A Leopard skin hat by Anne Serre
French fiction
Orignal title – Un chapeau léopard
Translator Mark Hutchinson
Source – Personal copy
Now of all the books that came out on the longlistt this year this writer is on my list of french writers to get to I had want to get the couple of earlier books that came out from another press by her but hadn’t got around to it so she her on this list is good as she is a writer that maybe needs a high profiler in English. There is a great LRB bookshop interview with her when this book came out. It makes you want to read her other books and see what an inventive writer she is. She is well known for her excellent choice of first lines. She also mentioned that the narrator in this book has cropped up in other books she has written. The book is in part about her sister.
Hardest of all for her friend the Narrator was Fanny’s astonishment – a perpetual, dumbstruck amazement, littered with question marks – at the lack of response that was her lot. That was why, on the rare occasions when she did fight back and flew into a terrible rage – even with the Narrator sometimes – he always felt relieved. There you are, there was life, there was frenzy, the desire to do battle! It was a sign she was rallying her forces, was about to march on the enemy and slay him perhaps – perhaps even slash him to ribbons, since the violence of these sudden outbursts seemed to know no bounds. They could last for days, weeks even. He can still see her, teeth clenched, seated beneath the trees in a park reading, glancing up to find her old friend there, happening by, and the look in her eyes, the language she had used to shoo him away. Had Fanny been armed she would probably have killed him that day. But sadly she had a loyal heart and would sit in judgment on herself.
Fanny could be very dangerous at times
The book is a two-hander about two friends. The book’s narrator is a man in his mid-forties who has been friends with Fanny for many years. Fanny is a woman that has some apparent issues The title of the book comes from when she steals a leopard skin hat and is so proud of stealing an item that no one really wears these days, She is the sort of person that has no idea of what to wear for the season is very unpredictable in how she interacts with people and seems to be the sort of friend that follows the others around her in the career paths. There is hints at some sort of mental illness or even neurodiverget condition but also a little of both. The book is formed of glimpses of the pair through the years, a life that, although bright, is very flawed and like a moth to likely to fly into the flame as Fanny does in her own way.
FANNY AND THE NARRATOR had been close friends since childhood, but within that friendship roles that would normally shift about and change had been frozen for years now, and that wasn’t good. Nor did it bode well. The Narrator was stuck in the role of the watchful friend, steadfast and reliable, Fanny of the one who strays, is forever losing things – possessions, lodgings, friends – and only with the greatest difficulty manages to maintain a semblance of stability. He would have liked to have broken out of this box, not because he wished to fall apart in turn, but so that his friend could play the role of the steadfast, reliable one for a change.They could manage this for a minute or two, but not much more. For though Fanny liked to poke fun, and cruelly at times, at the Narrator’s chronic good health, she couldn’t stand him being weak. It would have been too much of an upheaval in the order of things.
The narrator and Fanny have been very close over the years
It is strange that I chose this as the second book for this year as it has little in common with the first book. Both are takes on AUto fiction without being strict auto fiction. Both have a relative with a mental illness and flawed relationships. This is a story of a woman that has an obvious opinion. It is never quite pinpointed, and given that it was written nearly twenty years ago, it is excellent as to how we view mental illness, which has moved on so much in the last decade or two. What we get is a friendship down the years told in snippets as we see how Fanny copes with the world but also can be wild and free in many ways. The book is an ode to a sister. Like Fanny, the narrator is a man, but the book also has a thinly veiled version of the writer herself coping with her own past. Serre has described writing each book as a chess game where each game takes its won course, and her books take their won course. Have you read any of her other books? If so, which would you tell me to get next? I hadn’t heard of the translator, but he had been a close friend of Serre for forty years and knows her well.
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