Helpful Score: 3
I hated this book. At the beginning. I didn't understand the fuss about Barbery, who seemed an arrogant and superior Iris Murdoch. I couldn't relate to the prickly, self-absorbed, haughty characters as they dispensed wisdom to the reader, taking great pains to keep their knowledge clandestine to the outside world.
This novel is simply amazing. Barbery transforms these characters without altering who they are or changing anything about them. Alternatively, Barbery changes the reader.
Renee initially struck me as the most splintered character, so class-obsessed that everything in her life was in terms of the working poor and the bourgeois, so overly-philosophical that she turned phenomenology into a nearly consumptive neurosis. Then, she ranted about simple grammar and I found myself chuckling and cringing along with her. Slowly, I began to appreciate Renee's economical and urbane vocabularythis was truly an enlightened woman. So, at the point in which Renee revealed her past, I felt I understood her completely; I felt that in an alternate universe, I could even be her. I sat baffled at how Barbery managed that.
Paloma needled me from the start; precocious was far too kind a word for that arrogant and narcissistic child. I thought her suicidal tendencies were cursory at best. But, by the end of the novel, I understood her. I liked her. I ached for her. Her final observation was no less short of brilliant.
How did Barbery change *me* by reading this? The characters each grew and had their respective revelations, as is expected in any good work of literaturebut I found myself the most changed of all. I feel both unsettled and elated at this thought. This book will give you much to think about for a very long length of time.
This novel is simply amazing. Barbery transforms these characters without altering who they are or changing anything about them. Alternatively, Barbery changes the reader.
Renee initially struck me as the most splintered character, so class-obsessed that everything in her life was in terms of the working poor and the bourgeois, so overly-philosophical that she turned phenomenology into a nearly consumptive neurosis. Then, she ranted about simple grammar and I found myself chuckling and cringing along with her. Slowly, I began to appreciate Renee's economical and urbane vocabularythis was truly an enlightened woman. So, at the point in which Renee revealed her past, I felt I understood her completely; I felt that in an alternate universe, I could even be her. I sat baffled at how Barbery managed that.
Paloma needled me from the start; precocious was far too kind a word for that arrogant and narcissistic child. I thought her suicidal tendencies were cursory at best. But, by the end of the novel, I understood her. I liked her. I ached for her. Her final observation was no less short of brilliant.
How did Barbery change *me* by reading this? The characters each grew and had their respective revelations, as is expected in any good work of literaturebut I found myself the most changed of all. I feel both unsettled and elated at this thought. This book will give you much to think about for a very long length of time.
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