I saw this in a book store a while ago, and was taken with its premise (two inhabitants of an expensive French apartment block, an apparently culturally and intellectually indigent concierge who in fact goes to great length to conceal her deep appreciation of the finer things in order to avoid attention and a startlingly intelligent 12 year old girl who decides to commit suicide and burn down her family's apartment in order to avoid the inauthentically, shallowly bourgeois future that she believes is inevitably laid out for her, find that things begin to change when one of the complex's moneyed tenants passes away) and with its first chapter (chapterlet[te?], really - like many of the others in the book, it's only a couple of pages long), in which the concierge, Renée Michel, nearly gives herself away by, in spite of herself, making a passing reference to Marx and Engels in front of one of the building's obnoxious children of privilege.
Once I'd actually picked it up a few days ago, the reading went very quickly - it's charming and for the most part very well written - and I finished it earlier this morning, waiting for someone at a chilly outdoor table on Brunnie St...I should mention that it's in translation, but to the extent that I'm inclined to criticise that aspect of it, I suspect that the flaws, such as they are, were equally present in the French language source text.
Now, as to that 'for the most part'...the novel unfolds in a series of the aforementioned short pieces, related either by Mme. Michel or in the journal entries of the precocious Paloma Josse. Both are pleasing narrators with clear (if somewhat similar) voices, and well believable (within the frame of a novel such as this); as to that similarity between them, both are prone to making pleasingly snarky and extremely funny comments about their coinhabitants in the building, reflecting on their own sense of being outsiders, and going on for paragraphs at a time about their philosophical or at any rate abstract thoughts about Life, Art &c. And it's those abstract passages - it wouldn't be fair to call them digressions, for they're central to the schema (or do I mean 'scheme'?) of the book - which sometimes became a bit clunky, particularly those of Michel. (That said, I did enjoy the part near the beginning where she grapples with Husserl and phenomenology before rejecting it as a furphy, while obviously not agreeing with the path of reasoning/conclusion she describes.)
To be fair, the trajectories followed by the two narrators' philosophical journeys are clear and clearly distinguishable from each other's, as well as being naturally referable to their respective situations and personalities, and if what's said isn't precisely profound, well, it's still at least coherent, reasonably sophisticated, and for the most part and in broad outlines (in my humble opinion, ahem) right in the design for life that it ultimately suggests.
Insofar as it's a novel, Hedgehog suffers from certain flaws, not the least of which was that, about a third of the way out from the end, I was pretty sure I had worked out broadly what the ending was going to be for each of the main characters, and how each of those endings would relate to the other's - and was vindicated when all of it, indeed, came to pass in the final 10 or 15 pages. (It was the 'summer rain' chapter that clued me in.) Relatedly, it perhaps wears its art (by which I principally but not exclusively mean 'artifice') perhaps a little too much on its surface.
Still, while I've seemingly devoted most of this space to picking it apart, I liked Hedgehog very much more than I have reservations about it; it veers a bit towards the precious, but that's rarely a criticism coming from me, and I'm fully in sympathy with what seem to me to be its central concerns. (I ought also to've mentioned the nice critique of class snobbery that's built into it.) Bottom line: I think it's very good, and reading it brought me considerable pleasure. So there it is.
