A Leopard-Skin Hat - Anne Serre
There was a period in cinema beginning in the early 00s and peaking towards the end of that decades when metanarratives became popular among quirky indie films. I'm thinking specifically of films like Stranger Than Fiction (2006) and Adaptation (2002), though earlier films like Being John Malkovich certainly fall under this umbrella too.
A Leopard-Skin Hat reminds me of these films, particularly in the way its narration is very self conscious about the fact that it is, in fact, narration, and it was not really a surprise to me to learn that it was first published in French in 2008. This is a book that's very much of its time, and very much in conversation with the rise of that very particular early 21st century postmodernism.
Unfortunately, while this felt like a good thing for the first chapter or two, I never really got to grips with the book and soon found the tone to be grating. Despite only being barely 100 pages long this was a slog to get through, and now that I've come to the end of it I'm left wondering what the International Booker committee saw in it - not only to Longlist it in the first place but to go on to give it a spot on the shortlist.
Writers are often given the advice to “show, don't tell”. This is, of course, not a trueism, and there's plenty of use for both in fiction. But A Leopard-Skin Hat is all Tell all the time, and it's exhausting. It's also all very surface-level telling. It feels Narrated with a capital N; you can hear the voice-over over the opening credits of the film of the book. But that voiceover never falls away to allow us to actually spend time with the characters and learn about them. Instead we're treated to disjointed vignettes, presented to us from a distance that never allows us to get close, in a way that's lacking any sort of concrete reality, meaning, or emotional resonance.
The best parts of this book come in the penultimate chapter, when it starts to play with questions of who is actually narrating the piece. But they're half-formed and not given enough time to breathe, and they come far too late in the proceedings to redeem the book.
It's a shame, really. When I first started reading the book I was telling anybody who would listen how much I was enjoying it. But it's so one-note that by the end, everything I liked had either grown stale (best case scenario) or become actively annoying (worst case scenario), to the point that I now can't really remember what it was that I liked so much in the beginning. There are certainly some interesting ideas around the identity of narrators going on in here, but they're never developed enough to be satisfying or meaningful or to move beyond simply being ‘quirky’.
This is, ultimately, a character study of two characters, but we're never actually given the opportunity to study them. It feels like a short story stretched out to the point of snapping, and I suspect that I'll have forgotten all about it this time next week. Maybe I'm missing something that elevates this book, but for the life of me I can't figure out what it might be.