Renée, who’s 54, has been the concierge of a luxury apartment building in Paris for the past 27 years. She’s a widow, and lives alone with her cat (because, you know, all lady concierges have cats). She does her job competently, and counts on people not really seeing her (because people only ever see what they expect to see). (“I am saved,” Renée says to herself, “by the inability of living creatures to believe anything that might cause the walls of their little mental assumptions to crumble” (18).) But the thing is, Renée is an intellectual: she’s smart and bookish and cultured (and totally self-taught); she reads Husserl and Kant and particularly loves Tolstoy. She’s stuck in her own assumptions too, though: for starters, she assumes that none of the tenants in the building where she works could fathom a concierge who reads literature and philosophy and watches Japanese films and listens to opera—and mostly, she’s probably right. But two residents, a newcomer in his sixties named Kakuro and a twelve-year-old girl named Paloma who’s no stranger to hiding her own intelligence, realize that Renée is much smarter and more interesting than she lets on, and Renée’s not quite sure how to deal.
Paloma, meanwhile, has decided she’s going to kill herself on her thirteenth birthday: life, she’s decided, is pointless and only gets worse when you reach adulthood, because by then you’re miserable and fully invested in the charade of pretending life isn’t actually pointless. So, she’s making plans to end it all, but in the meantime, she’s decided to keep two journals, to observe and try to understand life while she can: one is a journal of profound thoughts, and the other, in contrast, is about physicality: a “journal of the movement of the world.” This journal is focused on “the movement of people, bodies, or even—if there’s really nothing to say—things, and to finding whatever is beautiful enough to give life meaning. Grace, beauty, harmony, intensity” (38).
The book alternates between Renée’s voice and Paloma’s journal entries, and I liked the back and forth of it—a whole book of either one would have been overwhelming. But I wanted more “journal of the movement of the world” entries: there are only seven, as compared to fifteen “profound thoughts”: which I think gets at one of the issues I had with this book. Renée and Paloma are both extremely cerebral, observant but also very much in their own heads. And so it’s a very think-y book, and a very talky book, which sometimes just felt tedious, in passages like this, which is a little less than half of a long paragraph that continues in a similar vein:
What is the purpose of intelligence if it is not to serve others? And I’m not referring to the false servitude that high-ranking state-employed flunkeys exhibit so proudly, as if it were a badge of virtue: the façade of humility they wear is nothing more than vanity and disdain. Cloaked every morning in the ostentatious modesty of the high-ranking civil servant, Etienne de Broglie convinced me long ago of the pride of his caste. Inversely, privilege brings with it true obligations. If you belong to the closed inner sanctum of the elite, you must serve in equal proportion to the glory and ease of material existence you derive from that inner sanctum. (252)
When it’s not being philosophical, the narration is sometimes funny and sometimes beautiful: the section when Renée starts to open up to Kakuro is lovely, the chapters “A Summer Rain” and “A New Heart” in particular. The ending, though, was a disappointment: it felt like a cop-out, and also like a weird acceptance of a belief Renée was moving away from, though maybe part of my disappointment is just because I’m a sucker for happy endings, and, if not happy endings, then at least endings that are unresolved, that are open to interpretation.
Leave a Reply