Friday, April 09, 2010
What I Dealt With But Didn't Love
The Elegance of the Hedgehog by Muriel Barbery
I'm on my third book group. Third time's the charm, right? I have a lot of hope and heart for this one. It's small, exclusive, it's only women, and we have a great system set up for choosing books. Each month, one of us chooses 4-5 books and we vote on them. After averaging them out, we usually have a winner, though this time, it was a straight tie and two of our members had to flip a coin to determine our next book. Ahh, book club geekery. I love it. This past month, we read The Elegance of the Hedgehog, a book translated from French.
I didn't love it. I don't think I even liked it. I thought it had a very generic message that has been conveyed through generations of other books that fell flat. The book was entirely too didactic, forcing philosophy down the readers' throats when we originally thought we'd signed up for pure fiction. The characters were believable but completely unlikeable. The plot (was there a plot) thudded along drearily, while I waited for something- anything!- to happen. When it did happen, finally, there were a mere few pages until the end of the book. Which I suppose, is the whole moral of the story, but talk about holier than thou, self-righteousness. I felt like the central character, Renee, was most likely a personification of the author herself. Cranky, a miss-know-it-all, and completely self-involved. Blech.
I'm on my third book group. Third time's the charm, right? I have a lot of hope and heart for this one. It's small, exclusive, it's only women, and we have a great system set up for choosing books. Each month, one of us chooses 4-5 books and we vote on them. After averaging them out, we usually have a winner, though this time, it was a straight tie and two of our members had to flip a coin to determine our next book. Ahh, book club geekery. I love it. This past month, we read The Elegance of the Hedgehog, a book translated from French.
I didn't love it. I don't think I even liked it. I thought it had a very generic message that has been conveyed through generations of other books that fell flat. The book was entirely too didactic, forcing philosophy down the readers' throats when we originally thought we'd signed up for pure fiction. The characters were believable but completely unlikeable. The plot (was there a plot) thudded along drearily, while I waited for something- anything!- to happen. When it did happen, finally, there were a mere few pages until the end of the book. Which I suppose, is the whole moral of the story, but talk about holier than thou, self-righteousness. I felt like the central character, Renee, was most likely a personification of the author herself. Cranky, a miss-know-it-all, and completely self-involved. Blech.
