Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout

Random House, 2008     ISBN: 9781400062089

These thirteen linked stories are set in a small Maine coastal town where everyone pretty much knows everyone else and where everyone definitely knows Olive Kittredge, school teacher, parent, wife, and grandmother, who figures into each story.

Each story, while revealing the ups and downs of the town’s inhabitants, their passions, depressions, dreams, and failures, reveals a little bit more about Olive. We ultimately come to know her as a complex person: prickly, judgmental, occasionally generous, contradictory, manipulative, loving, disappointed, frustrated, and wholly human.

The roles she plays in each story vary from irritation at the demands on her, to her need to feel integral to the ongoing life of the town. While something of a loner, she resents feeling left out, and craves knowing the sometimes cruel secrets others have to tell, and insinuates herself into situations where others might have left people to sort out their own problems.

Olive’s relationship with her son is the relationship in which she feels most powerless, and she is unable to comprehend how it came to pass that he has so little to say to her.

The Elegance of the Hedgehog by Muriel Barbery

Europa Editions, 2008

This existential and intellectual short novel will charm readers. The setting is an upper middle-class apartment house in Paris, whose inhabitants are largely bourgeois snobs, at least from the point of view of the two main characters. The novel focuses on the concierge, Renée, who grew up in abject poverty, and is a self-taught secret intellectual, enjoying the challenges of philosophy, and the beauty of nature and the arts; and Paloma, the twelve-year-old daughter of so-called liberal parents who strike her simply as phony. Each of them keeps a journal, exploring the life of the mind and the meaning of life. Paloma plans to kill herself on her thirteenth birthday, unwilling to suffer a life of superficiality like that she sees all around her, but she is still looking for moments of grace and elegance that might change her mind.

When a new owner moves in, the first in the twenty seven years that Renée has worked there, everyone in the building, except perhaps Paloma, is atwitter. Mr. Ozu, an elegant Japanese man who speaks perfect French, seems to be immune to the many attempts to engage him personally, but early on he catches on to the fact that the concierge is, for some reason, hiding a bright and curious mind, and he gifts her with something that shows he is on to her secret. The relationship that starts to develop between Mr. Ozu and Renée brings a lightness and hopefulness to the story.

Meanwhile, after meeting Paloma in the elevator, he strikes up a gentle relationship with her, and manages to get her to meet Renée, in whom she finds both a place of retreat, and the idea that there is a place in the world for young women like her who are sensitive and brilliant.

The startling ending will disappoint readers hoping for a fairy-tale happy ending, but the book will stick with the reader, and the ending will ultimately feel redemptive.