Shortlisted for the International Booker Prize 2025, Anne Serre’s A Leopard-Skin Hat, translated from the French by Mark Hutchinson, is a poignant story of love, loss and memory. Told in an elegiac style, this novel digs deep into the mind of its readers and plays with tact, charm and intelligence.
Written in the third person, we follow the narrator and his dead friend. Fanny died by suicide at 43. The narrator lives to tell the tale of their friendship that began in childhood. It had got lost in the throes of life until the two met again when they were in their 20s. In shifting vignettes, we see different shades of Fanny and why her loss meant crippling to the narrator. Fanny was much of the time ‘lost in thought, like the rest of her being. Quizzical even.’ As the narrator observes her, he sees Fanny descend into her madness of thought. She is no more the Fanny of this world. Haunting, moving and melancholic, this book brings to the fore an account of platonic love and friendship that takes its very last breath.
It is the slow-burn, searing quality of the writing that gives the book its streak of excellence. Every word and sentence appears to have been thought through before being woven into this narrative. Not one word seems to be out of place or breaks the rhythmic quality which embodies the grief that runs in the text. ‘To be filled with hatred but unable, by one means or another, to kill is a great torment. It’s worse than desperately desiring something and coming away empty-handed. It’s a million times worse than grief.’ These lines are only a snapshot of how the writing and translation flow in a seamless texture, giving Fanny and the narrator a life of their own in the reader’s mind.