Literature

I’m falling behind in my book reviews…like everything else. But while I have a pause in my work, I thought I’d tell you about this book which I recently finished reading.

This is an unusual book. It was a runaway best seller in France and, to be sure, across much of Europe, but hasn’t generated that level of interest here. I hope it becomes more popular. I really enjoyed it and I hope you will too.

It’s the story of Renée Michel, the the dumpy, nondescript, 54-year-old concierge of a small and exclusive Paris apartment building. and Paloma Josse who lives in the building. Paloma is acutely intelligent, introspective and philosophical. This 12-year-old views the world as absurd and records her observations about it in her journal. She despises her coddled existence, her older sister Colombe (who is studying at the École normale supérieure), and her well-to-do parents, especially her plant-obsessed mother. After careful consideration of what life is like, Paloma has secretly decided to kill herself on her 13th birthday.

Renée skulks like a spy among the intelligentsia, an apparently unlettered concierge who secretly disdains Husserl’s philosophy, adores Ozu’s films and is so passionate about Tolstoy she named her cat Leo. A widowed concierge in her 50s who calls herself “short, ugly and plump,” she is a self-consciously stereotypical working-class nobody. She is also an autodidact — “a permanent traitor to my archetype,” as she drolly puts it — who takes refuge in aesthetics and ideas but thinks life will be easier if she never lets her knowledge show. Even the slippers she wears as camouflage, she says, are so typical, “only the coalition between a baguette and a beret could possibly contend in the domain of cliché.”

The story flits between the two women in alternating short chapters. Renée’s story is addressed to no one (that is, to us), while Paloma’s takes the form of a notebook crammed with what she labels “profound thoughts.” Both create eloquent little essays on time, beauty and the meaning of life, Renée with erudition and Paloma with adolescent brio. Neither character realizes they share such similar views, from “the pointlessness of my existence,” as Renée says, to their affection for Japanese culture. Paloma adores reading manga, while Renée goes into raptures over an Ozu scene in which the violet mountains of Kyoto become a soul-saving vision of beauty. Both of them hide their true selves from the residents of the building, though.

About half way through the book, though, a Japanese gentleman, Kakuro Ozu, buys a vacant apartment and immediately realizes that the two women are not whom they appear to be. Before long, Monsieur Ozu is gently contriving some little tests to discover more about their secret lives. And this leads to developments that range from the comic to the touching to the heartbreaking.

It’s an enjoyable, interesting and thought-provoking book. There is a certain suspense about it as the characters’ loves are changed and it’s quite well-written and easy to read. I urge you to give it a try. It might be a bit different than what you’re used to but it will be worth it.