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.

The Annual Banquet of the Gravedigger's Guild by Mathias Énard

  Based primarily on its cover and the ‘book feel,’ I picked up The Annual Banquet of the Gravedigger’s Guild by Matthias Énard and it was a wild ride. We start with David Mazon, a PhD student in anthropology who has embarked on writing a thesis about a small town in France. I was immediately immersed; David’s flailing academic venture is represented with such wonderful humour, though not without empathy. He fails to make progress on his thesis and gets wrapped up in small-town dramas, where he is also compelled to break into a church to steal candles to light and heat the home of his crush’s grandfather. The story is recounted through David’s journal, which maintains a lively informal style and the humour is partly in his idiosyncrasies and partly in his obliviousness. The first part of the book sees him interact with the townsfolk and is essentially an extensive dramatis personae for the hundreds of pages to follow.

But it’s a bait-and-switch.

The first part of the book ends and the narrative transforms into alternating short bursts referred to as “Song”s and lengthy parades of the lives of others. I think the work critiques anthropology as a discipline because the subsequent sections demonstrate just how little David Mazon knows about the townspeople. Their personal dramas and backstories have been totally overshadowed by his fraught relationship with his girlfriend, drinking at the bar, and other country matters. So, the subsequent section reveals the backstories of his new love interest’s great grandfather, great grandmother, grandfather, grandmother, and mother. These are lengthy tales. It also revealed as a matter of course that reincarnation is real. As soon as someone dies, they are reborn as something else somewhere else; it’s similar to David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas in that respect, where Énard introduces a character and then introduces all the people they have been throughout history and all the people they will become.

There are a few aspects of Énard’s reincarnation that seem of particular interest. Number one is that reincarnation is not limited to species. We see a priest get reincarnated as a boar, for example. There are people reincarnated as other human children, but also trees, worms, and even seemingly non-sentient entities like a storm. The implications for time are also pretty interesting. Énard questions our assumption that lives and reincarnation work in some sort of linear fashion. Why would death and time care to follow our rules? So, it’s implied that when someone is reborn, they might be reborn into a past life or far in the future. This nonlinear mode of reincarnation offers us an interesting perspective on the implications for an individual soul across time.

The downside to this approach is that it raises the question about why I should care about any of the characters. What does it matter, for example, if someone used to be a Burgher or a farmhand or a piglet that lived for three days before it was abandoned to die? Énard has a unique storytelling approach that relies on excess to show the full scope of what escapes the eye of his seeming anthropological protagonist. I have to admit, though, it felt inconsequential knowing the multiple backstories and futures for these characters. One exception that was a wonderful touch, though, is that in the first part of the book David is constantly clearing out wormy vermin from his shower drain and wonders where they can all be coming from as he repeatedly kills them with chemical solutions. Much later in the book, Énard gives accounts of a series of murders conducted by different people in the history of the area. One is particularly grisly: a man kills his sister with an axe-blow to the head, rapes her dead body, and then cuts her open to find the source of his desire, removing organ after organ and then placing them back in her. When he is killed, we are told he is reborn in David Mazon’s drain as a worm. It’s a moment where the past-and-future-lives motif seems to connect to the central narrative in a satisfying way.

That being said, I keep talking about the central narrative as David Mazon’s, which isn’t quite fair; it is simply that his story felt the most immediate, most relatable. He gets some primacy because his story starts the novel and ends it, but there is a wealth of content in between. Énard seems to criticize David’s surface-level reading and that critique, I can’t help but feel, extends to me. At one point he interviews his new girlfriend’s grandfather for his thesis. He barely listens and asks inane questions. When the grandfather dies, he rebukes himself upon relistening to the recording:

I was embarrassed by the puerile questions I had asked and I thought, uh-oh, it’s going to take some creative editing to cut that out [...] I put on my headphones and listened to the three-hour recording. What a roller coaster. I was fascinated. It was like listening to a program on France Culture or reading a book in the Terre Humaine series—a long, arduous yet ultimately unique experience. Bloody idiot that I am, at the time I hadn’t listened to a word the old man was saying. It’s unbelievable, it’s as though I was resistant, as psychoanalysts say. The recording relates an extraordinary story. The death of his mother, his father’s suicide, the fact that he was illegitimate, cast out by his family, forced to work in the fields, robbed by his cousins of his rightful inheritance, forced to earn a living as a tractor driver, a knife grinder, sometimes a lumberjack—”two weeks we’d spend out younger, camp’d out in the swamps, hackin’ down trees, hewing elms, buckin’ the poplars, endin’ up sky west and crook’d.” Oh, he had a regional accent and an old-fashioned turn of phrase, but he was perfectly intelligible. It’s strange to think that during the recording session I was both present and absent. (375)

Upon reading that passage, I saw a little too much of myself. David misses so many important details, distracted by the immediate. Yet, when looking back on the interview he recognizes that there was a real story there—one that he needs to investigate further. That’s exactly what happened to me; I was seduced by the immediacy of David’s narrative to the point where I did not effectively appreciate the real story, that is, the full genesis of what had led to this moment in time for Lucie’s grandfather.

There were a number of storylines that were really compelling despite my ignorance. In one section, Lucie’s great grandmother is abused by her great grandfather, who is insistent on having a child. Yet, they seem unable to conceive and he beats and rapes his wife. In order to avoid the abuse, she pretends that she is pregnant. Appeased, he also gets called to war—and tries to plead his case that he cannot go because his wife is expecting, which is a horrific moment when it might work—and his wife expects him to die. As time progresses, though, she has to continue to fake her pregnancy until she gives it up, he returns unexpectedly and sees her through the window, leading to a violent misunderstanding. The different threads are woven with a deft hand.

The other side of things is that the book mimics David’s own thesis project. He flounders to complete it, loses himself in the minutiae of daily living. Towards the end, after years of not being able to complete his work, he applies to switch his studies to agriculture (denied!) and ends up abandoning his studies to work the land with Lucie. It is then revealed in full what has been the secret undercurrent of the book all along: environmentalism. There’s a real focus on ecology and preserving the land, including a whole subplot about activists preventing the use of land for artificial lakes. Given the premise that we are endlessly reincarnated, it instills a sense of importance in maintaining the environment (not that the characters are necessarily aware of the reincarnation Wheel).

The Annual Banquet of the Gravedigger’s Guild also revels in excess. Énard’s style is consistently lively, and the novel is heteroglossaic—there are many voices from many time periods. The sentences are sprawling with comma after comma. Énard picks up on the spirit of excess with plenty of reference to stories replete with detail (consider David’s interest in Victor Hugo, for instance). Rabelais’ Gargantua and Pantagruel in particular serves as a grotesque intertext for the sprawling novel before us. In fact, in the section that recounts the banquet of the Gravedigger’s Guild, the gravediggers take turns discussing philosophy and telling stories. It’s somewhat like The Decameron or perhaps more appropriately 120 Days of Sodom where the gravediggers tell bawdy tales spoken largely in rhyme, including a retelling of Gargantua’s mammoth sex organ and its emissions on the people below. There are also excessive descriptions; lengthy lists of the foods the gravediggers eat and, later, David’s packing list for a portage trip.

All of this excess might just be a joke.

One of the characters in town is Max, a local artist with a girlfriend named Lynn. In a Bluebeardian twist, when Max shows Lynn his glorious artistic project, she is horrified by its perversity and breaks off the relationship. The audience is not at the time told what Max’s artwork actually involves. Much much later, Max reveals his work to David and the audience finds out the source of Lynn’s horror: a maximalist photography exhibit of all of Max’s excrement. It makes me think that Énard is toying with the audience: there is so much shit to cover that we then build up with false pretension. When first seeing the work, David narrates that he could not bring himself to speak. He “wondered how an artist like Max could have forsaken beauty and plunged into abjectness. Some kind of depression, no doubt. Weltschmerz. The horrors of the world that plunge you deeper and deeper into excrement every day” (360). He continues, “This was not some subtly ironic game for art cognoscenti, nor a conceptual piece by Manzoni, an inside joke for the happy few, but an almost pathological immersion, a way of being in the shit, which to me seemed both borderline psychotic and very much part of the zeitgeist” (360). It feels like commentary on the excess that the book revels in. Then, David, when pressed for commentary, offers a glowing review to Max: 

I think it is very much a work of its time. It’s a reflection on the immediate, and on the infinite yet frustrating materiality of homo faber, who is capable of simultaneously producing art and excrement. This is not about sublimation, about the artist transforming shit into art. We live in the era of and, of conjunction. Art that is simultaneously this and that. The sublime and the shit. The impossibility of escaping from the mire, you know? (361).

David’s commentary is presented here as a lie and yet it also seems to serve as a commentary on the book itself. It is this and that. A ridiculous lie and an analysis of the work. The humour cuts both ways. It makes fun of the artist but also makes fun of us for imbuing the work with meaning. 

All this said, the ending of the book offers a pretty comforting and tidy ending. Sure, there are some loose ends regarding David’s academics, but starting a farm with Lucie and being in a happy relationship away from the city gives the idyll its gentle conclusion. Despite there being a lot of excess that drew me away from the book, the ending was pretty moving, actually. It isn’t unqualified—I expect there are some things I’ve missed that would challenge my naivety—but the warmth of the ending imbued the book with a sense of optimism that these lucky hominids had a great position in the Wheel of reincarnation.

There’s a lot to like in the book; it took me on a journey, for sure, sometimes to its own detriment, but there is enough here to make the book worth reading. There is much to discuss, the style is masterful, and some of the passages that shine really shine. I think if I were smarter, the book would get even better. If you pay close attention, there will be a lot here to hang onto.

Happy reading!

Revolting Prostitutes: The Fight for Sex Workers' Rights by Molly Smith and Juno Mac

As you can likely infer from the title, we’re entering some difficult territory with Revolting Prostitutes by Molly Smith and Juno Mac. This is a nonfiction book that confronts the challenging discourse surrounding sex work wherein the authors recognize that it would likely be better for women if sex work did not exist at all, but, since it does, we are obligated to establish better practices for protecting those in the industry.

A foundational aspect of the text is defining sex work as work, in some ways like any other. People often make moral arguments against sex work and decry (especially, but not exclusively) women selling or “renting” their bodies for a fee. The argument starts to break down, though, when you try to explain the difference between a sex worker selling her body and the destruction any number of people subject their bodies to for work. Consider, more directly, a miner whose body is perpetually sore or, to take it further, an Uber driver who never sleeps and so subjects themself to any number of illnesses. Gig economy work notwithstanding, we have a number of protections for workers—so what is the difference? The line of reasoning is reflective of the authors’ approach. Not that their work isn’t data-driven, but Smith and Mac tend to wax more philosophical and offer reasoned arguments for the ethical treatment of sex workers. They remain consistently informative, if a little general, and probe into the paradoxes of the industry.

Particularly compelling to me is the way they break down sex work prevention laws and expose them for their injustice. For example, in an effort to eradicate sex work, several countries have decreed that there shalt be no brothels and have put in anti-trafficking measures. The problem, though, lies in the definitions of these practices. For instance, a brothel is defined as any place in which sex work takes place by more than one worker. What does not get factored in is whether the workers are there at the same time, whether they know each other, and so on. Smith and Mac give the example that two women engaged in sex work might rent an apartment together to save on rent and be around as backup in the case of unsafe situations. Even if they are not working at the same time, and even if they also live where they work, their apartment gets counted as a brothel. Similarly, if you ‘harbour’ anyone involved in sex work, depending on where you are, you might get classed as a sex trafficker—including if you have a friend or family member in your life that engages in sex work and happens to sleep over at your house. These laws effectively serve only to cut off sex workers from their communities and make sex work less safe.

Another measure that people have attempted is to criminalize not sex workers but their clients. While we’re all prepared to shame people for being in the industry, the reality is that there are people willing to buy sex. Smith and Mac are quick to point out, though, that sex workers need the money, while their clients do not need to buy sex—there is an unevenly distributed need. And, like abortion—making it illegal means it will still happen, just less safely. So, when clients are criminalized, it has a few effects; it decreases the amount of vetted, trusted clients. In turn, workers are more willing to accept riskier clients—clients more prone to violence or not paying or having STIs. 

Smith and Mac expose a number of hypocrisies that arise from not listening to the lived experiences of sex workers. Early on, they note that anti-prostitution organizations hire unpaid interns for months with no arrangements made for housing. These jobs, which could be paid, are nonetheless advertised as unpaid internships. The women most able to take on these roles are those who can afford to do unpaid work—that is, women in a position of privilege from where sex work is something to be abolished, not a pathway open to women who have suffered at the hands of national and global policies. Smith and Mac continually return to the notion that sex work is a product of circumstances imposed on desperate people—people who have been rendered illegal as they flee from circumstances beyond their control, and so forth. Particularly when it comes to trafficking, we could make a pretty circular venn diagram of people who oppose migration and those who oppose sex work. Well, in the case of trafficking, making everyone “illegal” paves the way for exploitative sex work of the people they claim in another breath that they want to protect.

Revolting Prostitutes is thus a difficult book to grapple with. It exists in a space of grey areas: prostitution is not ideal, yet needs to be protected. We want to reduce the necessity of sex work, but can’t criminalize it. We want to help people get out of the industry while recognizing that it is a viable income for some subset of the population. There are also, I imagine, far more sex workers in the world than you expect, especially if you broaden the definition beyond prostitution alone. This is not a book of easy answers, but is certainly a book of compassionate ones.

Happy reading!