We are in the center of Paris, in an elegant apartment building inhabited by bourgeois families. Renée, the concierge, is witness to the lavish but vacuous lives of her numerous employers. Outwardly she conforms to every stereotype of the concierge: fat, cantankerous, addicted to television. Yet, unbeknownst to her employers, Renée is a cultured autodidact who adores art, philosophy, music, and Japanese culture. With humor and intelligence she scrutinizes the lives of the building's tenants, who for their part are barely aware of her existence.
Then there's Paloma, a twelve-year-old genius. She is the daughter of a tedious parliamentarian, a talented and startlingly lucid child who has decided to end her life on the sixteenth of June, her thirteenth birthday. Until then she will continue behaving as everyone expects her to behave: a mediocre pre-teen high on adolescent subculture, a good but not an outstanding student, an obedient if obstinate daughter.
This book gets three out of five.
I really liked the philosophical observations during the whole book. I got to know how genius think. When you meet ultra smart people in real life it's hard to really understand them. But this book showed me the good sides and even the bad sides of having a overdeveloped brain.
In some parts of the book it's so much of the philosophical observations that I got a little tired of it. It took a while to like the book, in the beginning i just thought it was strange. The end is very dramatic, but it's also a part of the beauty in the book.
But if you read it, don't stop. Finnish it, because it's worth it.
song of the day: Passenger - Let her go
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