I’ve just read Elegance of the Hedgehog. This is a personal assessment of course, but I do consider it to be one of the best books I have ever read. There seems to me hardly a misstep, and the one place I can say that I argued with the text, I can’t really say it is a misstep so much as I just disagree with the conclusion reached.

I’m going to end up writing on this and surrounding subjects again I expect. There is just so much in there apart from the delightful, if sometimes grief riven, story.  There is an image that recurs: camellia on moss. The book is such a thing. A little stillness in the storm. A quiet humane voice. Not a window or a door, but, in Deleuzian terms, a fold that moves one into beauty or, more accurately, moves beauty and the reader until we co-habit.

The plot is simple, just as a rose bud falling is simple. The two main characters (both female) are such that I thought of the women unbound challenge — here they are, perfect women, because to both of them becoming human, becoming civilized (in the most noble sense), is their primary personal quest. They wish to be themselves, to be able to break from what had been ordained by the accidents of their birth.

The author embeds the characters in a simple day to day life but at the same time she allows them to swim in a deeply complex historical and intellectual and artistic world that is, in fact, our own.  So few books use art and philosophy as if they were just part of what it is to live, especially in the lives of lower or middle class people, but this one does. From the first page philosophers show up both in their words but also in the lives and actions of the characters. Barbery writes as if philosophy and art were like desire and hunger, things designed to help us make decisions in life, guideposts to action, fundamental characteristics of life.

Because of the richness of thought and feeling, and the lightness and delicacy of its prose, the book is a work of art for which multiple perusals will be required, each of which will generate different reactions. I am already looking forward to my second reading.

Where I said I disagree with the conclusion: this has to do with the particular philosophical traditions evoked. I won’t speak to this here except to say that, as it happens, I am completing Deleuze’s The Fold which, it seems to me, strikes a deep harmony with the ideas underpinning Hedgehog’s philosophical point of view.

What I don’t know is how many of the wonderful, small moments of beauty that are evoked through philosophical allusion will translate for those who haven’t read the material referenced. I also don’t know if it matters since the book is wildly popular. I suspect it is one of those books that is written so well, with such care and compassion, that what you know simply doesn’t matter. I think enjoying this book has more to do with what you are willing to learn than what you already know.