The Elegance of the Hedgehog

“Moreover, a concierge who reads Marx must be contemplating subversion, must have sold her soul to that devil, the trade union. That she might simply be reading Marx to elevate her mind is so incongruous a conceit that no member of the bourgeoisie could ever entertain it.”

Renée uses a sarcastic tone when thinking about how the tenants must think about her. The allusion to Karl Marx is particularly evident of this sarcasm. Marxist theory involves ideas about a necessary, forced equality between social classes. As the concierge of a building for wealthy people, Renée’s reading of Marx could be seen as political. However, for Renée reading philosophy, even if she can relate to it because of her socio-economic status, is all about the learning process.

“So I’ve made up my mind. I am about to leave childhood behind and, in spite of my conviction that life is a farce, I don’t think I can hold out to the end. We are, basically, programmed to believe in something that doesn’t exist, because we are living creatures; we don’t want to suffer. So we spend all our energy persuading ourselves that there are things that are worthwhile and that that is why life has meaning. I may be very intelligent, but I don’t know how much longer I’m going to be able to struggle against this biological tendency. When I join the adults in the rat race, will I still be able to confront this feeling of absurdity? I don’t think so.”

Paloma announces her intention to kill herself at the very start of the novel, which establishes tension and foreshadows character development. This quote is important because it identifies her inability to cope with the absurdity of life. She hyper-analyzes the adults around her and dreads sharing that future. Rather than see a meaningless life as permission to live however she pleases, Paloma sees absurdity as depressing and indicative that life is not worth living.

“Can one be so gifted and yet so impervious to the presence of things? It seems one can. Some people are incapable of perceiving in the object of their contemplation the very thing that gives it its intrinsic life and breath, and they spend their entire lives conversing about mankind as if they were robots, and about things as though they have no soul and must be reduced to what can be said about them—all at the whim of their own subjective inspiration.”

This quote captures one of Barbery’s main points in her novel: Most people are not introspective or reflective enough about themselves and the world around them. In embracing philosophical wonderings and analyzing the world with openness and thoughtfulness, one can live as a fully cognizant human rather than as a robot.