A Leopard-Skin Hat by Anne Serre

        I’ve been continuing my journey of reading the books nominated for the International Booker Prize, which has brought me to the deceptively-covered A Leopard-Skin Hat by Anne Serre. Despite the whimsy of the cover, the book is absolutely crushing. It’s essentially a book-length character study of Fanny, the Narrator’s friend, as he recounts their lifelong friendship, cut short by her death at forty-three years old.

In terms of events, there is not really much to tell. The book is primarily snapshots of their friendship, which are dripping in melancholic beauty. In one scene, the Narrator and Fanny are sitting on a hill and she is talking a mile a minute and the Narrator reflects on feeling exasperated but in retrospect misses her intense excitement. Later in life, the Narrator is on a trip with Fanny and her father and recalls being left out of their card game, which is both tragic to him but it’s also a moment when Fanny’s connection to the world is restored.

There are two main reasons that the book is so devastating to me. The first is that early on in the book you can infer that Fanny takes her own life, so every moment revealed in flashback is imbued with the sorrowful knowledge that the signs of depression are overlooked and the moments of joy are fleeting. The second reason the book is so devastating is because, despite the fact that we get to know Fanny so intimately, there is always a distance from her.

The Narrator opens the book with the notion that we are separated from one another and from ourselves. There’s a version of Fanny that stole a whimsical leopard-skin hat and has a fun personality, but that version of Fanny is inaccessible most of the time. Instead, the Narrator talks about it being like there’s a rock inside her. In talking to her, he does not know whether talk to Fanny A (the fun Fanny hidden behind the eyes of the other, the person that could be there) or Fanny B (the Fanny actually there, the stone). Serre’s depiction of the doubleness rings true and relatable. It’s deeply personal and profoundly moving.

It is also deeply philosophical. Essentially, Serre provides a narrative dramatization of a posthuman argument that none of us is singular. She provides some explicit discussion of that in the early pages of the book. The Narrator (or rather the Narrator of the Narrator) explains,

From a faint wavering, now and then, in Fanny’s gaze, or in one of her intonations. At moments like these, Fanny would be slightly off-balance for a second---and happily so. Slowly she would stare up in surprise at the Narrator puffing on his pipe like Maigret. So there were three of them now: the Narrator, Fanny the old friend with the crippling existence, and this other woman, the one in the hat, the jovial ringleted one hiding behind her curtain, whom it would have been unthinkable to mention, to simply set down at the table—that was strictly forbidden—but whom it was neither prohibited nor authorized to throw a lifeline to. (10)

The description provides an account of Fanny’s duality and it identifies that there are three of them: the Narrator, Fanny, and fun Fanny. There’s a bit of an oversight here, though. There are hints that even the Narrator is not singular. He narrates about himself in third person, as though from outside himself. On the following page, he admits, “No doubt we all have someone else inside us, thought the Narrator, though, to tell the truth, I’ve never felt this with anyone but Fanny” (11). There’s a shift from third to first person within the unit of the sentence. The blend of the Narrator’s description and inner narration points to the fact that there is a different person inside him, too. As a narratological experiment, similar to Beckett for instance, the Narrator recognizes himself as not himself. The Narrator continues, “And if I examine my conscience [...] I know that I myself am that character, the writer’s secret twin, the one writing this story and the stranger within” (11). The Narrator is both a third person observer, a first person participant, and a fabrication of the author—the writer’s “secret twin.” The fact that the Narrator is different from Anne Serre in, if not in other things, at least in gender contributes to the sense of multiplicity for each identity. At the same time, the Narrator recognizes that what compels his actions is beyond him: “When my master cries out to me for a story, even if I’m accustomed to not answering him at once, playing hard to get because I’m not servile, I always respond in the end because I would get bored otherwise and because it’s my role in life” (11). The fatalism of the Narrator’s position adds that tinge of darkness; yes we are plural, no we are not in control of our multiple selves. 

Much later in the text, the Narrator questions his own significance. Fanny takes her life, and the Narrator wonders how he could have acted differently to prevent it. He starts to justify himself, too, by saying that surely he is not the only friend who had an impact on her. Then, yet another voice—a Narrator’s narrator—steps in with a direct address to the audience: “The idea he might be serving a fictitious writer had often occurred to him” (109). The fact that the writer is fictitious is another matter entirely, but then the text continues, “Still, we shouldn’t be too hard on him: to be a narrator is tricky enough to begin with, you’re in a very awkward spot really, for you are a stranger to someone you live inside” (109). Suddenly, the reader is implicated in the narration itself and the use of the pronoun “you” gets swapped in for the narrator where it would really make more sense to say “he is in a very awkward spot.” We are alienated to ourselves. There is a duality to our position. Serre writes, “In some ways it’s quite pleasant: you’re hidden, no one can get at you, you’re often idle, you have a good life” (109). Yet, “You take down what’s dictated to you by this person who perhaps imagines he’s a writer because he’s pretentious, and living in cloud cuckoo land, is out of his mind. In short, when you’re a Narrator you don’t really know exactly who you are working for” (109). Further, “this other character is there, with his ideas and his energy and his insufferable—almost dictatorial—authority, forcing you to string together sentences that, with your native genius as a Narrator, you lend a certain elegance to” (110). 

The motif of writing and narratological practices serve as an effective vehicle for a discussion of depression. Fanny embodies the plurality of being a character, a narrator, a writer, but is not able to control her own life: “what she would like no doubt is to live, to climb over the railing, cross to the other side of the screen; but how can she possibly do this when Fanny has placed her under ‘house arrest’” (11). She lacks the capacity to control her own whims—and we do not have the capacity to understand her.

The Narrator demonstrates how, when everyone is multiple, we almost never see the person for who they are in the moment and how we can only understand (or project) their true feelings retroactively. There’s a heartbreaking description of their friendship when Fanny is in a dark space:

“when your great friend whom you love dearly and with whom you get along so beautifully and laugh so much and share so many memories with, starts doing or saying strange or inappropriate things—not senseless things, just things that are slightly off base—the word ‘mad’ never occurs to you. You can’t find a word for it in fact—you who know a thing or two about words. You rack your brains and come up against a conundrum: someone with no suitable word to describe them.” (100)

At every turn, we encounter barriers. Barriers of knowing others. Barriers of language. We run into the inarticulable sorrow at the heart of it all. Really, this whole book is an attempt to articulate the inarticulable. The narrator continues on to say how Fanny herself cannot be described in language. If someone uses the word “schizophrenic,” for example, “she stiffens slightly,  and the moment the word is behind her [she] falls silent. She herself never utters the word [...] You find a way round the word; Fanny does, too. It’s a rock. She has that same image in her mind of a mad person, a madwoman” (100). It’s painful to not be able to articulate ourselves.

The book is profoundly sad and I loved it. Fanny’s suicidal depression is dark enough, but in addition, it’s sad that you never really get to know things about other people. We’re all at least doubled and the fact that we might be the joyful person stealing leopard-print hats or the person trapping and being trapped by the darkness we cannot overcome is haunting. In the final passages, the Narrator projects onto Fanny an account of her death. She feels a piece of eternity hanging off of her and only feels free of it in death, feeling liberated while everyone left behind on Earth imagines a way that they could possibly keep living.

A Leopard Skin Hat is its own piece of eternity; one I’ll likely hang onto myself.

Happy reading is the wrong phrase, but maybe keep reading.