Barry Pierce's Reviews > The Elegance of the Hedgehog

I've had this on my bookshelf for years. That's so typically me. I'll buy a book tomorrow but I probably won't read it for at least a year. I don't know why I do this because, as is the case with this novel, I seem to be putting off reading books that I quite enjoy.

This is the first book I've read this year which teeters on the edge between the three and four star rating. I enjoyed all the characters in here. Of course I loved Renée. I saw a lot of myself in her. Which is odd because she is a French woman in her fifties. I also liked little Paloma even if her knowledge is quite unrealistically beyond her years. But what do I know? Maybe all twelve-year-old French girls have a throughout understanding of the psychoanalytical studies of Freud, the works of Tolstoy, and Cartesian phenomenology. It's a great cast, in fact every character in this novel is ostentatiously pretentious and it is WONDERFUL.

Reading through reviews on here I see that a lot of people are complaining that this novel is full of baffling philosophical musings. I perhaps have an advantage here because I have literally just finished a year of studying philosophy in university so I was somewhat familiar with the concepts and names that Renée was dropping. However I do wish that in her accounts of William of Ockham that Barbery would have used his famous razor to cut down some of her dry and overlong ramblings.

So yeah, this has been one of the most enjoyable books I've read thus far this year. The level of pretentiousness was right up my alley (*winky emoji*). It definitely has one of the most perfect endings to a novel that I've read in recent months and for that I applaud it. However I did feel that it lacked depth and heart, I blame this on the stilted half-epistolary/half-first-person narrative style that Barbery employs. Overall, I would recommend it to people. Well... people who'd understand the allusions and references peppered throughout the novel. Let's just say that if this novel were a sitcom it'd be Frasier.