What Book to Read?

I’ll admit straight away that I have a mental block when it comes to philosophy. Even when I can understand most of the words philosophers use, I can’t seem to make sense of their concepts. This is a definite drawback in reading this book. Muriel Barbery is a philosophy professor, and she says she is interested in ‘exploring the bearing philosophy could really have on one’s life … that’s where the desire to anchor philosophy to a story … was born’. And here I can’t even understand one of the main words: phenomenology. The book, first published in 2006, was translated from French in 2008.

The story centres on two people who live in a posh Paris apartment block. One is the concierge, Renée Michel. She strives to appear as the archetypal concierge – dull and stupid, apparently – but has a hidden intellectual life and a broad knowledge of literature and films. The other is an intellectually precocious twelve year old, Paloma Josse, who lives with her family in one of the apartments. She also tries to hide her intellect, and has decided that since life is futile, she will commit suicide when she turns thirteen. The story is told by these two, each keeping a journal of sorts. Then someone new moves in, and Renée’s cover is blown.

There is very little plot. Both journals are more of a series of thoughts than a story. Renée, for example, asks ‘What is the purpose of Art? To give us the brief, dazzling illusion of the camellia; to carve from time an emotional aperture that cannot be reduced to animal logic’, and then goes on about the quintessence of Art and the certainty of timelessness. Paloma, for her part, muses on ‘motionless movement in the world’. What are we to make of this? Renée’s interest in Husserl, the father of phenomenology, no doubt informs many of her reflections about consciousness, but I certainly can’t put them together into any coherent whole. Other readers may find these apercus thought-provoking; I mostly find them frustrating.

Many readers may find the main characters attractive, but here again I am unenthusiastic. I can’t understand why Madame Michel wants to keep her erudition secret. The class barrier which both the residents and the concierge perceive to exist between them is demonstrated, but that does not seem a sufficient reason for her concern. Who cares what they think? And Paloma is a brat, who, in her own cleverness, despises nearly everyone else.

Oblique literary and film references abound. Marcel Proust was for a time a concierge. The end of the story makes reference to Roland Barthes. Renée betrays her knowledge of the classics through a reference to Anna Karenina. (And then there’re all the ones I’ve missed.) Given that the other occupants of the apartment building do not recognise Renée’s true elegance of mind, and are referred to as insensitive and spoilt, I find these references problematic. The Anna Karenina reference is to the first sentence of the book: ‘All happy families are alike’. The reference is explained a page or so later. If you get it without explanation, are you, like Renée, a member of the natural intellectual aristocracy? Because if you need it explained, surely you are on the same level as the other idiots who live in the building. You are either complicit in intellectual snobbery or moronic. This is hardly fair on the reader.

Some critics suggest that English readers like books where the plot is most important, whereas French readers are more concerned with ideas. (They point out that philosophy is a compulsory subject in French schools.) If that is the case, then I am thoroughly English in my tastes, though surely it should be possible to have both ideas and plot – see for example the work of A.S. Byatt.  Oh dear. I do seem to have got off on the wrong foot with this book. There are moments of humour and pathos. Maybe if I understood what Husserl was really saying …

You can read some other opinions of the book here.