Book of the Week: A LEOPARD-SKIN HAT by Anne Serre (translated from French by Mark Hutchinson)
Anne Serre’s subtly inflected novel explores the difficulties of knowing another person (the very difficulties that may in fact induce us to the attempt), and contrasts these to the ways in which knowing is conveyed (or gives the illusion of being conveyed) in fiction. How does the relationship between an author and a reader resemble or differ from the relationships between actual people in the ‘real’ world?
”Anne Serre’s short novel is the deeply romantic telling of a platonic love story between the narrator and his complicated childhood friend, Fanny; a story so beautifully realised — and translated so sensitively by Mark Hutchinson — that the pair become part of the life of the reader. A perfectly balanced book, slender in size but bearing significant weight all the way through, A Leopard-Skin Hat is testament to the ways in which we continue to hold the people we love in our memories, with respect and dignity, after they die.” —International Booker Prize judges’ citation