Talented, precocious, and startingly lucid, she has come to terms with life's seeming futility and has decided to end her own on the day of her thirteenth birthday. Then there's Paloma, a super-smart twelve-year-old and the youngest daughter of the Josses, who live on the fifth floor. With biting humor she scrutinizes the lives of the building's tenants-her inferiors in every way except that of material wealth. But Renée has a secret: she is a ferocious autodidact who furtively devours art, philosophy, music, and Japanese culture. In short, she is everything society expects from a concierge at a bourgeois building in a posh Parisian neighborhood. Her only genuine attachment is to her cat, Leo.

She is cantankerous and addicted to television soaps. Renée, the building's concierge, is short, ugly, and plump. We are in an elegant hôtel particulier in the center of Paris. The Elegance of the Hedgehog is a moving, funny, atmospheric novel that exalts the quiet victories of the inconspicuous among us. The international bestseller that has sold over 10 million copies worldwide.

Product Dimensions: 5.6 x 1 x 8.5 inches.

Publisher: Europa Editions 1st edition (September 2, 2008).

Nevertheless, production values are high, the performances are solid and there are moments of charm.This title was our April 2018 pick for the UNICORN BOOKCLUB! Find out more here. The cuteness grates, and the setups and philosophizing are generally unconvincing. But art house audiences might find the movie’s winsomeness sticking in their throat.Īlthough the conceit of an ever-so-erudite child palling around with an exceedingly wise concierge might be workable in a novel, cinema tends to realism, and Achache is too much of a novice to bring it off. The story’s transposition of class conflict into something resembling the Cinderella fairy tale explains much of the novel’s success and might provide a basis for successful marketing of the movie worldwide. When the cultured Kakuro Ozu (Togo Igawa) moves into an upstairs apartment, he too is taken with Renee’s “elegance of the hedgehog” - all prickles outside, but a heart of gold within. She has a lavishly stocked library in her back room and, when her employers are not looking, enjoys nothing better than to curl up with a volume or two of Tolstoy.

She perceives an ally in the stout, blowsy concierge named Renee Michel (Josiane Balasko). She has decided that rather than succumb to the mediocrity of the life around her, she will commit suicide on a given date unless things take a turn for the better. Paloma (Garance Le Guillemic) is the daughter of a snobbish mother and a distracted father, both of whom largely ignore her.

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