A Leopard-Skin Hat
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- £6.49
Publisher Description
A quintessential early novel about an intense friendship, by the winner of the 2020 Prix Goncourt de la nouvelle.
SHORTLISTED FOR THE INTERNATIONAL BOOKER PRIZE
A Leopard-Skin Hat may be the French writer Anne Serre’s most moving novel yet. Hailed in Le Point as a “masterpiece of simplicity, emotion and elegance,” it is the story of an intense friendship between “the Narrator” and his close childhood friend, Fanny, who suffers from profound psychological disorders. A series of short scenes paints the portrait of a strong-willed and tormented young woman battling many demons, and of the narrator’s loving and anguished attachment to her. Anne Serre poignantly depicts the bewildering back and forth between hope and despair involved in such a relationship, while playfully calling into question the very form of the novel. Written in the aftermath of the death of the author’s little sister, A Leopard-Skin Hat is both the celebration of a tragically foreshortened life and a valedictory farewell, written in Anne Serre’s signature style.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Serre's searching, poignant latest (after The Beginners) depicts the complex relationship between a man called the Narrator and a woman named Fanny, who remains inscrutable to the Narrator after her death at age 43. The Narrator and Fanny meet and become close friends in childhood, and as adults readers see them traveling to the countryside, going on walks, and playing ludo in the middle of the night. The Narrator remembers small details about Fanny, like how cautiously she changed gears when driving, and the fact that her big toe was "conspicuously longer than the next." But Fanny is defined by "an absence": the Narrator describes her as "at once there and not there." And though he "talked to rouse her, to keep her alive and in the real world, to bring her round from her dreams," the Narrator's efforts, ultimately, are for naught. Serre's novel memorably evokes the slippery nature of Fanny's character in its snapshot-like structure: rather than a more conventional and chronological arc, the story progresses along the winding routes of the Narrator's ruminations. Readers will be moved by this probing story about the unknowability of others.
