A Leopard-Skin Hat
A narrator's patient attempt to understand a lifelong friend who remains finally unknowable to him, written after the death of the author's own sister.
A man called only the Narrator recounts his long friendship with Fanny, whose mental illness makes her at once vivid and unreachable. Anne Serre wrote it after the death of her own sister, and translated by Mark Hutchinson it becomes a study of what it costs to keep loving someone you cannot finally understand, and of how ordinary that failure is between any two people.
Recommended by 1 Person
Anton Hur
I think this book in particular, while surely a fine work of literature in the original French, really takes on something extra in translation. It is a work of great empathy and, therefore, love, a careful attempt by a narrator who is trying to understand a friend who is inaccessible to him, as we are all ultimately inaccessible to each other. But he tries anyway.
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