As I mentioned last time, I’m going to run a few short “nutshell reviews,” offering quick takes, in a nutshell, of some things I read while finishing up my time in London but that I didn’t have time to write about. Here is the second, on one of this year’s finalists for the International Booker Prize.
In recent years, hoping to increase my knowledge of world literature, I have made a point of trying to read the International Booker Prize winner. The 2022 winner, Geetanjali Shree’s Tomb of Sand, was a bit slow to get moving but turned out to be a compelling read (see my review here); Georgi Gospodinov’s Time Shelter, which won in 2023, is a fantastic book with an intriguing plot and provocative political relevance; Jenny Erpenbeck’s Kairos, last year’s choice, was (I thought) a disappointment, and frankly rather tasteless.
This year’s shortlist, which was announced a month ago, is attractive to the busy reader because almost all of the titles on it are relatively short. I hope to work through a few of them and started with Anne Serre’s A Leopard-Skin Hat, published by Lolli Editions and translated from the French by Mark Hutchison. Drawing upon Serre’s own experience with the suicide of her younger sister, the novel explores the relationship between “the Narrator” (a character always referred to in the third person) and Fanny, his childhood friend who develops mental illness. As Fanny’s condition deteriorates, the Narrator attempts to sustain their close friendship while understanding the woman she has become.
For there are multiple Fannies: the friend the Narrator remembers from his youth; an independent adult woman who takes trips to Paris and is full of energy; a helpless Fanny who cannot handle life’s demands and passively follows the decisions made by others; and a concealed Fanny who appears on the rare occasions when she wears the stolen leopard-skin hat of the book’s title. “You never know who your loved ones are or what they are capable of,” thinks the Narrator at one point, before wondering, “Perhaps we all have lives the person closest to us knows nothing of?”
As that question suggests, Serre probes the boundary between mental illness and sanity, never pretending that the former is not a real affliction but always treating Fanny with great respect. Her gradual deterioration and ultimate suicide are tragic, but she emerges as a compelling personality, full of wit, intelligence, and passion, capable of zestful enthusiasm, winning not only the Narrator’s friendship but also our own sympathy. For a reader like me, who has little experience with mental illness and is so “normal” as to be more or less abnormal, Serre’s novel offers a window onto the struggles of the mentally ill without stigmatizing them and without ever feeling overly didactic.
In addition to a compassionate portrayal of mental illness, A Leopard-Skin Hat is also, on my reading, a love story. The Narrator tells us that he is able to see Fanny so often because she lives near “the love of his life.” The folks at the Booker Prize seem to think this is another woman, a partner, taking at face value the Narrator’s insistence, “No, no, it’s not Fanny, it’s someone else the Narrator has loved for exactly twenty years, only this time happily, radiantly.” But we also read that Fanny’s problems began to develop precisely twenty years ago, and I prefer to read this as referring to the Narrator’s love for an elusive Fanny—perhaps for a Fanny whose troubles had not yet begun, perhaps for the Fanny who appears in the leopard-skin hat, but at any rate for a Fanny of whose presence he catches fleeting glimpses, one he knows is there, struggling against other Fannies that might choke off her vitality. Since the novel is a kind of love song to Serre’s own sister, this seems to me a fitting reading.
Be that as it may, Serre has written a short but moving novel about friendship, grief, memory, love, literature, and more. I enjoyed it—more than I expected to, in fact—and it is certainly a worthy contender for this year’s prize.
Thanks for reading, and I’ll see you next time for another installment From My Bookshelf.