Edouard Levé delivered the manuscript for his final book, Suicide, just a few days before he took his own life.
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.
Suicide (French Literature Series)
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Editorial Reviews
From Publishers Weekly
The suicide of a childhood friend—addressed here as "you"—elicits a reflective and dignified expression of wondering and grief in this last work by artist and writer Levé (1965–2007), who finished this novel 10 days before killing himself. The narrator describes his friend as a solitary, taciturn character who smoked American cigarettes, studied economics, played the drums in rock bands, and kept largely to himself. Subtle, troubling details begin to emerge: feeling increasingly "ill adapted to the world," the friend stops traveling and obsesses over his own death, designing his own tomb and growing despondent, seized by a kind of resignation. In the end, having left the house with his wife to attend a tennis date, he returns by himself, heads to the basement, and blows his head off. Why did he do it? the author wonders. Leve's slender narrative possesses a near-clinical precision of detail, which functions as both a funeral oration and the chilling foretelling of his own death. (Apr.)
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(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Review
Suicide is not a fictionalized 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. (Hugo Wilcken - The Berlin Review of Books )
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3 of 3 people found the following review helpful
By J.
Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase
Being a survivor of suicide, brother in law and a dear friend, I found this book to be a perfect insight into the mind of the grieving of suicide, the flashes of memory and its investigative narrative lend to it a stunning and often relateable quality. My only complaint is that I cannot read it in the original french but this translation is so well written I would have believed it was written in English proper.
It is not a standard book, there are no chapters and it has a flowing narrative. I would recommend to my most literate friends and all those I know who have walked the path of the narrator.
It is not a standard book, there are no chapters and it has a flowing narrative. I would recommend to my most literate friends and all those I know who have walked the path of the narrator.
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
I recently heard Jan Steyn read an excerpt from his elegant translation of Leve's book. It reminded me of Robert Pinget's Passacaglia in some respects, which is really the only reason why I am posting this comment. Pinget, in my opinion, is a major French avante garde writer who is still largely unknown.
By Ziwei
Format:Paperback
it's a great book. it's easy reading. not too long. love the author.
suidcide (french literature series) edouard leve. f
suidcide (french literature series) edouard leve. f
4 of 7 people found the following review helpful
By quinceyquick
Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase
Suicide is supposed to be inspired or influenced by the Oulipo, the same same group that Georges Perec belongs to. Perec's Life: A User's Manual being one of the major achievements from that literary band. Suicide does read a lot like Life: A User's Manual in that we start out with some well-defined premise and we work around it. In Life: A User's Manual, we're given 100 rooms to explore in a building. In Suicide, we're given an investigation into a dead character, written in second person with a first person narrative. Both stories are kind of charming, but they both make me wonder why they were not just condensed into short story form.
I think reading the afterword before reading the text proper would ground the reader a lot in what's going on. Suicide was submitted just 10 days before Leve committed suicide himself, and as such, the book is tentatively read as a kind of literary suicide note in itself (though the book can be read without this context as well).
The book essentially picks a bunch of little pockets of the main character's life, which pockets are interspersed with how the main character's death makes the narrator feel a more special connection to the main character. The book doesn't have a plot in the conventional sense, nor does it reach any kind of conclusion, nor do its characters really develop in any really big way (of course, the only character the reader can really follow is the main character, the one who committed suicide). It's for this reason that I give the book a mediocre score. Because this is very much one of those books that is meant to be artsy, that's meant to break boundaries or be interpreted. It can be read without looking for artistic qualities, but taking the book at face value makes it thin and unsatisfying.... Read more ›
I think reading the afterword before reading the text proper would ground the reader a lot in what's going on. Suicide was submitted just 10 days before Leve committed suicide himself, and as such, the book is tentatively read as a kind of literary suicide note in itself (though the book can be read without this context as well).
The book essentially picks a bunch of little pockets of the main character's life, which pockets are interspersed with how the main character's death makes the narrator feel a more special connection to the main character. The book doesn't have a plot in the conventional sense, nor does it reach any kind of conclusion, nor do its characters really develop in any really big way (of course, the only character the reader can really follow is the main character, the one who committed suicide). It's for this reason that I give the book a mediocre score. Because this is very much one of those books that is meant to be artsy, that's meant to break boundaries or be interpreted. It can be read without looking for artistic qualities, but taking the book at face value makes it thin and unsatisfying.... Read more ›
2 of 8 people found the following review helpful
By Ferdino
Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase
If you are a fan of existentialism and expect to find in Suicide something similar to what you have liked in the likes of Camus, then you will be deeply disappointed. Nothing philosophically profound and new will be found in this small book. It is just a compilation of a lot of boring details from the life of someone who has committed suicide, narrated by another person: "He went to the coffee shop, he liked the dog he saw there, and then went to the adjacent bookstore. No books were on sale..." And this stuff keeps going and going. Of course, some dark thoughts on life and suicide are thrown in too. But dark only in the sense of someone clinically depressed, and not in the sense of a metaphysical angst or anguish over life. More than once, you get the feeling that you wish the author and/or his friend had taken (or continued to take) their medication, which might have saved their lives. None of this is of course meant to belittle the gravity of clinical depression. Not at all. It is just that I had expected something more than the diary of a person who is clinically depressed and who has nothing interesting to add to the topic of his book. Yes, it is a novel and not a philosophical treatise. But then again, some of the best novels are the kind that give you both, and sometimes even in an entertaining way. Suicide is not such a book. After finishing it, I was left wondering if it would have been published in the U.S. had its author not committed suicide. I don't think so. So in a non-trivial sense, the publishers of the book are exploiting his tragedy for monetary gain. Judged on merit alone, they would have never green-lighted it.
