The Beauty of the Hedgehog

The Elegance of the Hedgehog by Muriel Barbery is a great book.  This beautiful, moving, and occasionally very funny novel tells the story of an amazing woman and a startling young girl, and their parallel and eventually joined paths to recognition of beauty, in the self and in the world.

Renee is the concierge of a very upscale building in Paris, a supremely intelligent and grammatically exacting woman, and Paloma is one of her tenants , a 12-year old girl already fed up with the falseness of the adults around her and doubtful about life’s possibilities. Renee is acutely aware and appreciative of life’s moments of beauty and yet is unable to grasp the absolute beauty within herself.  Paloma is a French, intelligent, and female prepubescent version of Holden Caulfield, a confused and disillusioned but still young and therefore reachable rebel.  Her thoughts are presented to us through her two thoroughly engaging and at times heartbreaking journals; from Renee we get her inner thoughts and observations through first person narration.

This book is about finding a reason to live but it is absolutely un-American in its prescription: there is no easy path, life is full of difficulties, and you are on your own.  But if you are honest and intelligent and exacting, you will find and appreciate the beauty that exists in relationships and music and nature and books.  The book is about the pure beauty that is possible in moments of genuine expression, the fleeting moments that can still last forever in our minds because of their beauty and truth.

If we are lucky, many such moments occur in our lives and we are mindful enough to grasp the beauty.  One rainy afternoon I spent in a Barcelona Art Museum over twenty-five years ago, I was stopped short by a painting. I will always remember the beauty of that painting (although I can remember neither author nor title), and the painting has its same power to bring peace to me now as it did then.  It is a simple landscape of a dawning sky over a dark hillside, with a hermit just coming out of his cave in the hill.  Apricot-orange lines had been painted in beyond the darkened hermit and his burrow to show the dawning of day;  looking at the painting I felt the thawing wind of spring, the precious beat of living, the gratitude for another day granted.  Memories of mornings I’d spent in the country entwined with the experience of seeing the painting, creating layers of time to be stored and later savored.  The moment of seeing that painting and the moments of experiencing what was presented in that painting are moments that, when brought back by remembering, have sustained and comforted me.

Renee is also aware of the threaded memories of life, and of the beauty that endures to sustain and inspire us to continue on with the sometimes heavy burden of living; she tries to pass that knowledge to Paloma, not through lessons or lectures, but through sharing of ideas and thoughts.  It is the joy of conversation, of realizing a shared observation or enthusiasm or dis-enthusiasm, that brings Paloma around to a new commitment to living, even when faced very suddenly with death.

The Elegance of the Hedgehog offers us Renee’s beautiful but thoroughly realistic appraisal of life. When she herself must re-examine what she thought she knew about herself, the forced examination does not undercut her appraisal but serves to support it even more: we understand, as she does, that by living fully observant and appreciative of the beauty that appears fleetingly in actual time but permanently in our minds, we can survive and surpass the mundane and trivial and superficial.  We can make connections and stave off alienation; each moment caught by our flourishing minds only makes all the moments to come better and better. Young Paloma commits herself to finding those “moments of always within never” as a reason to live and that reason is good enough for me.

Reviewed by Nina Sankovitch - On the Read all Day blog, Nina blogs about one book a day.

Published by Europa Books - paperback - 978-1933372600 - $15.00

I can’t begin to tell you how I loved Ron Carlson’s new novel, any more than I can explain the difference between the Butter Pecan ice cream from Babcock Hall in Madison, Wisconsin and the same flavor anywhere else. If you tasted it, you’d understand. I’ll have a sample for you in a minute. (The prose, not the ice cream. Though you can order that delivered, I hear).

In The Signal, just as in Carlson’s short stories, a lifetime of emotion is distilled into one event. This time the event is a six-day camping trip in the mountains–a final goodbye for Mack and his ex-wife, Vonnie.

Broken hearted by the death of his father, Mack blew it, big time. Amid the resulting drinking and drug-running, and the threatened loss of his beloved ranch, Vonnie left him. Several months in jail gave him time to dry out and think things over, but not to make a plan. He can just about manage one last annual fishing trip with Vonnie, and despite the fact that she’s with another man now, she agrees to go. Big stuff happens on the fishing trip and it doesn’t turn out how either of them planned, and that’s the story. Six days.

Here’s Mack waiting for Vonnie at the beginning of the trip, still unsure of whether she’ll show up:

Mack was not scared. He had been uneasy and worried and scared and empty and sort of ruined, and he knew this, but now he had his ways of doing one thing and then the next and it kept the ruin off him. If she left Jackson by four, she’d be along in a while. If she hadn’t left Jackson; well then.

An abundance of flashbacks fills in the details of Mack and Vonnie’s courtship and how things went wrong. Flashbacks can be tricky business, more distracting than enlightening, but when they work well–as they do here–the result is magic. By the end of Day One while Mack waits for Vonnie to arrive–thirty pages–the reader has tasted enough of his history to be glad to see Vonnie, and to truly understand why his father’s death so thoroughly devastated him.

His father’s death changed it all. At the ranch everything was tilted, weird; it was more than something missing. Gravity had changed. Mack saw to the horses and painted the small barn, but there was no center for him without his father there.

The setting–the mountains of Wyoming–is as critical to the story as any of the characters are, and the plot becomes riveting at the halfway point. Luckily it’s a short book; by the time you can’t put it down, you might as well go ahead and finish it.

Some people like ratings; I don’t. But if it’ll make you read this one, I’ll give it five (out of five) glorious pints of Babcock Hall butter pecan ice cream.

Reviewed by Ali J - her wonderful website is Worducopia: dedicated to the enjoyment and discussion of books and writing.  (Editor’s Note: Ron Carlson’s much older book Truants is a long time favorite of mine)

Published by Viking - hardcover - 978-0670021000 - $25.95

Order from Amazon or Barnes & Noble or find a local bookstore through Indie Bound.

Having read Joseph Boyden’s amazing Three Day Road, I was more than eager to read his second novel Through Black Spruce.

Three Day Road was set during The Great War, a time period I particularly enjoy reading about. And, of course, the ending left every reader wondering what had become of Xavier Bird.
I was disappointed when I opened Through Black Spruce, as it is set in the present day and so seemed completely unrelated to Xavier. Nonetheless, Boyden pulled me in with his skillful prose that paints pictures in just a sentence. The first chapter ends with Will Bird talking about his youth: “I was young still, young enough to believe you can put out your gill nets and pull in options like fish.” I was completely hooked like one of those fish.

The story is told in alternating chapters by Will Bird, a Northern bush pilot (and, we find out, a son of Xavier’s second marriage) and his niece Annie Bird. Will is lying in a coma (we are not at first told why) and Annie has come back home at the request of her mother to visit him. Annie’s friend Eva, a nurse at the hospital, suggests that Annie talk to Will in the hopes that he might respond to her voice & awaken.

At first, the two stores being told in flashback – Will’s of his life in the North, and Annie’s, of her recent, prolonged travels to Toronto & New York in an attempt to find her sister Suzanne, who has lost contact with her family after achieving super-model status – appear to have nothing in common. Each of the characters speaks without reference to what the other has just finished saying.

Will’s story includes Marius Netmaker, the “kingpin” of local drug dealers and a family enemy. Marius is the grandson of Elijah Whiskeyjack, boyhood companion and best friend of Will’s father Xavier. Annie’s story includes her attempt to make a life for herself after returning from the city.

But slowly, the threads of the stories come together & we see the fabric of their lives – Will’s, Annie’s, Suzanne’s, and the girls’ mother Lisette. Just as the movement of a butterfly’s wings sets in motion untold wonders, so Suzanne’s leaving the North sets a knotted pattern for all of the lives around her.

Boyden’s writing has been often & highly praised - and rightly so. I may not be able to find a superlative that has not already been used.

It’s deft & nimble, it captures images & sets them precisely down in a few words, and it finds the cadence of the Northern people about whom he writes. Annie’s “Ever tipsy, me” after having too much wine typifies the softness & frugality of his spoken language passages. I was as delighted as the character Violet at this phrase – but for much different reasons.

If you’ve read Three Day Road, you MUST read this. If you haven’t, then get a copy & read it – and then read this. I rate it a secure five stars.

P.S. Readers can only hope that rumors are true that Boyden is writing more in this series. My personal wish is that he will fill in the time between Xavier’s return from France & his death. What do you think?

Reviewed by Debbie Rodgers, http://www.exurbanis.com

Published by Viking - 978-0670020577 - $26.95 hardcover