Word: novelizations
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...that Prague restaurant makes a bold subversive gesture to the occupying Nazis, Jan is sympathetic. But he does not take a stand with the man who has been his friend and mentor. He is, in effect, the heir to "The Good Soldier Schweik," anti-hero of the classic novel by Jaroslav Hasek, which is the Czech anti-epic...
Many authors dream of getting their books onto best-seller lists, but few pull it off with the panache of French writer Muriel Barbery. Her second novel, The Elegance of the Hedgehog, has been at or near the top of France's sales charts for 102 straight weeks since its September 2006 publication. It has been translated into a half-dozen languages and is being adapted for film. In South Korea and Italy, the book has generated the same sort of enthusiasm and devotion that made it a publishing phenomenon in France. Now, with the release of an English translation...
Only two years ago, Barbery, 39, was a philosophy teacher in Normandy whose spare-time fiction writing had produced a single published work: the 2000 novel Une Gourmandise (A Delicacy). That tale of a world-famous food critic with deathbed yearnings for life's forgotten tastes won her a single award for culinary writing and a few encouraging reviews. Elegance, by contrast, which the weekly L'Express hailed for celebrating "the tiny pleasures of life . . . with the timeless nostalgia of a Marcel Proust," seems to have scored a direct hit on the global zeitgeist...
...novel is not Renée's alone. It also features the precocious 12-year-old Paloma, the daughter of one of the rich couples in Renée's building. A youthful idealist, she too is dismayed by the petty posturing of the gifted, privileged adults around her; so dismayed, in fact, that she intends to commit suicide by her 13th birthday. As the two characters' lives overlap, Paloma comes to discover Renée's secret gifts, and to appreciate her self-effacing elder as having "the elegance of a hedgehog: a real fortress, bristling with quills...
...realizing that not all adults sacrifice their intelligence and humanity to vanity, Barbery demonstrates her own deep love and command of art, philosophy, and literature. Indeed, Elegance can be a bit intimidating when Renée's philosophical references and brainier ruminations run thick. In the end, however, the novel wins over its fans with a life-affirming message, a generous portion of heart and Barbery's frequently wicked sense of humor...