"In this brilliant and sobering self-portrait, Edouard Levé hides nothing from his readers, setting out his entire life, more or less at random, in a string of declarative sentences. Autoportrait is a physical, psychological, sexual, political, and philosophical triumph. Beyond "sincerity," Levé works toward an objectivity so radical it could pass for crudeness, triviality, even banality: the author has stripped himself bare. With the force of a set of maxims or morals, Levé's prose seems at first to be an autobiography without sentiment, as though written by a machine—until, through the accumulation of detail, and the author's dry, quizzical tone, we find ourselves disarmed, enthralled, and enraptured by nothing less than the perfect fiction... made entirely of facts."
"It is inevitable that we spend the majority of our time thinking about ourselves, but what kinds of thoughts do we think? Our tendency, I would argue, is for the repetitive and the haphazard; we reflect on those aspects of ourselves that come to mind most commonly—the foods we like to eat, what we think of the daily commute, how we would prefer to make love—and we reflect on those things that occasion forces us to—the trials and strong experiences that we cannot help but break apart within the crucible of our minds. This way of considering self is not limited to our real lives. In the realm of the imagination, that of great works of literature, the protagonists’ thoughts tend to stick to a few worn paths, leaving entire modes of experience that are never described. We know what Leopold Bloom thinks when on the toilet, but what of those many parts of life that he never visits in his one Dublin day? Of those things, which make up the great majority of Bloom’s life, Ulysses is silent.
Autoportrait by Edouard Levé is notable for attempting to say all the things about a person that are not usually said. The book is simply a series of declarative sentences that lasts for 117 pages. The sentences are all ostensibly about Levé himself; they lack any discernable order and they are contained within one book-length paragraph. They seem to include every genre of thing that could be said about a person, ranging from the factual (“I have never filed a complaint with the police.”) to the oddly pointless (“I do not foresee making love with an animal.”) to the philosophical (“I wonder whether the landscape is shaped by the road, or the road by the landscape.”) to the bizarre (“On the Internet I become telepathic.”) to the psychoanalytic (“Whether it’s because I was tired of looking at tem, or for lack of space, I felt a great relief when I burned my paintings.”) to the comic and confessional: “On the street I checked my watch while I was holding a can of Coke in my left hand, I poured part of it down my pants, by chance nobody saw, I have told no one.” Throughout, Levé touches on more topics than we are conditioned to expect from a single book: childhood, politics, sex, art, death, depression, fears, hopes, reading, walking, nature, sartorial preferences, Spanish cafes, scruples about talking too much, rubber boots, the effect of a cane on one’s appearance, and the fear that one’s vocabulary is shrinking are just a small number of the topics included. In fact, the book’s exceptionally mercurial demeanor means that with nearly every sentence Autoportrait shifts to a new facet of life.
To structure a book without structure is, of course, to invite accusations of bad faith. But the totality of Levé’s oeuvre convinces that his use of chaos is not out of laziness or obstinacy but is rather an expression of some deeper logic. Levé was both a writer and a photographer, and all of his written and photographic books are made in the way that Autoportrait is made: without form, in rigorous adherence to conceits that Levé attempts to exhaust. Thus his previously translated work, Suicide, a book about a man’s suicide, is written in what he calls a “stochastic” order, “like picking marbles out of a bag.” Narrated by a friend of the suicide, the book seems to simply exhaust all that the narrator knows of his deceased chum. Autoportrait similarly exhausts all that Levé can say about himself, or, at least, all that he can say for the purposes of this self-portrait.
As with Suicide, the prose in Autoportrait is so clean and generally immaculate that when Levé does misplace a word, it jars. (As Jan Steyn did with Suicide, here translator Loren Stein has done Levé a true service; one wonders which homophone for Steyn/Stein will bring Levé’s third book into English.) The book gives the pleasure of aphorism, not so much for the content (though often that is the case as well) as for the rigid way the sentences snap together, leaving behind a sensation of inevitability. Stein is to be given great credit for economical phrasings that are pulled satisfyingly taut by the weight of their last word. Levé’s musings have an odd power to inspire self-examination; sentences like “I remember what people tell me better than what I said” are powerful invitations to consider one’s own practices. Throughout, the book conveys a pleasing air of levity and whimsicality, perhaps simply for the forthrightness of the prose, no matter whether it discusses trivial traits or life-and-death questions.
As good as the sentences are individually, how do they fit together? Pointillism is a word frequently associated with Levé’s prose (a characterization encouraged by the two covers of his English-language translations, both taken from Levé’s illustrations of himself). It’s not a bad word to use with his work. Each sentence feels like its own little dab of semantics, independent of the surrounding sentences though also related in some murky way that should be grasped if we could get far enough away from the text. This sense solid overall construction is abetted by the titles of Levé’s four prose works, which are each single, solid words that imply some object of study that they amount to: “self-portrait,” “suicide,” “works,” and “newspaper.” At very rare times the text even seems to indicate something about itself: “I am making an effort to specialize in me,” Levé tells us out of nowhere on page 81. At other times the text agglutinates quite magnificently, as in this stretch:
I will never know how many books I have read. Raymond Roussel, Charles Baudelaire, Marcel Proust, Alain Robbe-Grillet, Antonio Tabucchi, André Breton, Oliver Cadiot, Jorge Luis Borges, Andy Warhol, Gertrude Stein, Ghérasim Luca, Georges Perec, Jacques Roubaud, Joe Brainard, Roberto Juarroz, Guy Debord, Fernando Pessoa, Jack Kerouac, La Rouchefoucauld, Baltasar Gracian, Roland Barthes, Walt Whitman, Nathalie Quintane, the Bible, and Bret Easton Ellis all matter to me. I have read less of the Bible than of Marcel Proust. I prefer Nathalie Quintane to Baltasar. Guy Debord matters more to me than Roland Barthes. Roberto Juarroz makes me laugh more than Andy Warhol. Jack Keuroac makes me want to live more than Charles Baudelaire. La Rochefoucauld depresses me less than Bret Easton Ellis. Olivier Cadiot cheers me up more than André Breton. Joe Brainard is less affirmative than Walt Whitman. Raymond Roussel surprises me more than Baltasar Gracian, but Baltasar Gracian makes me more intelligent. Gertrude Stein writes texts more nonsensical than those of Jorge Luis Borges. I read Bret Easton Ellis more easily on the train than Raymond Roussel. I know Jacques Roubaud less well than Georges Perec. Ghérasim Luca is the most full of despair. I don’t see the connection between Alain Robbe-Grillet and Antonio Tabucchi. When I make lists of names, I dread the ones I forget.
I like how these sentences glow with the heat of thought, as though Levé wrote them all down in a fit. They stand out as a little tangle of thought, a sudden desire to pin down something that remains at arm’s length. Although this list tells us surprisingly little that we can grab on to as fact, what it most connotes is a sensation that Levé has both barely begun to exhaust a subject and said all that he wants to say about it. It is a sensation felt throughout Autoportrait. Levé’s portrait ultimately points us not to him as a person so much as the limits of what a portrait can express, and why we have generally chosen paint ourselves into certain cherished forms.
By breaking out of these forms and remaining silent on his choice to do so, Levé forces us to take on the role of ethnologist. This is where Autoportrait most strongly resembles graphic art. All points of entry to the text are equally valid; the text feels that it is happening all at the same time, instead of passing through time as the book is read from front to back. It doesn’t recruit a reader’s intellect in the sense of most challenging literature—which requires readers to fill out subtleties of plot, social interaction, and occasionally grammar—it asks the reader to say what is beneath the slick surface of each sentence.
Such a form will likely make many readers uncomfortable, as it entirely ignores those requirements asked of long works of prose. Its apparent simplicity also invites the accusation that anyone could make a similar book. To these remarks I have only one good response: the book proved far more engrossing than most books I have read this year, and it has given rise to far more thought and discussion. As a writer and an artist Levé constantly upended expectations with the simplest of gestures, as he has done here. Autoportrait is another small gem from a writer of great talent and originality." - Scott Esposito
"One of the perks of bilingualism is having access to two different literatures. Not only the native literature of the two languages, but also whatever gets translated into each one and not (or before) the other. I was quite taken with this excerpt from Édouard Levé’s Autoportrait, and I was looking forward to the English translation that’s set to be published in 2012. As it happens, the awesome Norwegian publisher Flamme (who also introduced me to Vladimir Sorokin) recently published a Norwegian translation.
I’m predisposed to like Levé. He was a photographer and an author. He admires Joel Sternfeld, Ed Ruscha and Stephen Shore. I love photography, I love literature, I love Sternfeld, Ruscha and Shore. But beyond superficial shared affinities, there’s something captivating about the way Levé writes. You get a feel for it in the Paris Review excerpt, which is actually cobbled together from sentences that appear anywhere and everywhere in the book. Assembling a text by picking and choosing sentences would normally ruin the source material, but this isn’t so grave a sin in the case of Levé’s self-portrait: the entire book is composed of atomic sentences that are more or less randomly strung together. Each sentence states a fact, an anecdote, a preference or an idea the author has; few sentences follow in any way logically from the one that precede or follow them.
“Art forms that extend in time appeal less to me than those that stop it,” Levé writes. (This is my translation of the translation. The point here isn’t to show off the prose, which will surely flow better in the direct French-to-English translation, but the sentiment it expresses.) This makes sense, coming from a photographer, and it’s refreshing to hear in a time when you hardly find a new still camera that doesn’t also capture film and when industry pundits predict that most photographers—most professional freezers of time—will soon also be videographers. This is exactly what Levé’s self-portrait does: where a traditional autobiography or novel trades in narrative, Levé freezes time, breaks it into atoms, and builds a portrait out of many timeless particulars. When you think of it, this is just as valid as the traditional narrative. Both the portrait of someone through a specific narration of their life and the portrait built out telling details are simplifications of reality. Narratives reflect truth in some ways and distort in others. The same is true of telling particulars, but the reflections and distortions don’t necessarily overlap.
I don’t write in books. Not books I borrow, and not books I own. It seems almost blasphemous, which is really a ridiculous attitude to take. This book inspired me to start highlighting. My copy is full of [square brackets] enclosing particularly interesting passages. Here is one (again, double translation):
In disused factories and abandoned barns, I can experience aesthetic feelings (beauty defined through function), nostalgia (places of production that no longer produce anything), erotic feelings (memories of childhood games), a benevolent emptiness, peace and quiet, all mixed together, trembling, with perceptions of death, of fear (the ideal site for a crime) and prohibition (no one gave me permission to enter this private property).Another: “Abroad, I do things I wouldn’t dare at home, because everything seems fictional.” There’s one sentence about witnessing, at the age of thirteen, a ski instructor in his forties masturbating a ten-year-old boy: this sentence is preceded by “I repeat myself a lot,” and followed by “I can’t say if I’d prefer to ampute my left arm or my right leg.” There are very few good books built entirely out of non sequiturs. As far as I know, there is only one.
I recommend getting this book in whatever version you can read, be it the French original, the forthcoming English translation, the Norwegian translation I read, or another translation. It’s a quick read, a hundred pages, but every sentence could be expanded to fill its own page, chapter, or book.
These are the last sentences: “The age of 15 is the middle of my life, regardless of when I die. I believe in a life after life, but not a death after death. I don’t ask if I’m loved. I will only once be able to say “I’m dying” without lying. The most beautiful day of my life has perhaps passed.” - Enthusiasms
"Autoportrait is more self-portrait than memoir, a litany of self-centered observations, claims, and memories presented in no particular order that feels both random and comprehensive.
On the first page already he announces: "I archive", but it's only fairly late in the book that Levé explains -- in a rare succession of sentences that are connected -- what is behind his method:
I do not write memoirs. I do not write novels. I do not write short stories. I do not write plays. I do not write poems. I do not write mysteries. I do not write science fiction. I write fragments. I do not tell stories from things I've read or movies I've seen, I describe impressions, I make judgments.
Autoportrait is an archive of such fragments, a single paragraph of short sentence after short sentence offering impressions and judgments, tallies and memories. Yes, the presentation is practically pointillist - and, yes, that cover really suggests what you're getting (except perhaps that the text is more than just black and white) - with few of the sentences even going on at any length, and fewer observations or memories presented in more than a single sentence. "Art that unfolds over time gives me less pleasure than art that stops it" he writes - and Autoportrait, an art-work made up of moments, forsakes any semblance of chronology ("chronology bores me", Levé admits).
There is a mechanical feel to much of this, Levé's tone generally neutral -- unemotional, non-judgmental -- as he lists his facts or gives his opinions. A summary impression may be of an 'autoportrait' on autopilot -- yet it is nothing of the sort. The mono-tone of the monologue is carefully shaded, the mix of observations a constantly changing one (the list quoted above is not representative).
Only very rarely does Levé go beyond mere recording of fact or opinion; his probing remains on the surface, and he avoids prodding for insight. Rarely does he try to explain in greater depth, or follow-up any initial observation; when he does, it is almost jarring:
I sometimes feel like an impostor without knowing why, as if a shadow falls over me and I can't make it go away.
There are the occasional odd notes - observations rather out of left field, such as: "I have never attended a nudist funeral" or: "I would be curious to see a Shakespeare play performed by figure skaters" - but most are more mundane, or at least more obvious bits of self-reflection.
Levé reveals - or at least enumerates - many personal details, about his life and loves and art. One characteristic that reveals itself is a sense of impermanence: Levé is not a settled man, in family or career. He is not tied to routine or necessity; in part, clearly, he is still 'looking for himself' - and Autoportrait is an exercise in trying to define and position himself. A portrait of the man does emerge, yet it is also not a final or full one: Levé remains, in many ways, indeterminate. (His suicide two year after publication of this book also suggests the failure of the exercise.)
There is great craft to Autoportrait, too: it's not easy to pull off presenting a narrative in this form, but Levé's text is a fluid, absorbing - and often beautiful - read. A fascinating piece of work." - M. A. Orthofer
"Parataxis is Édouard Levé’s best friend. Parataxis—also John Ashbery’s best friend—concerns the placement, side by side, of two sentences whose meanings don’t transparently connect. Parataxis, however, as concept, has leached its glories onto the landscape at large; any reader of contemporary culture is contaminated by paratactic energies, a stylistic phenomenon that Levé defends in his penultimate book, a work of unrepentantly naked yet stylistically errant autobiography, Autoportrait. He writes: “Raymond Poulidor is one of the least sexy names I know. I like salad mainly for the crunch and the vinaigrette.”
Levé is a French writer and photographer whose work had overtones of the Conceptual (for one project, he photographed American towns that “share a name with a city in another country: Berlin, Florence, Oxford, Canton, Jericho, Stockholm, Rio, Delhi, Amsterdam, Paris, Rome, Mexico, Syracuse, Lima, Versailles, Calcutta, Baghdad”). He is most famous now for having committed suicide in 2007 a few days after giving his publisher a slim novel called Suicide, written entirely in the second person, and addressed to a “you” who has already slain himself: “To portray your life in order would be absurd: I remember you at random.” Like Joe Brainard, whose paratactical I Remember is one indirect source of Levé’s method, he forswears synthesis, and opts for pick-up sticks, the kindling approach, sentence placed next to sentence, without development, coordination, subordination, or flow. Flow, a form of flight, is for the birds. Levé, like Brainard, or like Georges Perec, whose Life: A User’s Manual is cited in Autoportrait’s first sentence, cared too much about facts and ideas to waste time on novelistic atmosphere, character, or circumstance. I have many motives for writing this review, but my two principal impetuses are to praise Autoportrait, which I’ll go ahead and call a work of genius, and to make a general plea for parataxis as a still-useful aesthetic strategy, not exhausted by surrealists or modernists, for finding visionary (or merely mind- and eye-boggling) angles onto everyday experience.
Autoportrait, gracefully translated by Lorin Stein (who has also translated Grégoire Bouillier’s The Mystery Guest, which falls, like the late Levé’s works, into a category of French prose I’d call “the short, the sweet, the cerebral, the candid, the chic”), functions within a soft-core Oulipian economy of procedural moves servicing confessional ends: Like the essays in Perec’s classic Species of Spaces, Levé’s Autoportrait observes stylistic proprieties at once whimsical and pasteurized, or, one might say, at once comic and thanatopic. Autoportrait is a series of ostensibly factual declarations or descriptive statements, narrated by an “I,” all in a single paragraph; unlike I Remember, or the epigrammatic novels of David Markson, another practitioner of a doldrum-free “new sentence” aimed at catharsis rather than alienation effects, Autoportrait’s sentences do not occur in separate paragraphs, but are all crammed together into one long chunk, implying that a long-harbored reluctance to speak has at last been conquered, and, now that the silent epoch has ended, everything must be uttered in a single flash, without interruption, lest a sudden scruple kill off the desire or ability to speak. The voice, once it initiates the work of memory, can’t stop. And yet Autoportrait is not a talking cure; Levé well knows, as Freud came to discover, that any voice, whether heard, overheard, or remembered, plays tricks with time: “My voice recorded one minute ago on a Dictaphone sounds older than my voice recorded digitally five years before.”
The reason to read Autoportrait is to savor the shocking precision—a guillotine’s?—of its rapid cuts between unlike ideas, and to savor the actual information offered about the textures and peculiarities of a specific consciousness. “I archive. I spoke to Salvador Dalí when I was two.” Those two sentences are perfect and profound, more so because they sit next to each other without a word of mutual introduction. I suppose Dalí’s status as representative Surrealist serves to authorize the anarchic archive that Levé assembles here, in a fever glamorously (if abjectly) akin to the hectic inebriations of Hervé Guibert, another great dead French photographer-writer (ultra-handsome) who wrote tellingly and elliptically, in simple sentences, about the strange work of assembling a public self for friends and lovers and enemies to consume.
In the fashion of Guibert, Levé presents himself—without braggadocio—as a stud; or else he simply lets it be known that, unlike more sedate and supposedly modest writers, he considers literature to be the terrain of letting your hair down, a dishabille that paradoxically allows prompt cadence, sharp syntactic edge, and a bracing absence of excessive modifiers. “I have come in mouths. I have come on faces. I have come in pussies. I have come on breasts. I have come in hands. I have come on pubes. I have come on bellies. I have come on and in asses. I have come on backs. I have come in hair. I have come on thighs.” It’s cheating to quote this uncharacteristic passage, one of the book’s only idylls of nonparatactic utterance; and yet this litany of places whereon or wherein the writing “I” has deposited semen efficiently tells the reader that Levé is alert both to stylistic procedures and to sexual plasticity. The book is full of acknowledgments that Levé is a body and that his experiences, though narrated as natures mortes or documentary fragments, are at bottom those of a guy with a mind tuned to corporeal frequencies for their conceptual allure as much as for their intractable physiological presentness, their sweaty (and, in his case, spermy) haecceity. “I sniff the book I’m reading. I sneeze three times in a row. I do not take out my dick in public.” Dick out or dick in, Levé openly acknowledges—with a Brainard-esque gusto—the embarrassing and yet commonsensical (what, me worry?) facticity of bodily tics and habits. “I read better without shoes or pants.” “I have never attended a nudist funeral.” “In public toilets, before I flush I wrap my fingers with toilet paper, I put paper down on the seat before I sit down.” “I penetrate a woman faster than I pull out. If I kiss for a long time, it hurts the muscle under my tongue. I have never been sodomized. A woman slapped me.” Slap, slap, slap go the sentences, one swift stroke after another.
Sometimes, however, the sentence delays its termination; sometimes, the sentence swells into a full vignette, a fable. In one of these swollen, extended sentences, which describes a glimpsed scene of child molestation, no judgment is offered; I won’t assert that this primal scene—or screen memory?—is anything like an epicenter of Autoportrait, but I will suggest that a blasé attitude toward bodily emergency characterizes Levé’s tone, and that this indifference coexists with sharp observation and indelible recall, and with a vaguely queer tropism toward considering bodies as collaged-together clusters of energies and styles rather than as stable, easily named properties. (Put it another way: Levé thinks obsessively about his body, and by thinking about it, he makes his body—or any body—unfamiliar, uncanny, beyond classification. The classificatory energies that drive Autoportrait also centrifugally undermine the cataloguing impulse’s punitive tendency to domesticate its beasts.) Listen to Levé, making free with comma splices, all for the sake of rendering a turgid and traumatic cameo of lost time:
When I was thirteen, on a ski trip to Val d’Isère, I went back to the chalet to get my sunglasses in the middle of the morning, I took off my snow boots, I went into the dormitory in my socks, not making any noise, there I surprised a forty-something counselor in the middle of masturbating a ten-year-old boy who had to stay in bed because he’d broken his leg, the counselor snatched back his hand and smoothed down the sheet, and that night, while he made his rounds between the beds for lights-out, I called out across the dormitory: “I’m sure he hasn’t got any underpants on under his sweat suit,” right as he was passing me, I pulled down his pants, he was naked, he blushed and ran out without saying anything to me, for the rest of the trip he went to great lengths to make sure our paths never crossed and our eyes never met. I couldn’t say whether I’d prefer to have my left arm amputated or my right leg.
Meditation on amputation immediately follows memory of man-boy perversion; Autoportrait isn’t a guidebook to filth, or a defense of it, but its matter-of-fact sentences keep wandering over the edge of propriety, without classifying what sacrifices or exaltations this vagrancy might entail. “Obesity fascinates me because it effaces sex and age. I stand up straighter when I walk with a knapsack than when I don’t. My torso is too long for me to be comfortable in a car.” He is fascinated by bodies that don’t fit or belong, but he renders this fascination without glee, sadness, or commentary; instead, his tone expresses cinema-verité curiosity, as if in a haute-bourgeois version of Titicut Follies, a film that Levé names as an important influence on his work.
Hear, in the following passage, his refusal to push documentary into interpretation (although the word shame does pop up, near the end—“which is a shame” is Lorin Stein’s acute translation of “c’est dommage”): “I feel better sitting in a hard chair than in a soft chair. I do not keep my clothes in a wardrobe but on open shelves so I can take them in at one glance. Twice in my life I have been courted by gay men, they knew I wasn’t gay, I did not give them satisfaction. I have never been attracted to a man, which is a shame, the gay life appeals to me.” Neither maudlin nor panting, Levé’s structurally autoerotic Autoportrait suggests the logic of cold self-consumption, self-cancellation—or any procedure (including auto-fellatio, or auto-asphyxiation, or auto-analysis) of gorging on one’s own spectacularity. Levé’s method, however, is cuisine minceur. We are far from Alice B. Toklas’s heavy cream." - Wayne Koestenbaum
Elision is essential to reporting. In Autoportrait—Edouard Levé's story of a life as rendered through a list of scattered details, reflections, and accounts—it is the cause of an essentially communal loneliness.
For Levé, one's life exceeds one's capacity to express it. He writes, "To describe my life precisely would take longer than to live it." And, later, plainly, "I don't have time to tell long stories." Autoportrait presents memories as fragmented and divided, and selection is described as a condition of remembering. "I do not forget to forget," Levé jokes; "My memory is structured like a disco ball." The book is similarly structured, presenting its contents as distinct reflections emanating from a shared source.
As a marketed object, Edouard Levé's Autoportrait occupies the space between fiction and memoir. It is categorized by its American publisher, Dalkey Archive Press, as a work of fiction, while Lorin Stein, the work's English translator, places it more in the tradition of Joe Brainard's I Remember. This is a suitable comparison; both books consist of seemingly autobiographical lists, and they move from detail to detail with similar caprice. But for Brainard the active "I" is an elemental and unchanging refrain, (nearly every sentence begins, "I remember..." ), while the "I" in Autoportrait is perpetually shifting focus, occupying new spaces, without the consistency of Brainard's formal anchor.
The personal history presented in Autoportrait is intentionally unmoored. As one reads and rereads Levé's work, one experiences a multiplicity of histories that overlap and interrupt one another. Reality is incongruous and the content of Levé's sentences is often little more than the narrator's attempt to clearly describe his personal reactions to the world around him—family, friends, strangers, places, cultural artifacts. "It's better for me not to read medical textbooks, especially passages describing the symptoms of some illness: no sooner do I find out one exists than I detect it in myself," writes Levé, "War seems so unreal to me I have trouble believing my father was in one. I have seen a man who expressed one thing with the left side of his face and something else with the right. I am not sure I love New York." But these details do not accumulate. They swarm. They are formally isolated from one another in a way that permits perpetual reorganization. Levé does not allow his readers to linger. While some associative threads are longer than others, they are always inevitably interrupted ("I am not sure I love New York"). Levé resists linearity, or strict causality, and the rewards of the book lie not in reading associatively. A supposed "self-portrait," the book does not achieve a fixed rendering of its narrator by its end, nor does it truly attempt to. At best, upon finishing the book, each reader will have developed an individualized "sense" of a person. Composed of our own experience of an intentionally limited and self-interrupting text, Levé highlights how we edit and retell the story just as much as it is told to us. Our subjectivity divides us in what is objectively a shared experience, the reading of a book: a familiar idea, newly embodied in Levé's text.
For Levé, no act of perception is without sacrifice, and to read Autoportrait is to experience this first-hand. Remembering is always accompanied by forgetting, no telling is without elision, and happiness is always weighted by grief:
The best conversations I had date from adolescence, with a friend at whose place we drank cocktails that we made by mixing up his mother's liquor at random, we would talk until sunrise in the salon of that big house where Mallarmé had once been a guest, in the course of those nights I delivered speeches on love, politics, God, and death of which I retain not one word, even though sometimes I came up with them doubled over in laughter, years later, this friend told his wife that he had left something in the house just as they were going to play tennis, he went down to the basement and put a bullet in his head with the gun he had carefully prepared. - Colin Winnette
Eouard Levé, Suicide, Dalkey Archive Press, 2011.
"Suicide cannot be read as simply another novel—it is, in a sense, the author's own oblique, public suicide note, a unique meditation on this most extreme of refusals. Presenting itself as an investigation into the suicide of a close friend—perhaps real, perhaps fictional—more than twenty years earlier, Levé gives us, little by little, a striking portrait of a man, with all his talents and flaws, who chose to reject his life, and all the people who loved him, in favor of oblivion. Gradually, through Levé's casually obsessive, pointillist, beautiful ruminations, we come to know a stoic, sensible, thoughtful man who bears more than a slight psychological resemblance to Levé himself. But Suicide is more than just a compendium of memories of an old friend; it is a near-exhaustive catalog of the ramifications and effects of the act of suicide, and a unique and melancholy farewell to life."
"On the surface, all of this seems an example of the irritating and arty tactics that has made French fiction so unpopular. However, this novel is not so much an explanation or justification for Levé’s death as an insight into how the act of suicide might or might not confer meaning on an otherwise random life. (...) Yet this not a depressing book. The protagonist described the act of suicide as a "work of scandalous beauty" -- also a good description of the book, which like Levé’s best work as an artist and photographer, has a cold but very real sense of poetry." - Andrew Hussey
"It's a widely debated, though unexplained, fact that writers and artists are more likely to commit suicide than average. Such occurrences tend to fundamentally change the public perception of a writer, and this is perhaps suicide's most singular and fascinating aspect: it is the one act within all our powers that forces a reappraisal of a life.
Authorial suicides tend to send readers back into a writer's work for clues. In the case of the French writer and photographer Edouard Levé, these are not hard to find. A successful, up-and-coming author, he hanged himself on October 15, 2007, having delivered the manuscript for a short book titled Suicide to his publisher 10 days earlier. Published in France in 2008, an English-language edition has now been issued in Jan Steyn's fine translation.
Levé trained as an artist before publishing his first book with the influential French press Editions P.O.L in 2002. Given the circumstances of Suicide's publication, it is difficult not to look at it as a singular object, but it should be considered as part of a remarkably unified body of work. As Steyn's informative, perceptive afterword notes, Levé's three other works of literature are each as reticent and as bound by their conception as Suicide. Oeuvres, for example, is simply a collection of 533 sentences, each defining a potential work of literature. Likewise his immaculately arranged photographs, which share with the books a heavy interest in defamiliarisation and disembodiment. The images range from bizarre mock-ups - young individuals fully clothed in chic attire posing in sexual and rugby positions — to off-kilter documentary work: portraits of people who share names with celebrities such as Yves Klein, or photos of American backwaters called Berlin and Paris.
Suicide would be an odd and noteworthy work even if Levé had not killed himself. It is constructed almost entirely from short, lithe sentences written in the second person. Ostensibly these sentences are being spoken by an acquaintance looking back after 20 years on a friend who killed himself, and they both describe this suicidal man and narrate small but meaningful anecdotes from his life. On a most basic level it is clear that the narrative voice is attempting to do what any survivor would after a suicide - fill the vacuum of meaning - yet the success of Suicide is that it verges on allegory, allowing much broader interpretations.
Levé uses all the tropes that we have come to associate with suicide, but he animates them in original ways. The suicide's appearance and personality is detailed with uncommon sensitivity and scrupulousness, as are the feelings left behind in his friends and family. For example, a survivor's wish to understand why a loved one would take his life - and the impossibility of ever getting that answer - is evoked with characteristic elegance when "you" leaves a comic book open to a certain spread just as he commits the act. This final comment for his survivors is lost when, in the panic of discovering the body, "you's" wife knocks the comic down before recognising its significance. Later, "you's" father will pore over the book and construct an elaborate file of theories based on each spread.
The suicide itself is as effortlessly and succinctly narrated as any episode in the book, at once abrupt, affecting, and absurd. "You" and his wife are headed out to play tennis when "you" suddenly remember something and return indoors. As his wife waits for him to return, "you" put a rifle to his head and pull the trigger. How long had he contemplated death? Why did he choose to die in that moment? How premeditated was the act? We never know. The sentences that follow the rifle blast evoke sharp emotion despite their simplicity and insistence on surface detail: "She takes you in her arms and speaks to you. She sobs and falls against you. Her hands slide over the cold, damp basement floor. Her fingers scrape the ground. She stays for 15 minutes and feels your body go cold."
It is implied that the narrator was close to "you" at one time, and we know that they met when "you" was 17 (he dies at 25). Yet the exact nature of the relationship is left vague enough that one hardly wonders how the narrator comes about information that would seem to be difficult-to-obtain - after his death "you's" wife discovers a secret set of poetry he had written - and implausibly intimate: "At night, your wife's sleep lent lucidity to your solitude." So open-ended is Suicide that we might conceive of its narrator as less as a friend of "you" than as an aspect of "you's" consciousness.
Whoever the voice belongs to, it's quite clear that the suicide is what gives order to its diffuse recollections. In one instance the narrator pointedly remarks on just how diffuse Suicide is, saying, "to portray your life in order would be absurd ... My brain resurrects you through stochastic details, like picking marbles out of a bag." Yet these protestations are undercut by the fact that, again and again, the narrator admits that the suicide has now imposed a narrative: "your death gave it [life] this coherence"; "your suicide has become the foundational act."
As the book progresses it elaborates these notions of suicide as an act that can bring order from the absurd, as though it could be a metaphor for many other things. Levé has been described as a follower of Oulipo - a school of writing originated in France wherein formal constraints are used to produce fictions - and Suicide frequently feels like a book written under the constraint: "write a book about suicide." This is not to diminish the prose's emotional intensity, nor the pain that Levé must have known as a suicidal individual. It is to say that Levé's fiction is not a mere story but a small, finely wrought work of art.
This is chiefly achieved through a remarkably precise use of language that allows the book's submerged concerns to rise to the surface. This style reaches an apotheosis in the aforementioned poetry found by "you's" wife, which is appended to Suicide as a coda. Broken up into groups of three lines, each line of verse is a simple, personal definition of how something acts on "me". The lines interrelate meaningfully within each triad:
The millennium enfolds me
The century situates me
The decade decorates me
These short poems demonstrate precisely what makes Levé's style so powerful: as one reads the poems, their rules of construction become evident, and these simple, flexible principles fuse seamlessly with the words themselves to imply relationships and subtle meanings. Levé's choice to place the poetry at the end is another brilliant example of his ability to yoke structure to meaning. As the tide of gently accusing "you were's" is answered by a series of "me's," the suicide is finally offered the opportunity to define himself. Yet though Levé has allowed his suicide to speak, he still remains in a subordinate role: he now makes himself subject to all the things that made up the world around him.
As with Suicide's extremely limpid prose, these triads feel almost transparent in their simplicity, each meticulously milled down and polished. Much credit is due to translator Steyn for producing language that carries with it an intense, original feel while maintaining the original's minimalist understatement. With Steyn's translation one gets a clear sense of how well-formed and original was Levé's artistic vision, how his work makes a virtue of its limits, exploiting its boundaries within the less abstract stuff of style, story, and structure to produce remarkably subtle, rich effects. It lets us see that Levé wrote not novels but fictions, little books closer to art objects than literature." - Scott Esposito
"There are books that can never escape the circumstances of their creation. Suicide is one of them. French artist and author Edouard Levé submitted the manuscript of his novel on October 5th, 2007; three days later his editor at Editions P.O.L. called to tell him that he was utterly captivated by it, and they arranged to meet on the 18th to discuss publication. The meeting was not to be. On the 15th, at the age of 42, Levé hanged himself in his Parisian apartment.
Cover featuring an untitled photograph from Edouard Levé's series "Rugby" (2003). (Image provided by the publisher, Gallimard/Folio.)
Edouard Levé was born on New Year’s Day, 1965. A business school graduate, he soon discovered that he had an artistic vocation and started painting in 1991. A few years later, after a lengthy trip to India, he destroyed most of his work and reinvented himself as a conceptual photographer. At the same time he began to write, under the influence of Raymond Roussel and other practitioners of “constrained writing” techniques. His first publication, Oeuvres (2002), is an imaginary catalogue raisonné, self-defined in its first entry: “1. A book describes the works the author has thought of, but never produced.” There follows a list of a further 532 conceptual projects. Later, Levé brought some of these to fruition. One was Amérique (2006), photographs of small American towns named after great world cities (Berlin, Delhi, Rio, etc.). These seemingly banal portrayals of the American heartland unsettle with their desolate streetscapes, tombstones and war memorials, empty skies. Portraits of residents are all composed with exactly the same mortuary-like poses and expressionless faces. Pornographie (2002), another project drawn from Oeuvres, is a photographic series of men and women wearing office-worker clothing but posed in stereotypical porn positions. In Rugby (2003), the blandly clothed participants are photographed in scrums or reaching out to catch an absent ball. Again and again, Levé’s photography plays the trick of reducing subjects to absurd archetypes, captured within a glacial geometric diorama.
Levé’s penultimate publication, Autoportrait (2005), is a disorientatingly “cubist” autobiography, consisting of 1,500 self-descriptive sentences, organised as non sequiturs. A long sentence on the second-last page describes a boyhood friend who, years later, “told his wife that he’d forgotten something in the house just as they were going out to play tennis; he went down to the cellar and shot himself in the head with a gun he’d carefully prepared.” Suicide begins with this same scenario. On hearing the gunshot, the wife runs back inside and discovers the body. The suicide has “left a comic book on the table, open on a double page. In the emotion of the moment, your wife leans on the table; the book topples over and closes on itself, before she could understand your last message.” (Levé’s body was also found by his wife, but he was more careful with his own last message.) The rest of the book reads something like Salinger’s Seymour: An Introduction written with the distance and economy of Camus’s L’Etranger – radiating the same clinical intensity as Levé’s photography. Addressing the unnamed suicide in the second person, the author recounts various episodes from his short life, not necessarily in chronological order (“I remember you haphazardly. My brain resurrects you by random detail, as one digs out balls from a bag.”).
Suicide seems to be a memoir, but after 20 or 30 pages, the reader begins to doubt. There are unlikely moments (the night where the protagonist talks for eight hours straight about Marx and Freud); even more suspicious is the way the author gets inside the suicide’s head, and recounts scenes he couldn’t possibly know about, especially as he doesn’t even claim to have been a close friend (“If you’d lived, you might have become a stranger to me. In death, you are alive, vivid.”). Eventually, it becomes clear that the protagonist is a fiction, a sort of double. Levé – whose only photographic self-portrait is of himself as twins – has split himself in two. There’s the suicidal “tu”, plus the shadowy, observing “je”, of which we learn almost nothing, although the very fact of the book tells us that he’s obsessed with his friend’s suicide. The doubling effect – the fact that, in Rimbaud’s words, “je est un autre” – crops up often in the book. Looking in the mirror while shaving, “you thought you saw a stranger… the absurdity of the situation made you think that you were someone else.” The protagonist walks over to look at a photograph of his wife. At that very moment he hears footsteps, and turns around to see his wife in the flesh. “It was certainly her, you recognised her, but did you know her? She was abstract, like the objects in the background.”
In a Sebald-like sequence, the protagonist spends a few days alone wandering around Bordeaux. His first port of call is a museum, which he has the impression of having visited “dozens of times in other towns”. It contains a 200-year-old panorama of the city stretched out along the banks of the Garonne. Later, walking by the actual Garonne, he realises that he “preferred the old town of the panorama, or even the future town that [his] mind constructed, to the real thing.” His random wandering takes a conceptual turn, when he decides that he’ll follow a pattern of taking a first left then a second right. Eventually he ends up at an art exhibition of austere architecture photography – not unlike, one imagines, Levé’s own Amérique or Angoisse series (Levé had a show in Bordeaux in 2006). Later, he muses that “seeing an island from a boat might be better than actually visiting it.”
Enigmatic suicide is a familiar literary theme. It’s one that Levé sets up only to knock down, since his protagonist is such an obvious case (introspective, evasive, passive in relationships, a perfectionist, dislikes social situations, has bipolar episodes). The enigma lies elsewhere. The fact of Levé’s own suicide irredeemably colours our understanding of his book. Even if Levé hadn’t perceived his suicide as an aesthetic, conceptual act, he must have realised that others would. It is, in any case, what the “je” of his novel thinks: “Your suicide was of a scandalous beauty,” he writes.
Suicide is not a fictionalised account of Levé’s death; in some respects it is a negative image of it. “You didn’t leave any letters for loved ones to explain your death,” he writes, although Levé himself reportedly did. Levé’s art and life nonetheless converge, fuse, and end brutally together. Ironically, Suicide represents a new departure for Levé: his previous books could be considered conceptual conceits, whereas Suicide is something else, a purely literary work. At the end of his life, Levé had by no means exhausted his art. In his last photographic project, Fictions, he abandons the play on established visual codes to portray mysterious, anguished scenes of ceremony, illustrations of a narrative we are never given.
Near the end of this slim work, the protagonist buys an elegant pair of black leather shoes in a second-hand shop. A few days later, at a political meeting, a middle-aged woman’s face collapses at the sight of them. “She was on the verge of tears, her lips trembled. She recognised the shoes you were wearing. She’d given them to her nephew, and her mother had sold them after his suicide.” The faux-memoir concludes with the words: “You didn’t like the selfishness of your suicide. But, on balance, death’s reprieve won out over the painful agitation of life.” There is a puzzling coda, a collection of tercets supposedly discovered in a drawer by the protagonist’s wife after his death. The last of which is as follows:
Happiness precedes me
Sadness follows me
Death awaits me." - Hugo Wilcken
"In the course of discussing Edouard Levé's final work, Suicide, it's probably impossible to forego mentioning the author's own suicide: On October 15, 2007, 10 days after submitting the manuscript to his editor, Levé killed himself. That Suicide was followed by suicide might be said to lend the slim, spare novel, which reflects on and reimagines the suicide of an unnamed friend of Levé 20 years earlier, an almost unbearable poignancy. The "you" of the work—ostensibly the long-dead, long-gone friend—becomes, uncannily, "I," becomes Levé himself. Other details shift too: It's the reader who's now left behind, to wonder and ponder, to consider the implacable reasoning of a man on the verge of self-appointed, self-inflicted extinction.
But Suicide is not a suicide note. (Anyway, as Jan Steyn, who has translated the novel from its original French, observes in his afterword, Levé is said to have left behind an actual note.) To treat it as one is to miss much of the point of a work that is, at once, love letter, conceptual portrait, philosophical investigation, and case study in philology. Levé was, first and foremost, a conceptual artist, and the concept that most thoroughly preoccupied him was difference, the Derridean insight that meaning is never identical with itself. In much of his work, Levé exploited our innocent belief in our own understanding, our easy acceptance of signification. In Amérique (2006), for example, Levé collected photographs of small American towns named after world capitals, each picture in the series building on the frisson of dissonance.
But perhaps the Levé work most akin to Suicide is Autoportrait (2005; the English translation is forthcoming from Dalkey Archive Press). In Autoportrait, Levé offers up, with no paragraph breaks, observations about himself interspersed with his opinions. Suicide also works as a form of portrait, presenting a series of memories, the narrator's recollections of his friend frequently serving as occasions for imaginative flights, attempts at interpretation, moments of reflection, a mode of biography. But in rather typical Levéian fashion, Suicide (and Levé's suicide) becomes an after-the-fact gloss on the earlier work, which begins with an intimation of the author's death by his own hand, both fulfilling its presentiment and demanding that we complete Levé's self-portrait, re-read and re-view it in light of deferred information. (We might go further with the conceit: In 2002, Levé published Œuvres, a catalogue of 533 works that did not yet exist; he went on to realize some of the described projects. Leve's suicide thus becomes a realization of the end he imagines for himself in his earlier writing.)
And yet it strikes me as misguided to treat Suicide as mere intellectual exercise. To do so is to acknowledge Levé's (considerable and formidable) intellectual accomplishment at the risk of slighting the work's aesthetic and emotion. (Of course, the novel's true merit lies in its refusal to separate the philosophic from the imaginative, the linguistic from the affective.) The details of the suicide are presented simply:
One Saturday in the month of August, you leave your home wearing your tennis gear, accompanied by your wife. In the middle of the garden you point out to her that you've forgotten your racket in the house. You go back to look for it, but instead of making your way toward the cupboard in the entryway where you normally keep it, you head down into the basement. Your wife doesn't notice this. She stays outside. The weather is fine. She's making the most of the sun. A few moments later she hears a gunshot. She rushes into the house, cries out your name, notices that the door to the stairway leading to the basement is open, goes down, and finds you there. You've put a bullet in your head with the rifle you had carefully prepared. On the table, you left a comic book open to a double-page spread. In the heat of the moment, your wife leans on the table; the book falls closed before she understands that this was your final message.
These details are excruciating, all the more so for their relentless clarity, their plainness. They speak to us much as the announcement of Septimus Warren Smith's suicide speaks to Clarissa Dalloway at the party she has spent all day preparing in Mrs. Dalloway. "Death was defiance," Mrs. Dalloway thinks. "Death was an attempt to communicate; people feeling the impossibility of reaching the centre which, mystically, evaded them; closeness drew apart; rapture faded, one was alone. There was an embrace in death." The narrator of Suicide envisions self-inflicted death in this way; his friend's suicide speaks directly to him, invites him to make sense of the act and the life that preceded it, to know his friend in death as he could never know him in life. "Only the living seem incoherent," the narrator remarks. "Death closes the series of events that constitutes their lives." But—and Clarissa Dalloway understands this much too—death is also an accusation. To understand suicide, to accept it, is to stand accused: of surviving, perhaps, of compromising, of deferring meaning. "But, all things considered," Suicide concludes, "the lull of death won out over life's painful commotion." The terrifying thing about the novel is that, as it ends, it's no longer about one man's demise, no longer about his friend's attempt to grapple with it; its "I" and its "you" suddenly comprehend us." - Yevgeniya Traps
"The narrator of Suicide addresses the book to the dead man he writes about, a friend who committed suicide twenty years earlier, at the age of twenty-five. The narrator gives no explanation why he writes this account now -- though he notes:
As my thoughts turn to you again, I do not suffer. I do not miss you. You are more present in memory than you were in the life we shared. If you were still alive, you would perhaps have become a stranger to me. Dead, you are as alive as you are vivid.
The narrator describes much of the dead man's life, though it is unclear how he has such detailed knowledge of some of the episodes he recounts. The picture that emerges nevertheless remains relatively vague: one gets a sense of the suicide's character, yet he remains something of a mystery (most obviously also in the fact that he remains unnamed).
The suicide wasn't a particularly social person, and generally wandered rather aimlessly (rather than being goal-oriented) -- while dreaming of knowing ahead of time what was going to happen next, so as to be able to prepare for what lay ahead. He did wind up married, but there's not much about this woman in his life ("When the two of you got married, you and I stopped seeing each other") -- though he staged the suicide carefully in such a way that she would be the one to find him. He experimented with antidepressants, but they didn't do much for him. Despite some obvious life-issues -- a general malaise and lack of focus -- he did not give the appearance of being dangerously suicidal; indeed, one of his projects was designing his own tomb (typically: "It would not be a family tomb: you would occupy it alone"), with birth- and death-date already hewn in the black marble, and the age of his death set at eighty-five (suggesting that the plan to off himself at twenty-five certainly wasn't always set in stone).
In part, the book as a whole is an attempt to get to the root of the act, yet the narrator does not muse too much about the why. Even the odd clues -- the double-spread of a comic book left open at the scene which was his "final message" - remain under-explored.
Eventually the narrator concludes:
Are there good reasons for committing suicide ? Those who survived you asked themselves these questions; they will not find answers.
But the narrator doesn't seem that concerned about finding a 'good' (or other) reason for the act; he wonders a little, but for the most part focuses on what's left of the dead man, the memories and image of him he retains, twenty years after the fact. And he notes: "Your suicide makes the lives of those who outlive you more intense."
The narrator's limited perspective and the unanswered questions -- including why he chooses to write this account twenty years after the fact -- make for an intriguing if incomplete (and subjective) portrait of a man who chose to exit early in his life. Seen simply as such, Suicide is a solid if not entirely satisfying life- and death-portrait.
Of course, it can't simply be seen as such.
Clearly, the narrator does see suicide as an immortalizing act: "Dead, you are as alive as you are vivid", he wrote, and: "Your suicide makes the lives of those who outlive you more intense." And so on. No need to wait another six decades to fulfill the tomb-prophecy -- how much easier just to get it over with immediately.
This attitude presumably reflects Levé's own, as Levé made a similar choice, albeit at a considerably later stage in life, offing himself at age forty-two. But Suicide is inextricably bound together with Levé's own suicide: he did himself in shortly after completing the manuscript, apparently waiting only until his editor confirmed that it had been accepted for publication.
Suicide hardly reads like a suicide note, yet given its title and the circumstances it's hard not to see it as such. Certainly, it allows Levé to apologize and explain very publicly that, for example:
This selfishness of your suicide displeased you. But, all things considered, the lull of death won out over life's painful commotion.
There's an appealing finality and absoluteness to suicide, making it a tempting ultimate (as it is, by definition) act for the artist. However, going about it as Levé did does, in this cynical age, also reek of a desperate (if hardly original) publicity-stunt; certainly by following Suicide so closely with suicide he irremediably attached a foul, foul stench to this work.
Levé apparently had little faith in his art -- unwilling to allow it to stand on its own, insisting on not just overshadowing it (by eventually killing himself) but essentially obliterating it (by immediately killing himself, thus permanently tainting the work and making it impossible to read it in any way independently of the author and his act). Ironically, the impulse to do so seems to arise out of his misguided hopes for immortality: it's hard not see him having committed these acts (Suicide ! suicide !) in this close sequence specifically in the hope of finding that, like his protagonist: "Dead, you are as alive as you are vivid" (since he understands that independently neither would have made near as much of an impression and he and his art would have suffered the usual fate of artists and art, fading quickly and easily from memory)." - M. A. Orthofer
"Suicide is packaged as directly as pornography. Its title leaves no room for ambiguity. Its marketing holds out the promise of voyeurism. The text on the back cover dictates how the novel will be consumed: "Edouard Levé delivered the manuscript for his final book . . . just a few days before he took his own life. Suicide is not, then, simply another novel – it is, in a sense, the author's own oblique, public suicide note . . ."
In his 42 years (1965-2007), Levé accomplished a considerable amount, publishing four books of prose and three of photography. His work in each medium is conspicuously conceptual. For example, Oeuvres (2002) is an assemblage of 533 proposals for different artistic projects, while Autoportrait (2005), a continuous block of autobiographical statements, has been likened to a form of literary cubism. On the photography side, Levé's work is characterised in part by a taste for expressing the sensational in mundane terms – appending famous names to portraits of everyday people, staging his subjects in mock-pornographic configurations while fully clothed in business attire, and so on.
Suicide shows another side of the French artist's interest in transfixing phenomena. Since suicide normally takes place behind a curtain of privacy even more exclusionary than the one reserved for sex, its ability to drum up interest is assured. As the narrator of the novel remarks, "I've never heard a single person, since your death, tell your life story starting at the beginning. Your suicide has become the foundational act." The "you" of this statement refers to the narrator's friend, who took his life 20 years ago, at the age of 25. In so doing, he conferred upon it a grim symmetry – his birthday being 25 December.
Aside from offering up elliptical remarks as to the reasoning behind his friend's suicide ("You died because you searched for happiness at the risk of finding the void"), the narrator devotes his attention mainly towards theorising upon the significance of his action. Early on he declares: "Your suicide was the most important thing you ever said." There are a number of ironies to this statement. For one, its ponderous nature actually works to freight the narrator's other recollections, of his friend's quotidian activities, with a surplus of ominous meaning. What's more, whatever significance the departed wished to attach to his death was made uncertain when his wife accidently closed the comic book that he'd left open for her to find. The unsettling comedy continues: "Your father bought dozens of copies . . . He came to know the text and the images of this book by heart; this was not at all like him, but he ended up identifying with the comic."
At another point, the narrator avows: "You don't make me sad, but solemn . . . I take advantage on your behalf of things you can no longer experience. Dead, you make me more alive." Nestled within that brief passage is the basis of the book's muted sense of hope.
If this irony-laden book contains a message to the reader it may well be this: "You suffered real life in its continuous stream, but you controlled the flow of fictional life by reading at your own rhythm . . . As a reader, you had the power of a god: time submitted to you." If one were to substitute "reading" and "reader" with "creating" and "creator" one might conclude that it's possible to read Suicide not simply as a veiled cri de coeur by a man looking to air the messy circumstances for which he took his life, but as a controlled work of art by a conceptual artist who wanted to leave us with a lasting document from which we might, paradoxically, muster the strength to carry on." - Christopher Byrd
"Suicide by Edouard Levé tells two intertwined stories. In one, a young man has killed himself and a friend meditates on the dead man's life. In the other, a young author has killed himself, but not before writing a novel in which a young man has killed himself and a friend meditates on the dead man's life. Part of what makes the experience of reading Suicide so singular is that the young author in question is Edouard Levé himself: Ten days after handing in his manuscript, Levé hanged himself, at age forty-two. It is all but impossible when reading, then, not to be constantly aware that Levé was about to kill himself when he was writing and did kill himself soon after he stopped—facts proclaimed both in the novel's publicity materials and in the translator's afterword, not to mention by the media frenzy around the book in France.
Suicide, which has been translated into English by Jan Steyn, probably could have functioned successfully as a work of literature without the reader's knowing about Leve's fate. The narrator's associative ruminations on his unnamed friend's life are filled with haunting, strangely hopeful observations that accumulate into a moving treatise on the territory of life, literature, and death. "Only the living seem incoherent," he speculates at one point. "Death closes the series of events that constitute their lives. So we resign ourselves to finding a meaning for them." Meanwhile, the sustained second-person address—"One Saturday in the month of August, you leave your home wearing your tennis gear, accompanied by your wife"—places the reader uncomfortably, provocatively, in the shoes of someone who is about to end his life. The reference to the opening of Italo Calvino's If on a Winter's Night a Traveler, which also employs the second person and also blurs the line between reader and character to thought-provoking effect, is hard to miss. The possibility that the narrator, in addressing his unnamed friend (with whom the reader has become identified), is in fact addressing himself, and so is drafting a kind of suicide note, adds another fascinating, dizzying layer to the text. The many blanks surrounding the precise nature of the relationship between the narrator and his former friend further, interestingly, accentuate these effects.
But this is a novel that does not function on its merits alone, and the floor falls out from under us entirely when we recall how Levé—who shared numerous autobiographical points in common with the suicide in the novel—chose to end his days. Suicide is both fiction and final, nonfictional statement, both novel and memoir. It is we, as readers and participants, who stand at the center of these two mirrors hung opposite each other and find the author infinitely, diminishingly multiplied. Though we'll probably never know whether Levé—who in addition to being a writer was a successful photographer with an interest in conceptual art—killed himself to bring his grim metafiction full circle, it is all but impossible not to read his haunting Suicide in this troubling light." - Laird Hunt
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