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A review by rightonmama
The President's Hat by Antoine Laurain
5.0
My second book by this author. His work is so clever, fun, delightful and engaging.
“Pierre had developed a theory about all this, according to which he had lived a parallel life where he had not taken the hat from a bench in parc monceau, his wife had not made that comment about his beard, he hadn’t shaved it off, and of course the hat had not been placed on the sitting-room radiator on new year’s eve.
In this parallel life he was still wearing his old sheepskin jacket and had his beard, had never opened the door of his study and still went every Friday to his analyst. What aslan called a parallel life was actually a perfect illustration of quantum mechanics and of applied developments in probability theory, starting from the hypothesis that everything we do in our lives creates a new universe which does not in any way wipe out the previous universe.
Our lives can be thought of as like a tree hiding a forest of parallel lives in which we aren’t exactly the same, nor are we wholly different. In certain of those lives, we wouldn’t have married the same person, or lived in the same place, or had the same profession... To deny that fremenberg had played any part in his recovery had one flaw; namely that without the weekly appointment with his analyst he would never have sat on the bench beside the hat.”
“Pierre had developed a theory about all this, according to which he had lived a parallel life where he had not taken the hat from a bench in parc monceau, his wife had not made that comment about his beard, he hadn’t shaved it off, and of course the hat had not been placed on the sitting-room radiator on new year’s eve.
In this parallel life he was still wearing his old sheepskin jacket and had his beard, had never opened the door of his study and still went every Friday to his analyst. What aslan called a parallel life was actually a perfect illustration of quantum mechanics and of applied developments in probability theory, starting from the hypothesis that everything we do in our lives creates a new universe which does not in any way wipe out the previous universe.
Our lives can be thought of as like a tree hiding a forest of parallel lives in which we aren’t exactly the same, nor are we wholly different. In certain of those lives, we wouldn’t have married the same person, or lived in the same place, or had the same profession... To deny that fremenberg had played any part in his recovery had one flaw; namely that without the weekly appointment with his analyst he would never have sat on the bench beside the hat.”