Talented and precocious, she’s come to terms with life’s seeming futility and decided to end her own on her thirteenth birthday. Paloma is a twelve-year-old who lives on the fifth floor. With biting humor, she scrutinizes the lives of the tenants-her inferiors in every way except that of material wealth. But Renée has a secret: she furtively, ferociously devours art, philosophy, music, and Japanese culture. In short, she’s everything society expects from a concierge at a bourgeois building in an upscale neighborhood. Her only genuine attachment is to her cat, Leo. In an elegant hôtel particulier in Paris, Renée, the concierge, is all but invisible-short, plump, middle-aged, with bunions on her feet and an addiction to television soaps. Un étrange pays, Gallimard, January 2019.The phenomenal New York Times bestseller that “explores the upstairs-downstairs goings-on of a posh Parisian apartment building” ( Publishers Weekly).La vie des elfes, Gallimard, March 2015 in English (translated by Alison Anderson) The Life of Elves, Europa Editions, February 2016.L'élégance du hérisson, Gallimard, 2006 in English The Elegance of the Hedgehog, Europa Editions, September 2008.Une gourmandise, Gallimard, 2000 in English, Gourmet Rhapsody, Europa Editions, August 2009.The Elegance of the Hedgehog was turned into a 2009 film called Le Hérisson (in English The Hedgehog), directed by Mona Achache. Renée also features briefly in Barbery's first novel, Une Gourmandise, which appeared in Anderson's English translation as Gourmet Rhapsody in 2009. She and Paloma, the likewise intellectual (even radical) teenage daughter of a resident family, narrate the book in turn. The story concerns the inhabitants of a small upper-class Paris apartment block, notably its crypto-intellectual concierge, Renée. It has also been a bestseller in Italy, Germany, Spain, South Korea, and in many other countries. Her novel L'Élégance du hérisson (translated by Alison Anderson as The Elegance of the Hedgehog) topped the French bestseller lists for 30 consecutive weeks and was reprinted 50 times, selling over a million copies by May 2008. After she quit her job, she lived in 2008–2009 in Japan (20). She then taught philosophy at the Université de Bourgogne, in a lycée, and at the Saint-Lô IUFM (teacher training college). She studied at the Lycée Lakanal, entered the École Normale Supérieure de Fontenay-Saint-Cloud in 1990 and obtained her agrégation in philosophy in 1993. Her 2006 novel The Elegance of the Hedgehog quickly sold more than a million copies in several countries.īarbery was born in Rabat, Morocco, but she and her parents moved when she was two months old. Muriel Barbery (born ) is a French novelist and philosophy teacher.
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