Originally published in France in 2006 as L'Élégance du hérisson.
In recent weeks I've come to realize that I suffer from a severe case of Reading ADD. No matter how great the book I'm reading at the time, my attentionsoon inevitably drifts to another title, and then to another one, and another, until my nightstand fills up with a pile of half-finished books, all equally great and equally neglected.
So reading, which is supposed to be a pleasurable escape into my own private world, has become yet another source of guilt and stress. How do I expect to finish life's grand projects if I can't even finish a book? Why can't I commit to one title and give it my full attention? My scattered reading habits have got me worried that I might be a generally fickle individual with a serious shortage of patience, attention and faith. After all, in life and in love, just as in reading, these are important qualities to have.
That's why I was happy to find a book that kept my attention from the first page to the last. It's called The Elegance of the Hedgehog, and it's a wonderful tale of a secretly erudite French concierge whose life transforms through small encounters with the residents of her Parisian apartment building. The author, Muriel Barbery, is a philosophy professor, and her scholarly training comes through in her poignant ruminations on the purpose of literature, music and art. This adds a welcome dose of enlightenment for those like me, who feel they're indulging in a guilty pleasure whenever they read a novel instead of an educational text. The book is a little too smart at times, but it left me with new vocabulary in my pocket--hubris or incunabulum, anyone?--and introduced me to a wide range of works, from 17th century Dutch still lives to Japanese films.
It was also made into a movie--which, I'll admit I watched first--that makes a wonderful companion to the book.
I love it when a book gives you the urge to learn things, to write things down. Here are some of the gems hidden inside...
Ophelia, by John Everett Millais, is the artist's vision of the drowned dame who was rejected by Hamlet.
The founders of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood were the first bad boys of modern Britain.
Beginning as a pact between young classically-trained art students in the heat of the Industrial Revolution, the Brotherhood grew into an art movement that rejected the mechanical aesthetics of the time and made its goal to reform art through a naturalistic and spiritual approach. The three founding members--John Everett Millais, Dante Gabriel Rossetti and William Holman Hunt--believed in particular that the exaggerated Mannerist style that succeeded the High Renaissance art of Raphael and Michelangelo had a corrupting influence on the development of art, and sought to restore it to its "pre-Raphaelite" form.
The Pre-Raphaelites would eventually become known as the first avant-garde movement in Britain. A gorgeous new exhibit of their work, Pre-Raphaelites: Victorian Art and Design, 1848-1900, docked recently at the National Gallery of Art after making its way from London's Tate Gallery (in June, it will head to Moscow's Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts). It features around 130 paintings, including Millais' infamous Ophelia, and stunning examples of decorative arts for which the pre-Raphaelites are less known, including rich textiles with designs of native British plants and flowers, finely carved book plates, and stained glass techniques that the Pre-Raphaelites revived from the Middle Ages.
Pre-Raphaelite textile design.
A good exhibit should have good accompanying information, and the NGA outdid itself in this regard. Brief and informative texts illuminate the significance of each work, tracing its origins in the Pre-Raphaelites' fascination with Gothic and medieval settings, Shakespearean subject matter, early English poetry (especially Tennyson, Chaucer, Milton, Byron and Pope), and the notions of chivalrous love. The lush landscapes that round off the exhibit--another often-overlooked part of the Pre-Raphaelites' repertoire--display the group's earnest dedication to John Ruskin's idea of direct and realistic transcription of nature. This "directness of vision" becomes almost blinding in their intense portrayal of sunlit fields and lush, verdant forests.
Dante Gabriel Rossetti, self portrait (1847).
Having been mostly unimpressed with the Pre-Raphaelite art that I've seen in books or on the computer screen, I was stunned by its appeal in real life: the brilliant colors, with the translucency of a butterfly wing, the meticulously detailed background scenes, the nymph-like women. It's all luxurious, poetic, and terribly romantic. The men of the Brotherhood (and one woman, Elizabeth Siddall, the artists' muse and love interest who died at age 32) have a mysterious appeal of their own. Perhaps it stems from the futility of what they were trying to do in throwing themselves against the spokes of the industrial revolution in hopes of halting the destruction of a more beautiful, naive way of life. And it doesn't hurt that Dante Gabriel Rossetti, widely seen as the group's leader, was by all accounts a total babe.
Lady Lilith by Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1866-68), with a verse from Goethe's Faust as translated by Shelley attached to the frame:
"Beware of her fair hair, for she excells All women in the magic of her locks, And when she twines them round a young man's neck, she will not ever set him free again."
Beata Beatrix by Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1870), evoking a heroine from Dante Alighieri's poem, La Vita Nuova.
Mariana by John Everett Millais (1851), from am 1830 Tennyson poem of the same name:
She only said, 'My life is dreary,
He cometh not,' she said;
She said, 'I am aweary, aweary,
I would that I were dead!'
Monna Vanna by Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1866).
April Love by Arthur Hughes (1855).
Vanity by Frank Cadogan Cowper (1907).
Aspargus Island by William Homan Hunt.
The Light of the World by William Holman Hunt.
And here's a cool promo video of the exhibit, courtesy of the Tate:
