Both the older woman and the young girl share in a fascination with Japanese culture, a prop to balance the yin of daily tedium with the yang of artistic aspirations. Which brings me to the "elegance" argument of the novel. I may not be fully convinced by the plotting talents of the author, but I am ready to bet Barbery is a great teacher of philosophy. It's not so much the clarity of the presentation as the passion she manages to transmit for the subject, the way she makes it obvious that philosophy is not a dry academic pursuit, but a vital part of being alive, that it has bearing on everything we do and on how we interact with others.

This isn't a badly written book. But this will be rather a poorly written review. Full of word vomit, rants and screeches. Anyway, this book is remarkably written. It is described as a book that straddles the line between literary and genre fiction. I disagree. There is basically no plot to this book. It is philosophical stream of consciousness, perfect for the quasi-intellectual such as myself.

Don't look at the table of contents until you've read several chapters; it will look odd and confusing, though the book is not. Civilization is the mastery of violence, the triumph, constantly challenged, over the aggresive nature of the primate. For primates we have been and primates we shall remain, however often we learn to find joy in a camellia on moss. There is a 2009 film that I haven't seen, merely called "The Hedgehog": http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1442519/?... I've had this on my bookshelf for years. That's so typically me. I'll buy a book tomorrow but I probably won't read it for at least a year. I don't know why I do this because, as is the case with this novel, I seem to be putting off reading books that I quite enjoy. Earlier in 2019, around February, after my grandmother's funeral and while I was in limbo as a job offer mulled over whether to retain their offer once they learned I still didn't have my degree (they retracted it), a friend came over to Kenya and gave me this book.

She felt invincible. I love her with all my heart. I think I will forever. There are so many other things I would love to wax lyrically about Renee but revisiting all my notes is getting me emotional again.To contrast the difficult relationship with her sister and parents, she actively looks for beauty as a reason to live, especially the beauty of movement, and seeing grammar as a means "to attain beauty" (rather than "to speak well", as her teacher suggests). Until then, she also seeks out silence and somewhere to hide. That so many people love this book makes me fear for the future of literature. It is one of the most pretentious, banal "novels" I've ever read. In fact, "novel" is too good a word for its bloggishly self-indulgent, smugly insipid meanderings. Actually most blogs are much more interesting than this book. The two main characters (the concierge Renee and the young girl, Paloma) are hypocritical snobs who accuse others of snobbery. This intolerance is forgiveable in a child perhaps, but not in a 53 year old concierge. Renee whines about her lot constantly (and not in an amusing way -- she's incredibly tendentious and judgemental). She vaunts her superior intelligence, is very self-involved, and yet fancies herself compassionate. Whence comes the sense of wonder when we encounter certain works of art?... The enigma is constantly renewed: great works are the visual forms which attain in us the certainty of timeless consonance... Certain forms... return again and again throughout the history of art."

The tea ritual: such a precise repetition of the same gestures and the same tastes; accesion to simple, authentic and refined sensations, a license given to all, at little cost, to become aristocrats of taste, because tea is the beverage of the wealthy and of the poor; the tea ritual, therefore, has the extraordinary virtue of introducing into the absurdity of our lives an aperture of serene harmony. Yes, the world may aspire to vacuousness, lost souls mourn beauty, insignificance surrounds us. Then let us drink a cup of tea. Silence descends, one hears the wind outside, autumn leaves rustle and take flight, the cat sleeps in a warm pool of light. And, with each swallow, time is sublimed. If anything, I"d be more interested in her if she were an ignorant working-class stiff. I'd like to know what her life is like, then. Carver writes about people like that all the time, and its enthralling. Because he makes you care about these people and their motivations. Intelligentsia pretensions in a do-nothing concierge? Excuse me while I pour some more bourbon in this drink. And Muriel, God bless her, delivered the goods. An enormously satisfying ending to a highly unusual book. As always, I am saved by the inability of living creatures to believe anything that might cause the walls of their little mental assumptions to crumble. Concierges do not read 'The German Ideology', hence, they would certainly be incapable of quoting the eleventh thesis of Feuerbach.I recently had a brief relationship with a young lady who had studied philosophy at a university in southern California. The relationship was destined to be a brief one, as she left for the Philippines to join the Peace Corps just a week or so ago. On one of our last evenings together, she thanked me for something that I found curious.