Book Notes: The Elegance of the Hedgehog

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 attention soon 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...

The enigma of Anna Karenina

All average books are alike; each great book is great in its own way.

Anna Karenina, the crowning jewel of Leo Tolstoy's work, is without a doubt one of the great books of our time. Spanning well over 800 pages, it is great not only in size but in the scope of its moral and intellectual reaches. It has been described as a "flawless" work of art by Dostoevsky and by the notoriously dismissive Nabokov. Faulkner called it the "best ever written." In a 2007 Time magazine poll of leading contemporary authors, Anna Karenina was declared the greatest novel of all time.

Keira Knightley as Anna Karenina in the 2012 British adaptation.

What is it about this book that has conquered continents and generations of readers? Hundreds of critics have been unable to pin it down. To me, it's precisely the elusiveness of that something that has made this book so great. And that elusiveness flows from Anna herself. She is the queen, the namesake of the novel; we feel her presence in every scene, regardless of whether she is there. "He stepped down, trying not to look long at her, as if she were the sun. But he saw her, like the sun, even without looking."

By his own accounts, Tolstoy set out to write a moralistic novel about a ravishing woman who has everything she wants in life but who knowingly brings about her own downfall by renouncing the societal conventions of her time. As the novel developed, however, he found that his attitude toward the sinful heroine was changing; just as she was gradually winning over the other characters in the book, Anna was simultaneously putting a spell on Tolstoy. Eventually, as the translator Richard Pevear writes in his introduction, Tolstoy "lost sight of her...as he drew closer to her, and finally became one with her." The mystery and force of Anna's character, so bewitching to those who encounter her within the novel, also defies the preconceived notions of the reader and the moral convictions of the author himself. She was borne of Tolstoy, but escaped his grasp, fluttering out of life before he could understand her completely. The need to understand her--the mystery inside an enigma that is Anna--is what keeps readers returning to the novel time and time again.

Other adaptations:

Greta Garbo in a 1935 American adaptation.

Vivien Leigh, 1948.

Tatiana Samoilova in the 1967 Soviet adaption.

Anna Karenina has been brought to life  in more than 10 film adaptations, from the 1935 American version starring Greta Garbo, to the faithful 1967 Soviet version (my personal favorite, with the actress's dark coiffure and exotic eyes), to the 2012 rendition by a divine Keira Knightley. But despite these well-executed roles, it's the invisible Anna in the novel who remains the most memorable, the most alive.

French actress Sophie Marceau in the first American version filmed entirely in Russia, 1997.

 
When it comes to this book, there is no substitute for reading, and re-reading, its luxurious words. A Russian acquaintance of mine who is well into her 60s recently told me she's read the book seven times. I myself am currently on my second reading, marveling at all the ways the novel--or is it me?--has changed since the time I first picked it up. It is a book that keeps developing with you. You don't just read it; you live with it for several weeks. This is what a great book should be.

As a preview, you can listen to an in-depth discussion of Anna Karenina on the Slate Audio Book Club podcast here.

ALTA Conference: Part 2

Translating Murakami in Europe

The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami, originally written in Japanese, shown here in its English, Polish, Danish, and Russian translations.

Haruki Murakami is probably the most widely-known Japanese writer in the West. I was excited to see a panel on his work as I was currently reading his Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, and wanted to hear about the challenges of translating literature out of the Japanese. The panel turned out to be fascinating, led by three women translators who, bypassing English completely, translated Murakami from the Japanese directly into Danish, Polish and Norwegian. I found it uncanny their ability to master two languages from strikingly different language families. 

The most compelling points of the presentation dealt with the particularities of Murakami's style; in particular, his philosophical plays on the Japanese language and his deliberately inconsistent use of tense. In several novels, Murakami injects the present tense--a tense not commonly used in English narratives--to play with time, to blur the boundary between dream and reality, or to distinguish the voice of a particular character. To English readers, the present tense is unsettling (it is "the tense of fear," as one of the translators put it) and is generally disliked by English editors. The more familiar past tense, meanwhile, makes the reader's experience comfortable and safe. What Murakami himself said after one of the translators asked him about the subject suggests that the role of tense in a particular language is as much a product of that culture as its grammar, humor, and everything else:

"Western translators should translate into the tense that sounds the most natural to their readers. In Japanese, tense is much less essential to the work than the sound and weight of individual words."

Tense serves an additional purpose for Murakami: it allows him to take the reader on his philosophical wanderings through time. His latest novel, the sprawling IQ84, was purportedly inspired by Marcel Proust's In Search of Lost Time. This seven-volume masterpiece was Proust's self-described attempt to write a "cathedral-novel" that would do narratively what a great cathedral does architecturally--to cut through centuries and space while enclosing within itself a a sacred, nearly static world. (I have only been able to get through the first volume of Lost Time, and while the language really is as breathtaking as a French cathedral, the centuries you spend reading the thing will eventually crumble your willpower).

I have since finished reading the Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, a dreamy Japanese take on Gabriel Garcia Marquez's magical realism, and look forward to reading the new Murakami, in light of my new insights.

recent reads

Where'd You Go, Bernadette?

by Maria Semple

Ice. It's trippy, symphonies frozen, the unconscious come to life, and smacking of color: blue. (Snow is white; ice is blue. You'll know why, Bee, because you're knowledgeable about these things, but I had no idea.) It rarely snows because Antarctica is a desert. An iceberg means it's tens of millions of years old and has calved from a glacier. I saw hundreds of them, cathedrals of ice, rubbed like salt licks; shipwrecks, polished from wear like marble steps at the Vatican; Lincoln Centers capsized and pockmarked; thirty-story buildings, impossibly arched like out of a world's fair; white, yes, but blue, too, every blue on the color wheel, deep like a navy blazer, incandescent like a neon sign, royal like a Frenchman's shirt, powder like Peter Rabbit's cloth coat, these icy monsters roaming the forbidden black.

Maria Semple's Where'd You Go, Bernadette is referred to in multiple reviews as an "epistolary novel"--a fancy way to describe the ultra-modern lack of narrative that makes this book feel as hip and unorthodox as its heroine, and the city she spends most of her time trying to flee. Stitched together from a trail of emails, police reports and handwritten notes, Bernadette tells the story of crumbling architect Bernadette Fox, a former MacArthur genius gone cuckoo amid the rain and riffraff of Seattle. After Bernadette gradually disconnects from her Microsoft-god husband and disappears without a trace, it falls on her clever daughter, Bee, to find her. Add to the mix a demonic blackberry bush, a swarm of private-school moms collectively known as "the gnats" and a virtual personal assistant named Manjula, and you're not even close to describing the mayhem that animates this unusual novel. It ends with a wild chase across Antarctica--bringing the story, and Bernadette, back to the city she might love after all. I normally wouldn't go for a TV-show type plot like this, but the book's style, in addition to my own love-hate relationship with Seattle, made me appreciate its caffeine-like jolt.

Death and the Penguin 

by Andrey Kurkov

Misha had appeared chez Viktor a year before, when the zoo was giving hungry animals away to anyone able to feed them. Viktor had gone along and returned with a king penguin. Abandoned by his girlfriend the week before, he had been feeling lonely. But Misha had brought his own kind of loneliness, and the result was now two complimentary lonelinesses, creating an impression more of interdependence than amity.

So much for disproving the cold-weather stereotypes: Death and the Penguin, originally written in Russian by dark humorist Andrey Kurkov, sets the reader in the middle of snowy, post-Soviet Ukraine, packing the place with copious deaths and, yes, even a penguin. The main protagonist is Viktor, a struggling writer getting by on writing advance obituaries for the targets of a local crime ring, who adopts a penguin named Misha, not realizing the pet will become his mute and melancholy alter-ego. Misha bears a touching resemblance to the disoriented post-Soviet man, spending most of his time half-asleep in the "hidey hole" behind the couch and emerging only to guzzle frozen herring and to get a sniff of his master's vodka. At times, the English translation--completed, fittingly, by one George Bird--reads with the unsteadiness of a penguin's waddle, but it's not the language that gives the book its charm. It's the combination of crime noir and communist-era humor, which, thankfully, didn't get lost in translation.