This charming French novel first published in 2006 happens to be one of my favourites of all time. It's imbued with philosophy from beginning to end and everything revolves around the meaning of life from the point of view of a well-read French concierge who hides behind the façade of a typical spec...
Renee Marchel is a 54 year old woman who is the concierge of an upper-crust apartment building in France. We are introduced to Renee in all her self-described frumpiness as she tells us: “I am a widow, I am short, ugly, and plump, I have bunions on my feet and, if I am to credit certain early mo...
Upon finishing, there was only one word that stuck in my mind to describe this book: sophisticated. "The Elegance of the Hedgehog" is a perfect fit as a title for the truly magnificent piece of literature that lay within. What's more, I couldn't believe my luck when I came across it at a used bookst...
This was a very unsettling reading experience. The story deals with two female protagonists, one the 54-year-old concierge of a Paris apartment house, the other a 12-year-old school girl who lives in one of these apartments with her family. Both women are granted enormous intelligence beyond their s...
So everyone that came to this party before me is right. This is a rather get you hooked, stomp on your heart and give you back life type of a book. Though the secret wasn’t that secret, and it could have focused on race and class a bit more.
In general, I much prefer nonfiction books because they make you understand each of the pieces that go into the whole system in order to understand the big picture. This book is better than nonfiction because it makes you understand holistically in order understand the pieces.Ostensibly, this book i...
I liked this book but not as much as I wanted to. A little more plot and a little less philosophical musing would've made it better. Two characters, the middle-aged working woman Renee and the 12-year-old rich girl Paloma, narrate the story in turn. Both are intelligent and have their own dissatisfa...
A 5-star rating cannot begin to herald the exquisiteness of this book. The two central protagonists are clearly introverted, and the book is written from their 1st person point-of-views. The introspective forays are delicious and delightful, erudite, grandiose, and even, pompous and ostentatious. Th...
I picked up this book, not because I found it in the bookstore and it sounded cool. Not because it had been recommended to me many a-times. Not because it had been flying off the shelves at the library. I picked up this book because it was a chosen book for a book club meeting that I couldn't even a...
I generally find French literature insufferably pretentious... and this was pretentious, but not at all insufferable. The two narrators - the privileged, precocious, and suicidal 12-year-old Paloma, and the unschooled but self-educated widow Renée, the concierge in Paloma's upscale apartment buildin...
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