The Elegance of the Hedgehog: how not to be captivated by such a title? Whether it is the title of a book, a movie or even the name of a blog, the simple play of two nouns, one article and a possessive preposition is per se appealing.

A hedgehog turns its spines into a small fortress that hurts whoever dares to approach too close. A hedgehog deploys its false indolence in order to fully cover itself of loneliness. How can a hedgehog be elegant?

In this case, we are talking about the title of a book, which later made use of the same story and title to recreate a movie. The story entwines the life of three main characters: Renée, the concierge of a bourgeois building in Paris who pretends to be an ordinary woman; Paloma, a 12-year-old adolescent who hides an extraordinary intelligence and Mr. Ozu, a mysterious man who joins the story for favoring an encounter between both souls, thus reinforcing concepts such as friendship, art, compassion and the true meaning of life.

The concierge, who gives title to this book, hides herself behind the indolence that preserves her from the superficiality that surrounds her and leaves us reflections like this one:  “are we civilizations so much worm-eaten by emptiness or something that we only live in the anguish of our lack?” The humble concierge, perfect archetype of what should be expected from a typically French concierge, makes an allusion to the way society enjoys its goods and senses when it only has the certainty of being able to enjoy them even more time, without tasting the true pleasure of enjoying the ephemeral, the real, the present.

The other heroin of the novel, who has plans for committing suicide for feeling a misunderstood and out-of-place child in the society, gives also some of her thoughts as a present: “… for an unknown reason, I am hypersensitive at everything being dissonant, as if I had a kind of absolute ear for out of tune notes… and therefore, I do not recognize myself in any credo, in any of those incoherent familiar cultures.” Both, this child and the concierge, coincide in feeling themselves asphyxiated before the social hypocrisy smoke around them.

There are sensations in life too intimate where there is no need for words. There are colors too intense to be described. There are movements difficult to emulate. There are stories, such as The Elegance of the Hedgehog, that no matter how much you try to crumble in order to arrive to the essence of each ingredient, only the experience of reading page by page, touring its euphemisms, feeling the texture of its vocabulary richness and succeeding to the whole beauty of the language (that the author exploits her utmost) will give us the authentic sensation of reality present in this master piece.

The threads that interweave the beauty of this book come and go among the concierge’s inner dialogues and the “deep ideas” and chapters of the “diary of world’s movements” of the adolescent child. Therefore, beauty appears and remains like an echo in each word, in each phrase…, but not a vain beauty, no! It is the kind of beauty that forces the reader to do a work of reflection and association of ideas and, what is that but intelligence?

Even for those who think that this book is made up from a pile of aesthetic philosophical lectures, I have to say that this is the book that many people have liked the most from the ones read. There is nothing like abandoning oneself to the exquisiteness and the sublime of what this story evokes.  Don’t you feel at least a little of curiosity to discover this “elegance”?