Suicide

Édouard Levé (1965-2008), born in Neuilly-sur-Seine, was a writer, photographer, and visual artist. Levé was the author of four books of writing—Oeuvres, Journal, Autoportrait, and Suicide—as well as three books of photography.Jan Steyn is Associate Professor and the Director of the MFA in Literary Translation at the University of Iowa.

“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 (...) As the narrator’s revelations about his friend’s inner life become increasingly complex, the reader comes to see “tu” as a stand-in for the narrator’s own self, an externalized form that allows him empathic clarity about the most disturbed parts of his own being.” —Hannah Tennant-Moore, n+1 Magazine“If this irony-laden book contains a message to the reader it may well be this: 'You suffered real life in its continuous stream, but you controlled the flow of fictional life by reading at your own rhythm . . . As a reader, you had the power of a god: time submitted to you.' If one were to substitute 'reading' and 'reader' with 'creating' and 'creator' one might conclude that it's possible to read Suicide not simply as a veiled cri de coeur by a man looking to air the messy circumstances for which he took his life, but as a controlled work of art by a conceptual artist who wanted to leave us with a lasting document from which we might, paradoxically, muster the strength to carry on.” —Christopher Byrd, The Guardian“Suicide is both fiction and final, nonfictional statement, both novel and memoir. It is we, as readers and participants, who stand at the center of these two mirrors hung opposite each other and find the author infinitely, diminishingly multiplied. Though we'll probably never know whether Levé—who in addition to being a writer was a successful photographer with an interest in conceptual art—killed himself to bring his grim metafiction full circle, it is all but impossible not to read his haunting Suicide in this troubling light.” —Laird Hurt, Bookforum“Suicide reads like a photo album. This is no surprise, considering that Levé was as much an accomplished photographer as he was anything else. The prose is clipped, almost terse; while each line can be seen to represent a single idea in just the same way a photo in an album represents one moment in time. […] Suicide is at times beautiful, immensely sad at others, and in more moments than one might want to admit there is the potential in the text to be deeply relatable.” —Tom McCartan,Three Percent“Levé’s Suicide is a powerful reminder of what makes literature—and people—so worthy of our care and study, accepting, as we do so, that the deepest answers will always allude us.” —Compulsive Reader