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.
The pensive mode in which the story is written is deeply reminiscent of the 2024 Booker Shortlisted novel The Details by Ia Genberg, translated from the Swedish by Kira Josefsson. Both the books were written in the form of offering an elegy to self and those in which the self found its meaning and value. While Genberg’s novel offers a mosaic of the little details in life that different people have, Serre’s book engages with Fanny only and the importance she held to the narrator.
The book was written after the death of Serre’s sister, both to express the author mourning the short life of her sister and to celebrate the life she had lived. These are exactly the emotions that the readers share with the writer and the narrator. By jogging back memory and extracting Fanny out through them, the readers glean through the troubled life she’s lived that was unfairly cut short. At the same time, the reader sees the happiness and meaning she’s left behind for people who wake up and continue to live.
Serre’s story, however, can drag at many instances. It can lead the reader to wonder what this will eventually result in and whether it is worth putting in that effort. The story does stagnate at places, becoming repetitive. One wonders if the repetition was a symbolic choice made by the writer or a choice simply gone awry. Nonetheless, the story never falters. At least the two characters never falter. They were always there with the reader, circulating in their minds and begging various questions to think through.
Serre’s novel is mystical. It is written to drive the reader deep into the inner recesses of their heart. It jolts you, and then it elegiacally drops you down with its prescient and pristine quality.