What's Elizabeth Reading? ...Muriel Barbery

Muriel Barbery's The Elegance of the Hedgehog. I have had it on my to-read list ever since I watched the movie. Thankfully, that was at least a couple years ago and I had only hazy memories of the storyline. That meant I was able to rediscover the story while I read.

My conclusion: This is Barbery's masterpiece.

My other conclusion: Don't read this book unless you have had a friend or loved one die. It won't hit you nearly as hard, because you won't be able to understand it as much. I have a feeling, also, that this would make a good book for someone who is in mourning. Just a suspicion, so if you try it out, please let me know whether I'm right.

I call this Barbery's masterpiece, without having read any of her other works, because of the topics it addresses: art, beauty, a reason to go on living, death. I even find myself wondering if Barbery has depression or has been suicidal before, and if it isn't her, then she must know people well who have been through that. It seems like the book is trying to answer the question, "Why is this life worth it?"

It doesn't answer the question with family, religion, or a legacy. The answer it gives, ultimately, has many layers and is too complicated to explain in a blog post. I will do my best to explain one of the answers.

A camellia.

Life is worth it because of camellias. There is a youth in the book (spoiler alert to a subplot) who is so far gone on drugs that he is emaciated and not all there, ever. One of the main characters, Renee, is standing in her home when she sees this youth staring at her camellias for an irregularly long length of time. Eventually, he asks her what they are called. She tells him and he nods to himself, then leaves. We don't get much more about this until the end of the book, when we see the youth again. He's turned his life around, and it's because whenever he would be in the darkest abyss, he would remember about camellias. Their pure beauty, it would seem, gave him something to hold onto to pull himself out.

The book highlights the small moments we may miss if we aren't looking closely enough, and maybe my generation misses them altogether a lot of the time. It's those moments where the rain just finished falling and the sun comes out to set the world aglow. It's those moments where you wake up next to the person you love and realize that love over again. It's those moments where you are walking down the sidewalk and smell a barbecue. It's those moments where everything seems right and beautiful. They are small, but they are there, and they are what we must look for if we are to realize the beauty of life itself. That is a lesson taught in this book.

This girl on the left is Paloma.

And this is Renee with her cat, Leo.

I'd like to give a shoutout to the translator, too, for absolute brilliance. Her name is Alison Anderson. I almost thought Barbery had translated it herself, everything was so spot on. I wasn't comparing the two texts, but it felt right in English, as if it hadn't been translated at all. The one thing I think is missing can't be made up for: the difference between the French vous and tu, which both translate to the English "you." Vous is used in formal settings, when you are showing respect or professionalism or just don't know the other person well. It is also the plural. Tu is used with your friends and loved ones, those you are familiar with. I have a sneaking suspicion that the lack of an English equivalent to these meant an entire dimension of the story was dropped. Class status is a theme in the book.

The translator did justice to the work, however, and it is well-written and put together. While I am talking about the writing, be aware that there are large doses of philosophy that are hard to digest at the speed one usually digests fiction. Also, look for the back-and-forth between the two viewpoint characters, which is entirely accidental since their stories don't intersect much until a good portion of the story is done. For instance, there is a Renee segment that ends with a discussion of tea-drinking, and the next section, by Paloma, starts out by discussing coffee-drinking and how she prefers tea.

I want to keep talking about it, because it was such a beautiful book, but I don't want to spoil anything! So go read it and comment to let me know what you thought.