The Hedgehog Book: 1

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This is a French confection that is light and pretty and sharp, but actually much, much more skillful and substantial than it first seems. The plot is slight and broadly predictable, but it gently leads the reader along more philosophical lines, many of which probably went over my head, but which I enjoyed anyway. Reneé is reader, of literature and philosophy, but also a film buff. She was born to poverty, was unattractive, barely educated, married, widowed, and has only one friend. "The feeble child became a hungry soul." She's bitter in a fairly non-specific way. This isn't a badly written book. But this will be rather a poorly written review. Full of word vomit, rants and screeches. Anyway, this book is remarkably written. It is described as a book that straddles the line between literary and genre fiction. I disagree. There is basically no plot to this book. It is philosophical stream of consciousness, perfect for the quasi-intellectual such as myself. Just as teardrops, when they are large and round and compassionate, can leave a long strand washed clean of discord, the summer rain as it washes away the motionless dust can bring to a person's soul something like endless breathing.

But the point was that I didn't bring it up when it was totally irrelevant and then refuse to drop it the whole night because I didn't understand that even people that love philosophy don't walk around thinking about philosophy all day (barring, of course, our dear MFSO), nor do they give two shits that you are marginally acquainted with a few Wikipedia entries on phenomenology. And even if they did, couldn't it wait until after we meet your sister and I've got a decent buzz going?I recently had a brief relationship with a young lady who had studied philosophy at a university in southern California. The relationship was destined to be a brief one, as she left for the Philippines to join the Peace Corps just a week or so ago. On one of our last evenings together, she thanked me for something that I found curious. The west European hedgehog (scientific name Erinaceus europaeus) is one of about 17 hedgehog species worldwide and unmistakable as Britain’s only spiny mammal. Their highly specialised coat contains around 6,000 creamy-brown spines and hangs around their body in a loose-ish ‘skirt’, concealing greyish fur on their underside, surprisingly long legs and a short tail.

Civilization is the mastery of violence, the triumph, constantly challenged, over the aggresive nature of the primate. For primates we have been and primates we shall remain, however often we learn to find joy in a camellia on moss.

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When something is bothering me, I seek refuge. No need to travel far; a trip to the realm of literary memory will suffice. For where can one find more noble distraction, more entertaining company, more delightful enchantment than in literature? This diagram shows that they eat a lot of beetles, along with caterpillars and earthworms. Most people are aware that hedgehogs are mostly insect eaters. Her perspective is that "To be poor, ugly and, moreover, intelligent condemns one, in our society, to a dark and disillusioned life, a condition one ought to accept at an early age". I don't think it's much of a spoiler, or much of a surprise to the reader, to find out that the author comes down heavily on the side of Art, in particular when Madame Renee is confronted with the death of one of the tenants in her luxury building:

And Muriel, God bless her, delivered the goods. An enormously satisfying ending to a highly unusual book. Paloma reads, but is more of a philosopher-cum-analyst. She has an older sister, Colombe, who she sees as a noisy neat-freak, shallow, unemotional, fake, and annoying (the last of those is mutual). Some of this is normal sibling stuff, but it also feeds Paloma's ennui. Paloma craves peace, so Colombe plays music loudly, "She can't invade anything else because I am totally inaccessible to her on a human level". What changes everything is when one of the old residents dies and the apartment is bought by a wealthy Japanese man. The fact he is outside the French class system only serves to emphasise its importance in this story. The three misfits have the chance of change.And be careful of them: for they will, despite their attempts to push you away with their overly intellectual babbling, their deliberate hiding, their desperate and unconscious need to repress their true natures to protect themselves from long-buried pain or more recent and ongoing torment, sneak up on you, seize your heart and send you reeling at the depth of what they reveal about being human, about being loved, about being validated, about being. Paloma All our family acquaintances have followed the same path: their youth spent trying to make the most of their intelligence, squeezing their studies like a lemon to make sure they'd secure a spot among the elite, then the rest of their lives wondering with a flabbergasted look on their faces why all that hopefulness has led to such a vain existence. People aim for the stars, and they end up like goldfish in a bowl. I enjoy reading the leaflets that come with medication, the respite provided by the precision of each technical term, which convey the illusion of meticulousness and a frisson of simplicity, and elicit a spatio-temporal dimension free of any striving for beauty, creative angst or the never-ending and hopeless aspiration to attain the sublime.