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	The Elegance of the Hedgehog
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	Features	ISBN13: 9781933372600 Condition: New Notes: BUY WITH CONFIDENCE, Over one million books sold! 98% Positive feedback. Compare our books, prices and service to the competition. 100% Satisfaction Guaranteed
	Categories	Textbook Buyback   Contemporary   Literary   Paperback   Printed Books   Anderson, Alison   Barbery, Muriel
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Description
The enthralling international bestseller. We are in the center of Paris, in an elegant apartment building inhabited by bourgeois families. Renée, the concierge, is witness to the lavish but vacuous lives of her numerous employers. Outwardly she conforms to each stereotype of the concierge: fat, cantankerous, addicted to television. Yet, unbeknownst to her employers, Renée is a cultured autodidact who adores art, philosophy, music, and Japanese culture. Together with humor and intelligence she scrutinizes the lives of the building’s tenants, who for their part are barely aware of her existence. Then there’s Paloma, a twelve-year-old genius. She is the daughter of a tedious parliamentarian, a talented and startlingly lucid kid who has decided to end her life on the sixteenth of June, her thirteenth birthday. Until then she will continue behaving as everyone expects her to behave: a mediocre pre-teen high on adolescent subculture, a good but not an excellent student, an obedient if obstinate daughter. Paloma and Renée hide together their true talents and their finest qualities from a world they suspect cannot or will not appreciate them. They discover their kindred souls when a wealthy Japanese man named Ozu arrives in the building. Only he is effective to gain Paloma’s trust and to see throughout Renée’s timeworn disguise to the secret this haunts her. This is a moving, funny, triumphant novel this exalts the quiet victories of the inconspicuous among us.
Customer Reviews
Elegance of Hedgeho   2010-07-28
By McClure
The book arrived in a timely manner. Condition of the used book was like new. Very pleased with the purchase.
Rapture   2010-07-24
By C. Beck (Laurel, MD United States)
Full of truth, wisdom, and universal beauty, this book sparkles from within. Perhaps one of the best books I've ever read. A must read.
Worth the effort   2010-07-22
By Bookworm (New York City)
I was one of those readers that struggled with the first one hundred pages or so of Elegance. What's the point? I thought. I don't get all this, I whimpered. Where's the plot, the action, the tension, blah, blah, blah..... I'd read in spurts, not truly motivated to go on, or feeling so satiated with topics like phenomenology, or discourses on Flaubert that I would roll my eyes and think, how much longer? Then somewhere around chapter 15, things started looking up, and suddenly the past ruminations started feeding the present, and I found myself step by step, inside the story. Much like the characters themselves who began to find meaning in life beyond their own cynical protestations. On one level, this is a story of class difference. On so many others, it is a story of love, life and beauty, and how it can be found in unlikely places. The book, like all books, has some flaws. But part of me thinks that Ms. Barbery placed them there intentionally, like a Japanese potter will place a flaw in a tea cup, just to show it is made by a human's hand.
Elegant Hedgehogs   2010-07-20
By Michaela Biba
I got the book in a timely manner and would use this vendor again. This was a good book and would recommend it to friends to read.
The elegence of the hedgehog   2010-07-16
By Karen R. Hebert (Mass. USA)
I didn't like this book at all......the only character worth considering at all was the lady who was the conceige. The teenage girl was obnoxious.