Archived Suicide

Suicide by Edouard Leve
published by Dalkey Archive Press
144 pages

I don't know why I'm reading this in the summer. Maybe because if I read it in the autumn or winter it would simply be too much. But I came across this slim novel while looking through Dalkey Archive's catalog and its beautiful cover caught my eye. And then I read how the author killed himself shortly after handing in his final manuscript, entitled Suicide. Well, that was pretty much all I needed, seeing as how, like many literary types, I am weirdly fascinated with all things suicide, especially when it comes to writers. The tortured souls and what not. Not quite sure what it is about suicide that so interests me. The finality of it. The tremendous psychic pain. The willful act of taking yourself away from this world. Not sure. Ruminations for another time.

But with Suicide, Leve introduces us to an unnamed narrator as he (the narrator) creates a fragmented picture of a friend who had committed suicide years before. It is all told in the second person through moments, small and large, in the friends life. It is a stark portrait, funny at times, devastating at others. Perhaps a sort of suicide note from Leve, perhaps not.