The French writer Anne Serre has been very clear in interviews that she has no truck with a type of fiction that is fashionable in the UK at the moment. Readers drawn to fiction that blurs the line with autobiography – what Serre calls “the story of someone’s life, or of an episode in that life, passing itself off as a novel” – are, in her view, being “sold a lemon”.
She is clear, too, about her reason: “The whole point of a novel should be that we don’t know who is speaking.” This seemingly simple claim undoes so much new fiction in English – fiction as memoir, fiction in the first person, autofiction in which you always know who is speaking.
This feeling of Serre’s also underpins and invigorates A Leopard-Skin Hat, her fourth work, which has been translated by Mark Hutchinson and was nominated for the International Booker prize.
Published in France in 2008 as Un chapeau léopard, A Leopard-Skin Hat is a novel about a friendship between its protagonists, a woman called Fanny and a man known throughout only as “the Narrator”. However, while he is a writer, he is not the narrator of this novel.
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The narrator of A Leopard-Skin Hat is not named, although they do sometimes refer to themselves as “I”. Other than this, they are a mystery. What they tell us, though, is the story of Fanny and the Narrator’s friendship over 20 years, years during which the Narrator sees Fanny gradually lose the fight against madness (the novel’s word) and, in the end, death.
We know early on that Fanny will die at the age of 43, that isn’t a mystery, but what the novel centres on is how mysterious others are to us, and how we narrate to try to understand people who are not us, but whom we love.
What is most extraordinary about Serre’s novel is the way it shows us two friends doing very ordinary things – going out for dinner, going on holiday, walking in the countryside and swimming in lakes – but shows us through this the strangeness and complexity of friendship, love and of life.
It’s not just the mysterious narrator, though, that distinguishes Serre’s novel from so many of the orthodoxies of contemporary fiction in English. Against the advice of every creative writing course, A Leopord-Skin Hat tells rather than shows.
It is largely written in the tense that in English is known as the past habitual, which uses the conditional or a description of what used to happen. What the narrator tells us is hardly ever rooted in “scenes”, where we enter into the present of the world of the novel and listen to characters talking to each other. Describing Fanny’s pilfering of the titular leopard-skin hat, for example, we are told: “She would tell you about the theft with the amused and somewhat shamefaced air of a little girl and, were she to put on the hat, would resemble the woman she might have been”.
There is no dialogue in the novel until the last two pages. Its use of the past habitual and the almost absence of dialogue could make for a coolness or a lack of emotional engagement, but its effect is the opposite.
The narrative position is not tricksy. Actually, the best writing that experiments with narrative position – from Virginia Woolf, through W.G. Sebald to Lucy Ellman’s Ducks, Newburyport – does so in order to represent as faithfully as possible what it is like to be a human being in relation to other human beings. At the centre of such experiments is the question, how can we know other people?
While Fanny’s death is the melancholy heart of the novel, in its final, amazing chapter – which switches from the past habitual to the present tense – the narrator recounts Fanny’s experiences after death, as the narrator character cannot, and as only the unknown narrators of novels can. As she ascends into the sky, Fanny becomes Fanny:
Here she is, then, continuing her ascent, her hand still on her head, her blue eyes wide open and inhabited at last. Inhabited by someone who nobody ever saw on earth, I can assure you. Someone not unlike the woman in the leopard-skin hat, only better; less mysterious, fully present from head to toe. For the first time in I don’t know how long, Fanny is once again the woman she used to be.
The unknown narrators of novels can tell us who other people really are; we can never know that ourselves. All we can do is read novels and love those other people anyway.
Leigh Wilson does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.
