A cultured Japanese man takes the apartment and shares Paloma's fascination with Renée. The upstart girl and the concierge are drawn together when the celebrated restaurant critic upstairs dies. 'To be poor, ugly and, moreover, intelligent condemns one, in our society, to a dark and disillusioned life, a condition one ought to accept at an early age.' So she pretends to be far more stupid than she is. Plus, Renée just wants to be left alone and has no desire to become the eccentric object of everyone's curiosity. The inhabitants of 7 Rue de Grenelle would, apparently, be scandalised if they found out that their lonely, dowdy concierge was getting up to all these intellectual high jinks. But Renée must maintain her lowly position in the pecking order so that she can keep her job: she is an autodidact who adores Tolstoy, is a devotee of Japanese cinema and listens to Mahler. ( From the publisher.The reader knows from the beginning that the two of them have more in common than they realise. This is a moving, funny, triumphant novel that exalts the quiet victories of the inconspicuous among us.
Only he is able to gain Paloma's trust and to see through Renée's timeworn disguise to the secret that haunts her. They discover their kindred souls when a wealthy Japanese man named Ozu arrives in the building. Paloma and Renée hide both their true talents and their finest qualities from a world they suspect cannot or will not appreciate them. 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.
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. Then there's Paloma, a twelve-year-old genius. With humor and intelligence she scrutinizes the lives of the building's tenants, who for their part are barely aware of her existence. Yet, unbeknownst to her employers, Renée is a cultured autodidact who adores art, philosophy, music, and Japanese culture. Outwardly she conforms to every stereotype of the concierge: fat, cantankerous, addicted to television. Renée, the concierge, is witness to the lavish but vacuous lives of her numerous employers. We are in the center of Paris, in an elegant apartment building inhabited by bourgeois families.
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