The Elegance of the Hedgehog

Renee the concierge and Paloma the 12 year girl are both in hiding. Renee adheres to the stereotype of the invisible, frumpy working class servicing the rich tenants at Rue de Grenelle. Paloma is easily dismissed as a privileged daughter of one of these moneyed boarders, but who has decided she will end her life on her 13th birthday. They are both ravenous autodidacts working out their own personal philosophies. Renee offers up chapters on phenomenology, grammatical crimes and Tolstoy. As such the first half of the book starts out like an all too clever first year philosophy major writing fiction. I wouldn't call it immediately accessible.

It's not until a new tenant arrives in the building, the mysterious Mr. Kakuro Ozu that it becomes a story. One of friendship and love. Shaking off intellectual pretensions for conventional feelings. The second half is beautifully done, a bit of a gut-punch, and kept from being overly maudlin and melodramatic by the tone established in the first half.