L'HERRISSON OF SHAKESPEARE

A little while ago, I fulfilled a long-held ambition by visiting Shakespeare and Company on the Left Bank of the Seine in Paris.  I first came across this bookshop which, in its day, was a meeting point for expat writers such as Pound, Joyce and even Fitzgerald, in the pages of Hemingway's 'A Moveable Feast' and that was more than 35 years ago.  But despite numerous visits to Paris in the intervening years, I never made the pilgrimage until, that is, last Thursday, 26th April.  And I have to confess that, at least at first, I was a little disappointed.

Shakespeare and Company is a rather patched together secondhand bookshop.  True, there's a room upstairs for readers (rather than purchasers) but I was unable to penetrate those intellectual heights because they are prohibited to those carrying books they intend to buy and I am one of those who cannot leave a bookshop without a buying a book.  Nor did I see the bedrooms that I understand are still extant, that are reserved to erudite penpushers who have (temporarily) fallen on hard times while striving in the French capital.

But I did have an active conversation with the charming salesgirl when I attempted to buy her copy of a detective novel by Jan Willem van der Wetering (and I must remember to send her my copy of de Wetering's book about becoming a Zen disciple, 'The Empty Mirror').  I was also pleased by the simple act of stamping the books sold with the S&Co Shakespeare's head logo.

So, as I said, disappointed at first .. but only at first.

Despite the higgledy-piggledy shelving, there is a wealth of books, well displayed and easily searchable.  And in among these I found Muriel Barbery's second novel, 'The Elegance of the Hedgehog'.   This is the sort of book I want to find but rarely do; a book I hadn't heard of making me feel the poorer for that (former) omission.

I bought the Hedgehog because of the strangeness of the title, the fact it had sold over five million copies, according to the blurb (although that sort of information can cut both ways) and the fact it is set in Paris and was thus for me, for that brief time, local.

I haven't finished reading the story yet but I can already say that the underlying theme of hidden intelligence longing for yet fearful of exposure is seductive.  So too is the setting in a grand apartment block inhabited (one might say infested) by disparate members of la grande bourgeoisie bringing to mind Georges Perec's fine novel, 'Life a User's Manual'.

The Hedgehog (L'Hérrisson) of the title, is the concierge, Madame Michel, a closet intellectual from whom I have already learned the words 'conatus' and 'pithiatic'.  More to come I'm sure.

Good for Shakespeare and Company so let's give their namesake the last word (from 'A Midsummer Night's Dream'), "thorny hedge-hogs, be not seen".