The Hedgehog Book: 1

Product Information

The story focusses on Max the "hodgeheg" who tries to devise a way in which hedgehogs can cross the road safely.

En effet, c’est l’année où Gallimard publie L'élégance du Hérisson, qui la propulse littéralement parmi les meilleurs auteurs populaires. Always ensure that there are several gently sloping slipways around the edge of the water to allow animals to escape if they fall in.

The next morning at the crack of dawn a family of hedgehogs cross the road with the help of the lolipop lady, and they all make it to the park. My friend, Elyse, sent me this wonderful book, and I found it extra sweet that she sent me a book with a poignant friendship theme.

If for some reason they cannot be indoors for short term first aid, outbuildings would be acceptable if heated and flies can’t get to the hedgehog, but don’t put hedgehogs directly onto a metal grid or wire floor, or straight onto concrete – they have sensitive feet and the cold will permeate through. The first is Renée Michel, a middle-aged concierge at an extremely opulent luxury apartment building in Paris. But when you are applying the rules of grammar skillfully, you ascend to another level of the beauty of language. Ten or more different individuals may visit a garden over several nights, which could mean that ‘your hedgehog’ is in fact probably a number of different individuals visiting at different times. Having been attracted by the remaining contents, hedgehogs have been found with their heads stuck in tins, yoghurt pots and plastic cups.I’m a brilliant, precocious, underestimated and misunderstood 12-year-old who plans to burn down my apartment and commit suicide on my 13th birthday. Dick lived with his wife in a small 17th-century cottage, about three miles from the house where he was born.

It also helps that I am interested in Tolstoy and Flaubert, in Yasushiro Ozu, visual arts, cooking and classical music like Madame Renee; that I like Japanese Manga and haiku poetry like Paloma. I have a feeling that the philosophy professor is dominating the novelist in this highly popular novel by Muriel Barbery, yet I have really enjoyed the time spent in the company of the two main characters: and elderly concierge and a pre-teen girl, both living in a high end Paris apartment, but at opposite ends of the social scale. The story revolves mainly around the characters of Renée Michel and Paloma Josse, residents of an upper-middle class Left Bank apartment building at 7 Rue de Grenelle – one of the most elegant streets in Paris.However I did feel that it lacked depth and heart, I blame this on the stilted half-epistolary/half-first-person narrative style that Barbery employs. The good news is hedgehog fleas are host-specific and, although they might jump on to your cat or dog, they cannot live on them for long. Reneé muses "I've never given poor people credit for having noble souls" and concludes and that it's other poor people who the poor despise.

Bean trenches, footings, fencing holes and car inspection pits are all potential death traps for hedgehogs. Paloma referred to her as a hedgehog, Madame Michel has the elegance of the hedgehog: on the outside, she's covered in quills, a real fortress, but my gut feeling is that on the inside, she has the same simple refinement as the hedgehog: a deceptively indolent little creature, fiercely solitary - and terribly elegant. There are some nice little realistic details, like the description of the difference between a juvenile and an adult hedgehog, and how noisy young hedgehogs are (it really is true).

The Hodgeheg’ is the story of Max, a young hedgehog who wants to play in the park; his only obstacle is a busy road. This was more of a rant than a review, so here's my summary for the book jacket: stupid, stupid, stupid. And even then: I think lucidity gives your success a bitter taste, whereas mediocrity still leaves hope for something.