The narrator refuses to believe he understands his friend: "You are like the actor who, at the end of the play, with a final word, reveals that he is a different character than the one he appeared to be playing." As a result, Suicide is less the portrait of a young man and his final act than the performance of the narrator’s mind circling the unknowable. It will frustrate because there is no catharsis, no moment of connection across the divide. would of course mean that I would not read any more French novels, including those written by Edouard Lev. Levé has a light touch and a talent for creating drama in the movement and accumulation of sentences. Posts about edouard leve written by booksyo.
Not because the writing is difficult or boring-in fact, the opposite. Since 2019 the record price for this artist at auction is 4,418 USD for Untitled, sold at Piasa in 2022. They function as discrete units, repelling each other, refusing to build as the novel progresses. Edouard Lev's work has been offered at auction multiple times, with realized prices ranging from 594 USD to 4,418 USD, depending on the size and medium of the artwork. The back blurb mentions his self-inflicted death immediately, as if to designate the book as a suicide note.
I mention that because any acclaim for Suicide essentially rests on Lev’s own story. The book as a whole is usefully encapsulated in its opening sentence, which is the first of 533 descriptions. These scenes have a dreamy, opaque quality. Edouard Lev committed suicide in 2007, just days before submitting the manuscript for Suicide to his publisher. Works is one of the most nakedly formalistic pieces of writing I’ve ever come across.
Much of the book is spent alternating between the friend’s thoughts and working through moments from his life-a homeless man sitting next to him on the metro, an afternoon spent wandering through Bordeaux. The second person is tolerable because it is not directed at the reader but the dead friend, creating the sense of an accidentally overheard conversation (one-sided of course, as the dead are notoriously bad at answering questions). There is a distance and a flatness to the prose. (Levé himself committed suicide ten days after turning this manuscript in to his editors.) It is a short novel, told in a muted second person.
#EDOUARD LEVE ARCHIVE#
Suicide, translated from French by Jan Steyn and released by Dalkey Archive earlier this year, is a novel based on the death of this friend. Or maybe he’d never meant to say it at all, but the sentence and its unwieldy run-on length had slipped his grasp and turned on him. In the next line the friend and his suicide are dropped, as if the author could only stand to look for this brief moment. Edouard Lev was a French writer, artist, and photographer best known for his introspective and fragmentary style. With a friend at whose place we drank cocktails that we made by mixing up his mother’s liquor at random, we would talk until sunrise in the salon of that big house where Mallarmé had once been a guest, in the course of those nights, I delivered speeches on love, politics, God, and death of which I retain not one word, even though I came up with some of them doubled over in laughter, years later, this friend told his wife that he had left something in the house just as they were leaving to play tennis, he went down to the basement and put a bullet in his head with the gun he had left there beforehand. It also contains one of the most startling sentences I’ve read in a while: It’s personal and confessional but still gives the buzz of great fiction. As you can tell from my review, we thought very highly of Grow / Decompose by Young Jesus.
The timestamp is only as accurate as the clock in the camera, and it may be completely wrong.I first came across Édouard Levé this spring when The Paris Review published the surprisingly good "When I Look at a Strawberry I Think of a Tongue," an excerpt from Levé’s as-yet untranslated book Autoportrait. If the file has been modified from its original state, some details such as the timestamp may not fully reflect those of the original file.
#EDOUARD LEVE SOFTWARE#
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