The Story & ITs Narrator
Liz SchroederA Leopard-Skin Hat, by Anne Serre, translated by Mark Hutchinson, New Directions 2023.
Aloof and untouchable, Anne Serre’s newly translated A Leopard Skin Hat is unapologetically French. Following the nouveaux romanciers of the 1950s, Serre’s work often rejects traditional conventions of the novel and demands more of its readers. In A Leopard Skin Hat, we follow a character known only as the Narrator, who Serre deftly separates from the narrator of the book, in a detached yet intimate portrayal of a lifelong friendship.
A Leopard Skin Hat is Serre’s fourth book translated into English by Mark Hutchinson for New Directions. Written in the aftermath of the death of the author’s sister, the novel exposes the decades-long yet seemingly inevitable downfall of Fanny, the Narrator’s closest friend. Fanny is a defiantly unknowable presence, part ode and part indictment—often running from yet tormented by traditional expectations.
Guilt hangs heavy over the character of the Narrator, as he reflects on the ways he may have failed Fanny. “We can, by not thinking enough, be responsible for the most appalling things,” he says. As Fanny travels the world and fails, succeeds, then fails again, we sit and watch alongside the Narrator, torn between enabling and intervention. Ultimately, the Narrator seems too fascinated by Fanny to let go of a friendship frequently described as “grueling.”
He had often thought that the best way to help Fanny perhaps might have been to abandon her to her fate so that she found her own path in life, but he was never able to do this. Truth be told, he could have done without this grueling friendship. . . were it not, of course, that it also had something bewitching about it.
“ For twenty, for fifteen years now, and ever more intently as time wore on, the Narrator had been keeping a close eye on his friend Fanny,” the first few pages divulge, casting Fanny as the star of the novel and an oddity worthy of observation, described yet never defined by her relationship with the Narrator. As he remarks later in the novel, “You never know who your loved ones are or what they are capable of.”
Fanny’s mental illness, or “madness,” as Serre sometimes refers to it, is only lightly touched on. Her multifaceted personality and tendency towards volatility aren’t given a name until late in the book, almost as an afterthought. We study Fanny the way the Narrator does: quietly, occasionally with trepidation and sometimes with joy. We marvel at her vulnerable moments, as the Narrator watches her at home with her father, and fear for her unpredictability. “To be friends with Fanny,” the Narrator describes, “is to move ceaselessly back and forth between solitude and company, without ever knowing when you will find yourself alone and when there will be two of you.” We vacillate between the different versions of his closest lifelong friend—the one behind the grey veil and the one with the leopard-skin hat, the one who “as a child had called herself Felix, which means happy,” and the one who “teases [the Narrator] sometimes, like a cruel child toying with an insect or a small animal.”
Lacking a traditional plot, A Leopard-Skin Hat relies on memories retold from the Narrator’s perspective, and we’re never
sure of his reliability. The split between the character of the Narrator and Serre’s third-person narration allows for interjected commentary on the writing process itself. “The turmoil and mystery of Fanny’s emotions demanded to be worked upon,” Serre writes. “She was the living example of what a Narrator has to confront every hour of every day. She was a book from before the book.” Serre toys with us at points, dangling the character of the Narrator as a metaphor for the way we narrate our own stories of others. “The idea we form of others,” she writes, “comes solely from their relationship with ourselves.”
A Leopard-Skin Hat is as much an exploration of fiction as it is a story of friendship or tangled character study of those we love and lose. “We shouldn’t be too hard on him,” Serre writes of the Narrator, “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.” Serre’s small nod to her own writing process gives the book an ironic tone, but as with much of Serre’s work, it might take two or three reads to be in on the joke. The success of the story ultimately relies on our belief in the enduring and anguished love the Narrator has for Fanny. “When you see someone you love continually weighing in secret, like gleaming copper weights on the pans of a golden scale,” the Narrator asks at one point, “on one side her life, on the other her death, and you see her stooping to examine precisely on which side it tips— how can you help but peer over her shoulder?” In A Leopard-Skin Hat, we peer right alongside him.