Status
Available
Call number
Genres
Collection
Publication
Dalkey Archive Press (2014), Editie: Available again, Paperback, 104 pagina's
User reviews
LibraryThing member HadriantheBlind
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
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 part of a magazine cover, "will not save you."
You recognize that the author's own life is now permanently connected to his art and cannot be extracted. Your fingers are dipped into ice further as your mind stretches for distant and unknowable thoughts about life and death, which you had hoped to bury after years of grey rumination.
When you read the first paragraph you felt very stiff, as though the process of your death had set in already. You follow his life, with minuscule details and abstract cloudy thoughts. You read the last repeating lines of his poem.
Life is proposed to me
My name is passed on to me
My body is imposed on me
You pass over the narrator's description of his friend, his stoic impassiveness, and try to connect how much of it was from his own life. You note the grim pornography of the author describing how much sorrow his widow must feel, and wonder of how much the author's own beloved feels.
You feel terrible at this pitiless mimicry of the man's last work and close it with his words.
"You were said to have died of suffering. But you died because you searched for happiness at the risk of finding the void."
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
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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 part of a magazine cover, "will not save you."
You recognize that the author's own life is now permanently connected to his art and cannot be extracted. Your fingers are dipped into ice further as your mind stretches for distant and unknowable thoughts about life and death, which you had hoped to bury after years of grey rumination.
When you read the first paragraph you felt very stiff, as though the process of your death had set in already. You follow his life, with minuscule details and abstract cloudy thoughts. You read the last repeating lines of his poem.
Life is proposed to me
My name is passed on to me
My body is imposed on me
You pass over the narrator's description of his friend, his stoic impassiveness, and try to connect how much of it was from his own life. You note the grim pornography of the author describing how much sorrow his widow must feel, and wonder of how much the author's own beloved feels.
You feel terrible at this pitiless mimicry of the man's last work and close it with his words.
"You were said to have died of suffering. But you died because you searched for happiness at the risk of finding the void."
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LibraryThing member JimElkins
Edouard Levé 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
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.
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:
"Your pain died down with nightfall.The possibility of happiness began at 5 o'clock in the winter..." (p. 40)
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:
"You directed toward yourself a violence that you did not feel toward others. For them you reserved all your patience and tolerance."
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 Levé 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.
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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.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.
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:
"Your pain died down with nightfall.The possibility of happiness began at 5 o'clock in the winter..." (p. 40)
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:
"You directed toward yourself a violence that you did not feel toward others. For them you reserved all your patience and tolerance."
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 Levé 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.
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LibraryThing member gnfti
Books that ostensibly attempt to capture the essence of a life often get bogged down in biographical minutiae instead. Levé shows that you can tell much more about what a person was like through how they behaved at parties, or what their least favourite time of day was. Through its short vignettes
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"Suicide" manages to make its reader familiar with the protagonist while allowing them to gauge the significance of the recollections enumerated within for themselves, stopping short of excessive explanation. Great books make you feel like you've made a new friend. Now I feel like I've lost one. Show Less
LibraryThing member michaelbartley
a very powerful novel, lots of mystery just a excellent novel
LibraryThing member stillatim
It's rather unfortunate that Leve's own death overshadows the merits of this book. The second person is very tricky, but here it works wonderfully well; and the character study is very well done. There is apparently some 'conceptual' stuff going on (stochastic selection of passages), but it's not
As others have noted, the poetry at the end is atrocious. Presumably Leve knew that, and I still haven't manage to work out what purpose it's serving.
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intrusive, and the book remains interesting after you learn about the concept. As others have noted, the poetry at the end is atrocious. Presumably Leve knew that, and I still haven't manage to work out what purpose it's serving.
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Awards
Best Translated Book Award (Longlist — 2012)
Language
Original language
French
Original publication date
2008
Physical description
104 p.; 17 cm
ISBN
1564786285 / 9781564786289