Discoveries

The Elegance of the Hedgehog

A Novel

Muriel Barbery, translated from the French by Alison Anderson

Europa Editions: 336 pp., $15 paper

It is its own genre: apartment-building novels. In each apartment, a different storyline, a daily drama. Each character hides a secret life. Renee, 57, has been the concierge of a luxury Parisian building for 27 years. She looks and acts, outwardly, like a cartoon character, consciously playing the role. She pretends to watch TV incessantly. In reality, she has devoted her life to art, culture and "the quest of timelessness." Paloma, a 12-year-old autodidact who lives in the building, also hides her true identity, pretending to be an obnoxious pre-teen when, she is, in fact, a genius. She plans to kill herself at the end of the year, on the day she turns 13, to avoid the mediocrity of adulthood. All novels are bound together by tension, a kind of literary adrenaline that courses through the paragraphs. "The Elegance of the Hedgehog" is a high-wire performance; its characters teeter on the surreal edge of normalcy. Their efforts to conceal their true natures, the pressures of the solitary mind, make the book hum.

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To Love What Is

A Marriage Transformed

Alix Kates Shulman

Farrar, Straus and Giroux: 180 pp., $22

On July 22, 2004, at 2 in the morning, Alix Shulman's 75-year-old husband, Scott, fell 10 feet from their sleeping loft in an isolated cabin on an island off the Maine coast. He broke most of his ribs, both feet, and punctured both lungs. The fall caused many blood clots in his brain. This is a book about what the phrase "for better or worse" really means. It is also about the nature of dependence and independence, both requirements for a healthy life. The injury to his brain causes several transformations, most of them temporary, in Scott's personality. "Can his injury have transformed his very self . . . ," Shulman wonders, "or revealed a buried self I never knew?" In the context of a late marriage "of two autonomous souls," Shulman carefully examines the hopes and expectations she brought to the phrase "growing old together." She wonders, in the throes of intensive caregiving, what it might have been like if he had died. "Forget it," she thinks, exercising her will over this train of thought, "he's alive, he is mine, and I am his." She proclaims: "Amor fati! Love your fate. Love what is."

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The Slow Food Story

Politics and Pleasure