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Suicide

4.06 of 5 stars 4.06 · rating details · 489 ratings · 78 reviews

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...more

Paperback, 128 pages

Published April 14th 2011 by Dalkey Archive Press (first published 2008)

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Oct 25, 2011 David rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: france

Suicide is a brief novel in which the narrator itemizes selected fragmentary details of the life (and death) of a friend who killed himself some twenty years before; these details vary from the particular and anecdotal to the abstract and philosophical. What results is a meandering archeology of suicide itself, both as an individualistic act and as a general phenomenon. The text itself remains incomplete, however, without its necessary epilogue: the author Edouard Levé committed suicide only ten...more Suicide is a brief novel in which the narrator itemizes selected fragmentary details of the life (and death) of a friend who killed himself some twenty years before; these details vary from the particular and anecdotal to the abstract and philosophical. What results is a meandering archeology of suicide itself, both as an individualistic act and as a general phenomenon. The text itself remains incomplete, however, without its necessary epilogue: the author Edouard Levé committed suicide only ten days after he submitted the novel to his publisher.

Without a doubt, Suicide is irrevocably modified by the knowledge of the author's suicide. The art of Edouard Levé's novel becomes thereby inextricably bound to the art of Edouard Levé's death (because that's what suicide is—the art of death—death deprived of its natural agency and revised to the status of act, performance, object). As readers, we are unlikely to believe that the novel and the act are unrelated phenomena; the parity and significance are too insistent to admit of the possibility that Levé never considered suicide until after the novel was finished. Instead, we must, by the very nature of the juxtaposition, interpret the two as intended corollaries. Levé's death completes the novel in the same way that his death completes his life. That is, death not only completes and extinguishes—but it also augments and rewrites whatever preceded it.

Only the living seem incoherent. Death closes the series of events that constitutes their lives. So we resign ourselves to finding a meaning for them. To refuse them this would amount to accepting that a life, and thus life itself, is absurd. Yours had not yet attained the coherence of things done. Your death gave it this coherence.

The way in which you quit it rewrote the story of your life in a negative form. Those who knew you reread each of your acts in light of your last... When you are spoken of, it begins with recounting your death, before going back to explain it. Isn't it peculiar how this final gesture inverts your biography? 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...

Likewise, the author's suicide has become the foundational act of Edouard Levé's novel called Suicide. The two are now inseparable. The novel has graduated from the idle musings of a speculator in death to a prologue to the act itself. Levé has gone where we have yet to go, and he has done so as an act of will. His art is not necessarily strengthened, per se, by its efficacy, but it is certainly changed. It becomes a new thing. How would readers feel about the novel Suicide if its author were still alive? Would the words be less meaningful? Would the content be more ethical?

Suicide is unquestionably one of the most radical works of art. The artist destroys himself. The novel is the artifact. We are left to fill in the gaps between one act and the other.(less)

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Jul 15, 2012 knig rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: 2012

Leve, as the whole world and his goat knows, delivered the manuscript of Suicide to his publishers and committed suicide ten days later, thus ensuring immediate and spectacular (posthumous) literary canonisation.

Primarily a photographer, Leve likes a certain formal distance in subject -object interaction, a reserved detachment which works well with his photography and yields mixed results in Suicide.

In a series of photo portraits under the thema of pornography, Leve does this:

description

and this

Clothed por...more

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Mar 04, 2013 Hadrian rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: fiction, french

You will write this book review about Suicide.

You will want it to be concise. You will want it to cut and draw blood from whoever finds it.

You have heard vaguely interesting things about it, but tried desperately to forget them as you opened the pages, avoiding the temptation of the back cover.

Although you often enjoyed working in noisy crowded places, here you feel very cold and distant, not from the flashing lights nor the conversation of your neighbors. Your fingers are stiff. You glimpse pa...more

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Oct 06, 2012 Vilma rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: dalkey, my-fave-4-star-books

It seems impossible to discuss Edouard Levés Suicide without discussing Edouard Levés suicide, and indeed I am not sure it was such a smart move to write as a blurb "Edouard Levé delivered the manuscript for his final book, Suicide, just a few days before he took his own life." Or maybe it doesnt matter, those who are interested in this small novel will most likely know about it anyway before finally reading the book. But I could not help myself to go to this few lines over and over again, stop...more It seems impossible to discuss Edouard Levés Suicide without discussing Edouard Levés suicide, and indeed I am not sure it was such a smart move to write as a blurb "Edouard Levé delivered the manuscript for his final book, Suicide, just a few days before he took his own life." Or maybe it doesnt matter, those who are interested in this small novel will most likely know about it anyway before finally reading the book. But I could not help myself to go to this few lines over and over again, stop the reading itself for a minute just to read them once more, to take a deep breath, and go back where I was in the text.

Autobiography or autofiction? That is the question but I have not really an answer yet. The novel, and a novel it is, can be seen as a fragmented piecemeal that will implode in making his own rules and its own identity. An identity that appears to be impulsive, incoherent and with moments of madness.

A suicide is portrayed, a friend of the author who took his own life 20 years earlier but I as a reader does not even know his name. Suicide does not question the act itself but it aims to recreate the being who has decided to end his own life. An "I", we sense is the author, adresses a "You", the reader, me, but also the suicidal friend who could also be the author, Levé, himself.

It suggests different times of a short life without any moral judgment or simplistic psychological explanations. The author/narrator/spectator merely narrates, set times, take snapshots and recalls the absent: the "you", when "we" were collecting claims without any apparent order or a will of completness of a fragile life that once was but not is anymore. It is a re-creation, an attempt to cope with the loss by juxtaposing atttitudes, reflections and details, placed one behind the other revived through memory.

Some themes are resurfacing several times in the story. An ultimate gesture of anomie, a sense of not belonging to the world and the question of what one does on this earth, what is the exact role one has. There is also a fear of decay, of old age which might explain the desire to live fast and die young while being frightend but still fascinated by death. Suicide seems like an obsessive, anxious way of trying to outsmart the (negative) end that awaits one.

Condemned as a social inmorality the voluntary death is (still) very much a taboo subject. One of moral reprobation but with a morbid fascination. As with many other things literature is not detached from the real world. It seems impossible to determine how much Edouard Levé was in his writing inspired by his own life, his own problems and obsessions. Nevertheless its a kind of testimony, and in parts at least, a farewell letter.

(Maybe) it is a self-portrait, a projection of his own experiences and concerns as an artist which are inextricably mixed with memories and ideas of the absent. Obviously interested in the theme of the double and his split it leads a "you" into a novel to a process of depersonalization that paradoxically leads to a progessive identification. There is a mismatch of the otherness and of duplication, a conceptual proposal of a definition of a setback identity. In mirrorlike reflections it is a game on the minutiae, of what shapes our entire existence of the transient and the accidental.

The book ends with a series of triplets, found in the office of Levé by his wife:

Happiness precedes me
Sadness follows me
Deaths awaits me(less)

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Apr 26, 2011 Eddie Watkins rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Death was never such a clean reading pleasure.

Absolute despair is the unspoken center of this novel. Radiating around it are crisply clinical depictions and descriptions of disconnected experiences haunted by this despair (with suicide as foreknowledge).

Despair is an intimate stranger studied with cold obliquity.

Total cool never penetrated so deeply.

A chill runs through the reader.

Suicide has never been so exhilarating; so cold, so paradoxically warming.

Suicide as a way to preserve one's clarit...more

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Jul 12, 2012 Rasyidah Othman rated it 4 of 5 stars

Pembacaan satu hari setengah pronto. Tak terkejut kalau diri sendiri akan tulis Suicide II.

Pembacaan yang dekat dihati.

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May 10, 2011 Colin Miller rated it 2 of 5 stars

Shelves: short-stories-novellas

Édouard Levé’s Suicide is a character study that will inevitably be known more for the story outside of the book.

The novella opens with a powerful opening paragraph about the suicide of a friend that occurred 20 years earlier. There’s just one caveat: Édouard Levé committed suicide himself just 10 days after turning in the manuscript, so it is, in a way, his long form suicide note. After the initial plot point, there’s really little else that happens in the 123-page read. It’s simply a collectio...more Édouard Levé’s Suicide is a character study that will inevitably be known more for the story outside of the book.

The novella opens with a powerful opening paragraph about the suicide of a friend that occurred 20 years earlier. There’s just one caveat: Édouard Levé committed suicide himself just 10 days after turning in the manuscript, so it is, in a way, his long form suicide note. After the initial plot point, there’s really little else that happens in the 123-page read. It’s simply a collection of random memories about this friend (which is acknowledged in the text as pulling marbles out of bag blind and describing what you’ve got), making it one big character study. Thing is though, the more details an author gives, the less detail there is to fill in inside the reader’s mind, so the friend in Suicide often feels like random facts strewn together rather than someone you know.

The novella is written in second person. While this usually feels like a forced stylistic move in other works, the technique excels in Suicide, as it reads like a eulogy to the deceased. There are only two chapters: The first 100 pages of prose that (impressively) just keeps flowing on with details about the friend—though I’ll say the more drawn-out examples in the latter-half are superior—and the final section that is one big three-line stanza poem written by the deceased (discovered by his wife after his death). While there were many interesting points in those first 100 pages—like how a suicide inverts your biography, making it come first when people talk about you—the book doesn’t move (how can it when it’s about when someone dropped out of your life for good?), and the repetitive poetry section feels like it’s missing the mark, too. Overall, as appreciative as I am over the delicate nature of Levé’s French tone, there just isn’t enough here.

I imagine Levé could’ve written Suicide to be unrelatable, like he was unrelatable to the world, making it more about the concept than the execution, but that’s pure speculation on my part. The fact that the friend in the novel committed suicide at 25 and then is remembered 20 years later makes me think that Levé, who committed suicide at 42, was saying he should have hanged himself far earlier, but again, that’s morbid speculation. Inevitably, I am one more reader guilty of supporting a dead artist’s farewell piece than a living artist’s current work. When I first heard about Suicide, I felt compelled to pick it up immediately and found something eerie in the cover. In the end though, it was one of those reads that I wanted to enjoy, especially given the story outside the book, but there just wasn’t enough on the page. Sorry, Édouard Levé, I still wish better for you. Two stars.
(less)

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May 08, 2011 Jim Coughenour rated it 1 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: bleakfiction, european-fiction, experimental

Oulipo, the movement founded in 1960 by a group of French writers committed to the creation of literature using constrained writing techniques, produced works generally more interesting in conception than in execution – novels composed without the letter "e"; the same trivial scene narrated in multiple styles; etc. Edouard Levé's Suicide takes the experiment to its annihilating limit. A short book composed as a meditation to a friend who killed himself, it instantiates itself as a suicide note....more

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Jul 27, 2011 Alex V. rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

A hypnotic book about that line between deciding to live and deciding not to, and also those lines we mark around what is lived in a life, SUICIDE's river-runs-through-it of a friend's life after a self-inflicted death, narrator addressing the dead friend in second person, is diverted into an unavoidable forensic direction by the author's own suicide shortly after delivering the manuscript. Which is a bummer; not because Levé took himself across the line - the unwavering steadiness in tone seems...more A hypnotic book about that line between deciding to live and deciding not to, and also those lines we mark around what is lived in a life, SUICIDE's river-runs-through-it of a friend's life after a self-inflicted death, narrator addressing the dead friend in second person, is diverted into an unavoidable forensic direction by the author's own suicide shortly after delivering the manuscript. Which is a bummer; not because Levé took himself across the line - the unwavering steadiness in tone seems to say the author was resolved with his decision - but because you cannot separate the book from it, and you spend the book trying to piece together the life of the author with in the outline of his subject's demise.

I think the book does a tremendous job underscoring the fact that one's life is much bigger than one's death, all that cataloguing of what the "you" in the book did. I like how it ends on a poem listing off how things affect "me" as if to say "you" and "me" are indistinguishable only in the fact that our lines are drawn differently, our overlapping timelines begin arbitrarily and end decisively at different points. We are all of the same ether to which we eventually return.

I'm morbid and goth enough to even groove a little on the shadow cast across it by the author's passing, lending the book a cruel humor, a conceptual punch to the kidneys, but that also ruins it a little. Life is like that, I guess; a tidy little system that gets mucked up by our living it. In saying that the author's suicide ruins his book about suicide, is that a bigger disservice to the author or the book?

I kept thinking back to Dazai's NO LONGER HUMAN, a somewhat similar novel that wallowed in the author's ennui-driven cruelty towards others, and Artaud's "Van Gogh: The Man Suicided by Society", an exploration of how a true, wild human is ultimately failed by a systematic world, but really, I might as well tack in the lyric sheet for Nirvana's IN UTERO to my little bibliography here. We gotta know. Levé's narrator is asking his dead friend what we want to now ask Levé. Suicide inevitably leads the living to pore over "why" because maybe the base impulse of living is avoiding the asking "why not?" when we can only answer either of those questions for ourselves.(less)

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Oct 23, 2012 Hanif added it

Shelves: english

penulis seolah-olah menulis suicide note dengan sebuah fiksyen alter ego. menikmati Suicide terasa seperti menghabiskan semangkuk Ratatouille yang secukup rasa, dimasak oleh seorang kawan sebelum dia mengambil keputusan memasukkan revolver ke dalam mulut lalu melepaskan tembakan.

kalau kau anggap buku ini dipenuhi curhat yang sarat dengan depresi sebagaimana klise seorang yang tidak gembira dengan hidup, kau patut buang anggapan itu jauh-jauh.

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Oct 02, 2012 Chris rated it 3 of 5 stars

I doubt many come to this novella not knowing the backstory. Of course, I got caught up in the same tractor beam. I picked this up admittedly expecting it to break my heart. Just a little bit. Instead its resonance was more a numbness.

More obituary than eulogy, the narrative is a series of non sequitur anecdotes that swing between the clinically mundane and penetratingly profound (both probably more suitable to a life and its death than elevated emotion or drama.) Yet if it weren’t for the unfo...more

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Oct 04, 2011 M. rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: 2011, fiction, favorites, own

In the constant interstices of urban nomadism, it’s hard to feel like you’re doing anything but travelling. Pummeling towards something: maybe death, maybe the future, maybe in moments of sentimental jouissance, “life,” whatever. By “you” I mean “I,” of course, let’s not get confused quite yet. Life seems like you’re moving forward and then your best friend dies: space is filled with static, it’s OK. I mean, you know, it’s OK.

When I was employed I sat at my office desk and read Édouard Levé’s “W...more

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Jun 06, 2011 Kasandra rated it 3 of 5 stars

This almost got 4 stars due to the intriguing poem which ends the novel. However, both the speaker and the dead friend he speaks of come across as curiously unemotional and flatly unsympathetic personages (not because they are ugly, but because there is just no emotional flavor to the series of stories/anecdotes/ruminations, they feel flat, like writing exercises, and overly analytical, not at all human in any recognizable sense). The author committed suicide 10 days after delivering this manusc...more

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Jul 11, 2011 Eugene rated it 2 of 5 stars

not purely fiction but located somewhere between death porn, a bipolar's daybook, and a conceptual suicide note, levé's novel -- which is inseparable from its author's biography -- seems less a treatise on suicide than a portrait of an elegant but somehow dull faculty. (or dulled? the translator's afterword calls levé's aesthetic habitually "austere.") the narrator notes moments of the pedestrian sublime or accounts for days with gestures toward the philosophical, but somehow never does his sens...more

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Oct 03, 2012 Luc Abdullah added it

Shelves: fiction, english

My favorite book, given by a companion--a brother.

----

Jangan percaya pada puji-pujian yang telah aku sebarkan untuk kau. Barangkali ia untuk lubang peluru di kepalamu, mungkin juga untuk isterimu yang telah kau tinggalkan keseorangan, mungkin juga untuk diri aku sendiri yang tidak mengetahui jawapan tentang kematian seperti kau. Apakah pasca-reaksi yang akan berlaku sekiranya orang yang telah menuliskan perihal kau masih hidup? Apakah ia akan merubah persepsi pembaca lainnya tentang perihal kau?...more

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Dec 23, 2010 Jim is currently reading it · review of another edition

Shelves: small-press

One of the most gripping first paragraphs I've read in ages:

"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 outisde. The weather is fine. She's...more

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Nov 13, 2012 Courtnee rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Life has taken a terrible turn. You are overwhelmed. You don’t think you can make it through another trial or tribulation. “Life sucks!” you declare, slamming your door. In your fit of frustration, you fling all of your papers and books off of your desk; you kick over a nightstand; you destroy everything in your path. Your vision is blurry from the tears welling up in a translucent curtain over your eyes. You can’t take it anymore. Not in the way of the fitful teenager bubbling over with rebelli...more Life has taken a terrible turn. You are overwhelmed. You don’t think you can make it through another trial or tribulation. “Life sucks!” you declare, slamming your door. In your fit of frustration, you fling all of your papers and books off of your desk; you kick over a nightstand; you destroy everything in your path. Your vision is blurry from the tears welling up in a translucent curtain over your eyes. You can’t take it anymore. Not in the way of the fitful teenager bubbling over with rebellion and angst. No. You need out. Now.

Suicide. Every person alive today has heard the word that causes people to cringe or shudder. Maybe you think of a certain person, I know I do. Certain people, really. In Edouard Levé’s novel Suicide, the Frenchman describes the suicide of a friend. Levé doesn't name said friend, leaving the book to address the person as “you.” “Your” suicide, “your” wife, “you” did this, “you” lived to twenty-five years. Like recounting random memories, Levé paints a picture of “you” and all of the little quirks that made “you” “you.” It was a new thing for me to experience. I rarely stumble upon books written in the second person narration, but I grew accustomed to it. Though, it was a tad creepy; Levé would illustrate actions and habits of “you” that made me pause and wonder just how Levé knew such a thing about me.

The novel starts as if I was reading about someone else, but it soon becomes too detailed and deep that I began to question who we were really talking about. Levé’s writing takes a turn in the direction of autobiography or journal. There has, in fact, been many speculations over whether or not Suicide is an autobiographical piece, seeing as how Levé committed suicide just ten days after handing Suicide over to his publisher. I felt intrusive reading the book after I realized how...intimate it was.

Reading a novel knowing it contains the last words someone wrote lends a whole new level of intimacy. Books are intimate objects in themselves; they open readers to a whole new world, letting the reader into the mind of the author. But with Suicide, you feel closer to the author, or, at least, I did. I learned to pity the author, to sympathize and empathize with him. The revelation would crash over me like a wave, then slowly recede to the back of my mind as I continued on, only for it to come back and break over my head more like a tsunami tide and repeat the process.

Some people may believe that suicide is rare. According to the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention (AFSP) 38,364 deaths were reported as suicide in the United States in 2010 alone. Imagine all the deaths unreported. Imagine all the deaths in France, Spain, Brazil, Australia, everywhere. Suicide is not rare. For those who haven’t experienced the grief of knowing someone who commit suicide, be grateful. The emotions that you experience are suffocating. You don’t know what is real anymore. You walk through a haze for a while—maybe even forever. It is never an experience I would dare wish upon another. But imagine the feelings of the one who left everyone behind. How terrible did they feel? Why would they do something so permanent? What was the cause of all their anguish and turmoil?

Suicide is real. Every 13.7 seconds in the United States, a person dies by their own hand. It’s something we all need to fight to prevent. No one should feel such an overwhelming amount of despair that they resort to the most drastic measure of all. No one. (less)

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Jul 26, 2011 Simon Arnall rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: world-fiction

This book tells of a narrator who is speaking of the life of a friend (only known as "you") who committed suicide 20 years earlier. The novel is an exploration of "you"'s life giving us some possible insights as to why he may have done such a thing.

As is posited in the afterword it is impossible to not have your perception of this novella tainted by the knowledge that the author committed suicide 10 days after submitting this book. It is tempting to see him in the character of "you" basically tu...more

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Aug 06, 2012 Juan rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

This book is put together with incredible truthfulness and transparency. These words are sewn together so well with metaphor and analogy it only magnifies the experience described. The absurdity of reality is analyzed and so apparent, unavoidable even.

I was constantly reminded of Sartre's 'Le' Nausee', my fascination with death and the familiar introverted introspection and the difficulty of outward interaction. This seems to be a recurring theme in my library and daily life.

' Only the living s...more

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Jul 01, 2011 Aaron Kent rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: 2011

It's a bit eerie to read this considering it's author, several days after the manuscripts completion, killed himself. There are some moments, and I think the most interesting part of this book is the author's attempt to venture some guess's as to why the character in the novel chooses to end his life. (I'd guess this the number one question which revolves around any suicide.) The curious part to me is, although we might designate Leve as a "pro" in regards to the subject matter, I feel that even...more

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Apr 16, 2013 K. Euler rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: translated-works, modern-fiction

Powerful and brave, it opens with: "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 su...more

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May 21, 2012 Derek rated it 4 of 5 stars

discussed here: http://www.5cense.com/12/last_undone.htm

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Aug 06, 2012 Vincent rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

I admit that I read this book partially because it is called Suicide and the author killed himself 10 days after handing off the manuscript to his publisher. I also admit that, despite my best efforts to maintain the proper distance between artist and art, this biographical knowledge did inform my initial reading. Soon it became easy to stop speculating on what might have contributed to Leve's early demise and just read the damn thing. The subject matter may not be for all, but there are much wo...more

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Oct 09, 2012 Jim Elkins rated it 1 of 5 stars

Shelves: french

Edouard Lev� killed himself shortly after delivering the manuscript of this book to the publisher, and that fact has overrun the critical reception. The book provides a good test case for the possibility of detaching biography from the experience of fiction: it isn't possible to read the book without continuously jumping out of the fictional setting and wondering about the actual author; but at the same time it is possible to see through the autobiography to something of the book itself. Two thi...more Edouard Lev� killed himself shortly after delivering the manuscript of this book to the publisher, and that fact has overrun the critical reception. The book provides a good test case for the possibility of detaching biography from the experience of fiction: it isn't possible to read the book without continuously jumping out of the fictional setting and wondering about the actual author; but at the same time it is possible to see through the autobiography to something of the book itself. Two things in particular strike me as properties of the book that resist the autobiographical.[return][return]First there's the strange relationship between the narrator (a man who commits suicide, addressed as "you" throughout the book) and his wife. In the fictional frame, the wife isn't known to the narrator. He speculates about her once, and he reports, briefly, on exchanges between the man and his wife -- they're all brief and bloodless, especially the one about why they don't have children. On the other hand, the narrator plainly loves the protagonist, and the narrator is plainly a man. So without an autobiographical frame, one of the principal interests and meanings of the book would have to be the love between two men, and the author's inability to imagine the woman in his character's life. Reading as autobiography erases that theme.[return][return]Then there's the moment when the narrator stops speaking of the dead man as in realist fiction, reporting things the narrator might plausibly have known, and starts speaking in ways that would be identified in conventional pedagogy as an omniscient narrator. That slippage is a common flaw in fiction, because it's such a temptation. Here it occurs along with a break in narrative style. Up until page 41, the book is nonlinear, comprised of brief thoughts about the person who has killed himself:[return][return]"Your pain died down with nightfall.The possibility of happiness began at 5 o'clock in the winter..." (p. 40)[return][return]Page 41 opens a long story of a trip to a city to play in a band; it includes a long description of wandering, and the possibility of an affair. The story continues to p. 57, and when it ends it's abruptly replaced by more brief paragraphs of reminiscence:[return][return]"You directed toward yourself a violence that you did not feel toward others. For them you reserved all your patience and tolerance."[return][return]The story ends with a common author's device: the narrator had supposedly kept a journal of the journey, and it is implied that is how the narrator knew what was happening. But it's a threadbare device, and Lev� doesn't bother, or remember, to explain its context or how the narrator came to read it. The story stands out because it's the moment the author forgets his fictional frame. He (the author) is groping for ways to talk about himself, and the story within the novel is the moment when that desire swamps his impressionistic control of his work as fiction. The same happens again several times in the novel, especially in the concluding pages, which are curtly offered as having been written by the man who killed himself. For me these are signs of the rupture between the work as fiction and the work as autobiography, and they are the principal interest of the novel.(less)

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Aug 19, 2012 Chris rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: fiction

Levé's novel is about a friend (written about in the second person) who committed suicide twenty years ago, at age twenty-five; Levé himself committed suicide a few days after delivering the manuscript to this book. The narrator cannot think about his friend without the framework of his suicide; he, in fact, realizes that he thinks about his friend so much -- his friend is so present to him -- because of his suicide. Similarly, many readers are drawn to this book because of the author's suicide....more

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Aug 01, 2011 Elena Tomorowitz rated it 4 of 5 stars

Despite its morbid title, I assure you, it was lovely. What struck me the most about it was his use of second person point of view throughout the whole book. I was the deceased. By pointing a finger at me the reader, and telling me what I was doing with my day, Levé created this somewhat generic persona. At some moments in the book I thought, "he knows me well". Which is my segue into the question I've had on my mind today, which is, "How much of your life is your own?" "How much of my life is...more

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Jul 12, 2011 Sean Pagaduan rated it 2 of 5 stars Recommends it for: French lit buffs, Oulipo enthusiasts, avant-garde buffs

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...more 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.

The text proper clocks in at around 120 pp., plus a 10 pp. afterword, so it's not like you'll be spending too much time on this one (as opposed to Life: A User's Manual). If you're interested in French lit, or you like these kinds of narratives, I'd say to rent it from the library. If you're looking for something with more development, I'd say to look elsewhere.(less)

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Jul 01, 2012 Daniel rated it 5 of 5 stars

This is a very long review, and I am sorry, but I have a lot to say about this book.

It’s my opinion that Édouard Levé perfects the pointillist technique he experiments with in Autoportrait in Suicide. I’ll explain my reasoning later.

Levé is worth reading for reasons other than this unique experimentation. It is in his ability to create character through this pointillism that he really shines. These facts build people who are very real. It reminds me of advice for lovers I once heard: don’t marry...more

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Aug 04, 2011 Schuyler rated it 4 of 5 stars

I don't know why I'm reading this in the summer. Maybe because if I read it in the autumn or winter it would simply be too much. But I came across this slim novel while looking through Dalkey Archive's catalog and its beautiful cover caught my eye. And then I read how the author killed himself shortly after handing in his final manuscript, entitled Suicide. Well, that was pretty much all I needed, seeing as how, like many literary types, I am weirdly fascinated with all things suicide, especiall...more

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Jan 28, 2011 Frank rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: acquisto

Psicologicamente parlando, questo libro e' abbastanza impegnativo. Nello specifico, senza addentrarsi nella trama del racconto, si tratta di un romanzo breve scritto da Levé che lo ha consegnato al proprio editore dieci giorni prima di suicidarsi. Questi sono i fatti. Ne consiglio la lettura a coloro i quali, come me, sono in qualche modo piu' attratti dalle storie vere che raccontano le difficoltà e i problemi più o meno gravi che assillano le persone, piuttosto che dalle favole dove tutti viss...more

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About Édouard Levé

Levé was self-taught as an artist and studied business at the elite École supérieure des sciences économiques et commerciales. He began painting in 1991. Levé made abstract paintings but abandoned the field (claiming to have burned most of his paintings) and took up color photography upon his return from an influential two-month trip to India in 1995.

Levé's first book, Oeuvres (2002), is an imagin...more

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Quotes from Suicide

“You did not fear death. You stepped in its path, but without really desiring it: how can one desire something one doesn’t know? You didn’t deny life but affirmed your taste for the unknown, betting that if something existed on the other side, it would be better than here.” — 19 people liked it

“You were not surprised to find yourself ill adapted to the world, but it did surprise you that the world had produced a being who now lived in it as a foreigner. Do plants commit suicide? Do animals die of helplessness? They either function or disappear. You were perhaps a weak link, an accidental evolutionary dead end, a temporary anomaly not destined to burgeon again.” — 16 people liked it

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