Posts tagged muriel barbery
My YA Life
Stuff I like & YA books I read.
Just finished The Elegance of the Hedgehog
Excuse me while I go about my ugly sobbing in peace.
“Because from now on, for you, I’ll be searching for those moments of always within never. Beauty, in this world.”
We never look beyond our assumptions and, what’s worse, we have given up trying to meet others; we just meet ourselves. We don’t recognize each other because other people have become our permanent mirrors. […] As for me, I implore fate to give me the chance to see beyond myself and truly meet someone.
Currently Reading
THE ELEGANCE OF THE HEDGEHOG by Muriel Barbery
Renee is the concierge of a grand Parisian apartment building, home to members of the great and the good. Over the years she has maintained her carefully constructed persona as someone reliable but totally uncultivated, in keeping, she feels, with society’s expectations of what a concierge should be. But beneath this facade lies the real Renee: passionate about culture and the arts, and more knowledgeable in many ways than her employers with their outwardly successful but emotionally void lives. Down in her lodge, apart from weekly visits by her one friend Manuela, Renee lives resigned to her lonely lot with only her cat for company. Meanwhile, several floors up, twelve-year-old Paloma Josse is determined to avoid the pampered and vacuous future laid out for her, and decides to end her life on her thirteenth birthday. But unknown to them both, the sudden death of one of their privileged neighbours will dramatically alter their lives forever.
