl… with a bevy of heartwarming characters who are the tenants where our endearing hedgehog is the concierge.

Oy freaking vey. Nope.

Renée is 54 years old, frumpy, a shabby dresser, and she keeps her TV on all day, tuned to something boorish lest the individuals who dwell in the apartment building cotton onto the fact that, actually? The woman rocks!

She reads voraciously, devours works on philosophy, philosophical theories, art, Russian literature, can discuss Marx and Marxist works with the best of them. And for HOURS during this audiobook, she muses on such things. ….for HOURS…

Paloma is 12 years old, and due to the fact that she has no belief in life or her fellow man, she’s planning on offing herself on her 13th birthday—an overdose with a bit of arson on the side. This is kinda to shake her family up a bit as she can’t stand how shallow and fake they are. She journals her dark thoughts, sprinkled with little epiphanies to go with such inCREDibly biting observations. And for HOURS during this audiobook, she muses on such things. ….for HOURS…

The two don’t actually meet up until there are only two and a half hours left in the story. And then it’s communion based wholly on: I see you as you truly are; you’re smarter than everyone around here put together. So touching this meeting of two lost souls…

Except it’s not. Both of these women, young and old, are so very pleased with themselves, and while the verrrrry end of the story has us learning that all of Renée’s woes are based on a tragic incident in her past, for Paloma what is there? Basically, she’s an individual who’s never been challenged in her life, who’s surrounded by caricatures not real people (Flawed writing here; why go for the low hanging fruit?), and really? If she volunteered at a soup kitchen just ONCE, maybe she’d have a bit of true self-awareness rather than the perpetual living in her head that Barbery treats us to. ….for HOURS…!

Now onto a French novel having American narrators. No problem, as both Rosenblat and Morris are stellar. I particularly liked how Rosenblat could swirl and dip her voice, so many inflections, little gasps and growls, and bringing warmth to what could’ve been an exCEEDingly cold character. Cassandra Morris does her usual awesome job with her childlike voice (I googled her to see that she’s actually middle-aged! Holy cow!), but really: She had the tricky job of trying to make a tween suffering from Excessive Rumination a heartwarming character, she who sees the soft side of the prickly hedgehog. Morris did her best, but Paloma still wound up as what I truuuuuly dislike: That far too common creature, the Precocious Child.

The story staaaaarts getting better with the introduction of the new tenant, Kakuro Ozu. Now HE was deftly-written and came out as a warm, accepting, loving individual. Bummer thing? The audiobook already had us slaving away far too long before he enters the story. Still, the last half of the book was much MUCH better because of him, and I’d say he, not Paloma, is the tamer of hedgehogs everywhere with his warm manner.

And just when things were starting to go well? POW—an abrupt ending that my mom posited wasn’t abrupt enough (This audiobook had us all rolling our eyes and rubbing our ears). Add to that the fact that all of a sudden, within the final MINUTES of the story, Paloma learns a valuable lesson and she vows to not continue her life as a total toad (No offense to toads).

Barbery should take a lesson from Paloma: Brevity! No need for 9 1/2 hours of a question when the answer can be summed up in 1 1/2 minutes…