As if Levé managed to meld life, writing, and art in an aesthetic gesture that is absolute yet calm.” L’Express was equally rhapsodic: “If one is shocked by this experience of the extreme-what artistic project could justify such an act?- Suicide remains nonetheless an ultimate literary act, whose urgency and morbid beauty render so many other books vain and useless.” None of these reviews mention the book’s final twenty pages, a collection of tercets discovered in the suicide’s desk after his death. Jacques Morice, writing for Télérama, claimed that Levé’s suicide gave his work “a quality of madness without precedent in the history of literature. I was reminded of this passage while reading French reviews of Suicide. One hundred pages of notes and a very detailed index make this edition a precious work for lovers of literary history.
Edouard leve full#
These are notebooks full of bitterness and despair, laden with melancholic aphorisms, trenchant judgments on literature, and incisive commentary on his contemporaries.
Now that the delay he had set for its publication has passed, his editor is publishing these one thousand pages, and predicts that they will constitute the best of his work. The author who wrote, ‘There is no love in death,’ the monocle-toting mainstay of the capital’s salons, kept a journal his whole life. The section titled “Culture” treats us to such items as: This relentlessness is also sometimes very funny, revealing the absurdity of culture industry clichés. Journal is punishing-a litany of gruesome crimes, minute analyses of sales figures, weather reports, and job listings. Houellebecq and Shteyngart write page-turners. But while writers like Michel Houellebecq and Gary Shteyngart express contemporary disconnectedness through characters and plots that embody alienation and competition, Levé is concerned only with the way it feels to be bombarded by discrete facts. As he put it in an interview with Particule, the project aims to highlight the indifference that can result “if one lets one’s self be invaded by the daily onslaught of information.” Levé is hardly the only contemporary writer who seeks to rescue spontaneous engagement with one’s surroundings from the rush and emotional sterility of most daily communication. In Journal (2004), Levé rewrote newspaper articles without including any proper names or dates. Writing for Frieze, Hugo Wilcken claimed that “it is impossible to judge as a novel, given the author’s own suicide.” To consider Suicide as one sick man’s cry of anguish is to read the book from the exact categorical distance that Levé sought to breach in his work.
But it’s unfortunate that the label “suicide note” has been so firmly affixed to the book that it threatens to overshadow sensitivity to Levé’s rhetorical technique. The fact that Levé hanged himself ten days after giving his publisher the manuscript of Suicide necessarily raises the emotional stakes of our reading experience.
It didn’t produce music, but a sickening pulsation, and you waited for the abatement of this rhythm.” She was abstract like the other objects in the depths from which her silhouette appeared.” “Your veins and your arteries seemed too narrow. It really was her, you recognized her, but you wondered if you knew her. With a precision that can be frightening, Levé describes a man who is wholly alienated from the consolations of the outside world, beholden only to the tiniest shifts in his perception and sensations: “Your wife showed astonishment at your abruptness, but all you could see was an abstract grimace. It seeks only to illumine the particulars of that desire. So Suicide, the first of his books to be published in English, does not explain how a specific person in a specific set of circumstances could arrive at a desire for death. Better known as a photographer in his native France, Levé is not interested in exposition he is interested in quiddity. Edouard Levé’s fourth book is written in the second person, addressed to a friend of the narrator’s who committed suicide fifteen years earlier.