{"id":7029,"date":"2012-03-15T13:53:06","date_gmt":"2012-03-15T17:53:06","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/?p=7029"},"modified":"2016-07-12T12:21:18","modified_gmt":"2016-07-12T16:21:18","slug":"edouard-leve-suicide","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/2012\/03\/15\/edouard-leve-suicide\/","title":{"rendered":"Edouard Lev\u00e9: Suicide<\/em>"},"content":{"rendered":"
Suicide<\/strong><\/em><\/span>\r\nby Edouard Lev\u00e9 (2008)<\/span>\r\ntranslated from the French by Jan Steyn (2011)<\/span>\r\nDalkey Archive (2011)<\/span>\r\n128 pp<\/span><\/pre>\n
The first time I heard about Edouard Lev\u00e9 was when a piece of his was published in the Spring 2011 issue of The Paris Review<\/em>. It was called “When I\u00a0look at a Strawberry, I\u00a0Think of\u00a0a Tongue.” Here is how the strange — and strangely compelling — piece begins:<\/p>\n
When I was young, I thought Life: A User\u2019s Manual<\/em> would teach me how to live and Suicide: A User\u2019s Manual<\/em>\u00a0how to die. I don\u2019t really listen to what people tell me. I forget things I don\u2019t like. I look down dead-end streets. The end of a trip leaves me with a sad aftertaste the same as the end of a novel. I am not afraid of what comes at the end of life. I am slow to realize when someone mistreats me, it is always so surprising: evil is somehow unreal. When I sit with bare legs on vinyl, my skin doesn\u2019t slide, it squeaks. I archive. I joke about death. I do not love myself. I do not hate myself. My rap sheet is clean.<\/span> <\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n
The piece continues from there, a random sampling of statements with no apparent relationship to one another other than to build up our sense of who this person is. It’s short, and you can read the whole thing on The Paris Review<\/em> website (click here<\/a>).\u00a0I wasn’t sure what to expect when opening up\u00a0Suicide<\/em>, which was recently placed on the Best Translated Book Award longlist.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
In brief, what I got was more of the same style, a kind of random sampling of details to give a sense of someone’s life. Only in Suicide<\/em>, the subject is not the narrator. Rather, the narrator is listing details about a friend (whom he addresses directly throughout) who committed suicide some twenty years before, when they were each in their mid-twenties. The narrator describes his style best: “My brain resurrects you through stochastic details, like picking marbles out of a bag.” And we can expect, amidst the narrative that contemplates suicide, a great deal of random marbles that, somehow, add up to — I’ll say it again — a strangely compelling piece.<\/p>\n
Suicide<\/em> begins by setting up the act:<\/p>\n
One Saturday in the month of August, you leave your home wearing your tennis gear, accompanied by your wife. In the middle of the garden you point out to her that you’ve forgotten your racket in the house. You go back to look for it, but instead of making your way toward the cupboard in the entryway where you normally keep it, you head down into the basement. Your wife doesn’t notice this. She says outside. The weather is fine. She’s making the most of the sun. A few moments later she hears a gunshot.\u00a0<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Because there was no apparent tragedy that drove his friend to suicide — he was, we assume, happily married and still had a lot of life ahead of him — the narrator forces himself to consider the invisible motives. Depression seems to have played a large part: “You used to believe that with age you would become less unhappy, because you then would have reasons to be sad. When you were still young, your suffering was inconsolable because you believed it to be unfounded.”<\/p>\n
While it is all interesting, I was particularly drawn into the narrator’s relationship with his friend, which has become much more meaningful after the suicide. In life, he and this man were friends, but they were not particularly close. There were each closer to others, but the narrator doesn’t feel that way now:<\/p>\n
Your silence has become a form of eloquence. But they, who can still speak, remain silent. I no longer think of them, those with whom I was formerly so close. But you, who used to be so far-off, distant, mysterious, now seem quite close to me. When I am in doubt, I solicit your advice.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n
It’s this “belief in your eternity” — a “lunacy” born because the friend’s “disappearance is so unacceptable” — that is so striking to me. The narrator is perhaps a lot like Lev\u00e9 who, in his piece in The Paris Review<\/em>, says, “I believe there is an afterlife, but not an afterdeath.” This friend remains alive, somehow more alive, today, though two decades ago he took his own life.<\/p>\n
The book’s structure — that grabbing a marble out of a bag — is effective but also, for me, was a bit hard to sink into. At times it felt like a collection of aphorisms rather than a series of statements about a life, now gone though somehow more present. That said, the book is growing on me more and more, particularly after rereading “When I Look at a Strawberry, . . .”\u00a0 Lev\u00e9 ends that piece on a tragic note:<\/p>\n
I do not ask \u201cdo you love me.\u201d Only once can I say \u201cI\u2019m dying\u201d without telling a lie. The best day of my life may already be behind me.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n
As sad and tragic as that ending note was when Lev\u00e9 wrote it in 2002, it and especially the very book Suicide<\/em>\u00a0are drastically transformed when we learn that Lev\u00e9 himself took his life in 2007 at the age of 42. In fact, he killed himself just one week after delivering the transcript of Suicide<\/em> to his editor. I left this detail out until now because I wanted to attempt to look at the book as its own world and not as a kind of suicide note — which is impossible to do, because I knew the back-story before I started the book. Furthermore, it’s hard not to suspect that this is just what Lev\u00e9\u00a0wanted.<\/p>\n
So since I finished the book, I’ve been trying to understand why it was interesting to me. In other words, would I have accepted it and its random structure had I not been looking at it as a kind of personal reflection on Lev\u00e9’s own impending suicide? I’m still not sure. That said, it is an interesting and emotional book in which the confines of life seem to crack at the seams, allowing someone to become something more in death, which\u00a0could be what Lev\u00e9 was after when he put the final punctuation on this book with his own death: “Dead, you are as alive as you are vivid.” And (sadly? I’m not sure) that is the most interesting thing about this book.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Trevor reviews Edouard Lev\u00e9’s Suicide<\/em>, translated from the French by Jan Steyn. Read the full post<\/u><\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":7030,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"libsyn-item-id":0,"libsyn-show-id":0,"libsyn-post-error":"","libsyn-post-error_post-type":"","libsyn-post-error_post-permissions":"","libsyn-post-error_api":"","playlist-podcast-url":"","libsyn-episode-thumbnail":"","libsyn-episode-widescreen_image":"","libsyn-episode-blog_image":"","libsyn-episode-background_image":"","libsyn-post-episode-category-selection":"","libsyn-post-episode-player_use_thumbnail":"","libsyn-post-episode-player_use_theme":"","libsyn-post-episode-player_height":"","libsyn-post-episode-player_width":"","libsyn-post-episode-player_placement":"","libsyn-post-episode-player_use_download_link":"","libsyn-post-episode-player_use_download_link_text":"","libsyn-post-episode-player_custom_color":"","libsyn-post-episode-itunes-explicit":"","libsyn-post-episode":"","libsyn-post-episode-update-id3":"","libsyn-post-episode-release-date":"","libsyn-post-episode-simple-download":"","libsyn-release-date":"","libsyn-post-update-release-date":"","libsyn-is_draft":"","libsyn-new-media-media":"","libsyn-post-episode-subtitle":"","libsyn-new-media-image":"","libsyn-post-episode-keywords":"","libsyn-post-itunes":"","libsyn-post-episode-itunes-episode-number":"","libsyn-post-episode-itunes-season-number":"","libsyn-post-episode-itunes-episode-type":"","libsyn-post-episode-itunes-episode-title":"","libsyn-post-episode-itunes-episode-author":"","libsyn-destination-releases":"","libsyn-post-episode-advanced-destination-form-data":"","libsyn-post-episode-advanced-destination-form-data-enabled":"","libsyn-post-episode-advanced-destination-form-data-input-enabled":false,"libsyn-post-episode-premium_state":"","libsyn-episode-shortcode":"","libsyn-episode-embedurl":"","_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[800,312],"tags":[880,919,968,572],"coauthors":[505],"class_list":["post-7029","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-book-reviews","category-edouard-leve","tag-2000s","tag-919","tag-dalkey-archive","tag-french"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/03\/Suicide.jpg?fit=366%2C530&ssl=1","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pqqvZ-1Pn","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":false,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7029","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7029"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7029\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":19323,"href":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7029\/revisions\/19323"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/7030"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7029"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7029"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7029"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=7029"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}