Suicide (French Literature Series)
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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
"an astonishing novel.." --Zadie Smith, Harper's Magazine
"an astonishing novel.." --Zadie Smith, Harper's Magazine
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. --Christopher Byrd, Guardian
"an astonishing novel.." --Zadie Smith, Harper's Magazine
"an astonishing novel.." --Zadie Smith, Harper's Magazine
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. --Christopher Byrd, Guardian
Product Description
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.
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4 reviews
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful
excellent expolration into the strangeness of suicude
11 Aug 2011
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.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful
Robert Pinget?
14 Feb 2012
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.
1 of 2 people found the following review helpful
Depressingly boring
20 Nov 2011
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.
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