By Muriel Barbery
ISBN-10: 1609450132
ISBN-13: 9781609450137
ISBN-10: 1609450159
ISBN-13: 9781609450151
ISBN-10: 1933372605
ISBN-13: 9781933372600
A New York Times Bestseller
We are in a chic hôtel particulier within the heart of Paris. Renée, the building's concierge, is brief, gruesome, and plump. She has bunions on her ft. She is cantankerous and hooked on tv soaps. Her simply real attachment is to her cat, Leo. in brief, she is every little thing society expects from a concierge at a bourgeois development in a complicated Parisian local. But Renée has a mystery: she is a ferocious autodidact who furtively devours paintings, philosophy, tune, and jap tradition. With biting humor she scrutinizes the lives of the building's tenants—her inferiors in each means other than that of fabric wealth.
Then there is Paloma, a super-smart twelve-year-old and the youngest daughter of the Josses, who continue to exist the 5th ground. gifted, precocious, and startingly lucid, she has come to phrases with life's seeming futility and has determined to finish her personal at the day of her 13th birthday. till then she's going to proceed hiding her amazing intelligence at the back of a masks of mediocrity, performing the a part of a standard pre-teen excessive on pop lifestyle, an excellent yet now not a superb scholar, an obedient if obstinate daughter.
Paloma and Renée disguise either their actual skills and their best features from an international they think can't or won't get pleasure from them. They observe their kindred souls whilst a filthy rich eastern guy named Ozu arrives within the construction. simply he's capable of achieve Paloma's belief and to work out via Renée's timeworn conceal to the key that haunts her. this can be a relocating, humorous, successful novel that exalts the quiet victories of the inconspicuous between us.
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Example text
You know you have reached the very bottom of the social food chain when you detect in a rich person’s voice that he is merely addressing himself and that, although the words he is uttering may be, technically, destined to you, he does not even begin to imagine that you might be capable of understanding them. ” I ask therefore, somewhat listlessly. He sighs conspicuously and on his breath I detect a faint hint of ginger. “It is an incunabulum,” he says and toward my eyes, which I try to render as glassy as possible, he directs the smug gaze of the propertied classes.
I believe that my fate has taught me, better than anyone, to resist the negative influences of world thought. Let me explain: if, thus far, you have imagined that the ugliness of ageing and conciergely widowhood have made a pitiful wretch of me, resigned to the lowliness of her fate—then you are truly lacking in imagination. I have withdrawn, to be sure, and refuse to fight. But within the safety of my own mind, there is no challenge I cannot accept. I may be indigent in name, position, and appearance, but in my own mind I am an unrivalled goddess.
Obscene, even. What is the point of dying if not to not suffer? I’ve devoted great care to planning how I’ll exit the scene: every month for the last year I’ve been pilfering a sleeping pill from Maman’s box on the night table. She takes so many that she wouldn’t even notice if I took one every day, but I’ve decided to be particularly careful. You can’t leave anything to chance when you’ve made a decision that most people won’t understand. ” Therefore, I am headed slowly toward the date of June sixteenth and I’m not afraid.
The Elegance of the Hedgehog by Muriel Barbery
by William
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