Spent a relaxing week end reading "L’élégance du hérisson" by Muriel Barbery, the Elegance of the Hedgehog. Here, the hedgehog is a middle-aged Parisian concierge who reads Tolstoy and watches Ozu's movies. Good book, but the author is a little too eager to show us that "simple people" may also love art, literature, and philosophy. Well, this eagerness to inform us of that fact make her look like an naive elitist for those of us who knew that fact for a long time. Everybody is an expert in at least one subject. Degrees, books piled library shelves, museum passes, are mere trifles.
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