Wednesday, February 3, 2010

The Elegance of the Hedgehog by Muriel Barbery


With all due respect for the friend who recommended it to me, I am hard pressed to figure out why The Elegance of the Hedgehog is at the top of the New York Times best-sellers list. I suspect it is one of those books that lots of people buy because it is trendy and then never finish.

But maybe I'm missing something.

The novel is full of the types of maudlin, pseudo-philosophic sentences I would have copied into my diary when I was in high school:

In the split second while I saw the stem and the bud drop to the counter I intuited the essence of Beauty ... Oh my gosh, I thought, does this mean that this is how we must live our lives? Constantly poised between beauty and death, between movement and its disappearance?

Yes, the world may aspire to vacuousness, lost souls mourn beauty, insignificance surrounds us. Then let us drink a cup of tea.

I will admit there is a slightly yogic quality to the novel. But it feels so heavy-handed it's hard to enjoy. Narrated by two alternating and supposedly kindred souls, the book is inconsistant, and this lack of integrity of voice makes it tiresome at times -- I felt myself rushing through one narrator to get on to the other.

Of the two narrators, Madame Renee Michel, concierge at number 7, rue de Grenelle, takes the novel to a higher plane. She, indeed, lives the mindful life amateur yogis aspire to.

But Paloma Joss, the "introspective" 12-year-old, rings false. Her reflections on the inferiority of all those around her are so predictably jaded that its exhausting. Worst of all, her voice appears in a different font -- a pet peeve of mine, and a bit of an insult to the reader, as though the voices are not sufficiently different to make the point of view clear.

Yes, the novel is a meditation on friendship. And perhaps it's simply because I spend so much time in the teen world, as a teacher of middle schoolers, that I found Paloma's voice so tiring. But her narration keeps the very adult portions of the book anchored to a far more narrow view of the world.

Monday, February 1, 2010

The Brief Wonderous Life of Oscar Wao by Juot Diaz



At the risk of sounding politically incorrect, obese teenagers (see She's Come Undone by Wally Lamb) and repressive Central American regimes are two subjects that I do not particularly enjoy reading about. Obese teenagers depress me and repressive regimes highlight my ignorance regarding world history in a manner that makes me uncomfortable. But Junot Diaz's The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao describes the politics of the Dominican Republic so clearly, and is so compassionate and funny regarding Oscar and his dieting woes that neither of my hang-ups got in the way of the intensely moving experience of reading this book.

Somehow, family myth and political repression become one in this story, leaving Oscar strangely, yet effectively, peripheral. Narrated primarily by Junior, Oscar's sometime-roommate and Oscar's older sister Lola's sometime-lover, the book tells the story of the de Leon family and their "fuku," the family's word for, as Junior describes it in the novel's first pages, "the Curse and Doom of the New World."
The thing about the novel is that while it is, in many ways, the family saga you'd expect, the emotional impact is epic even beyond the extensive scope of the plot. Though it is about a family, to me this book is really about the de Leon women: their legendary beauty, their guts, their bodies, and their minds. Junior's casual, macho, street-smart voice, along with his persona as a self-professed womanizer make the stories of these formidable yet seemingly cursed women overwhelmingly powerful. Junior uses women in his life with a blatantly casual disregard, but he tells the stories of Lola and her ancestors with palpable respect.
Through Junior's frame narrative, it becomes clear that he is telling the story of a family to which he does not belong because its stories have impacted him enough to bring him to change his life entirely. It is his voice, and the seeming incongruity between his world view and the stories of the de Leon women, that is so unexpectedly moving. Paradoxically, Diaz manages to use a man's voice to give the women in the novel the real power.
This entry is about three years late, I guess, but I hope that my initial resistance to the novel underlines just how highly I recommend it.