It really was her, you recognized her, but you wondered if you knew her. It didn’t produce music, but a sickening pulsation, and you waited for the abatement of this rhythm.” She was abstract like the other objects in the depths from which her silhouette appeared.” “Your veins and your arteries seemed too narrow. The fact that Levé hanged himself ten days after giving his publisher the manuscript of Suicide necessarily raises the emotional stakes of our reading experience. Writing for Frieze, Hugo Wilcken claimed that “it is impossible to judge as a novel, given the author’s own suicide.” To consider Suicide as one sick man’s cry of anguish is to read the book from the exact categorical distance that Levé sought to breach in his work.īut it’s unfortunate that the label “suicide note” has been so firmly affixed to the book that it threatens to overshadow sensitivity to Levé’s rhetorical technique. In Journal (2004), Levé rewrote newspaper articles without including any proper names or dates. As he put it in an interview with Particule, the project aims to highlight the indifference that can result “if one lets one’s self be invaded by the daily onslaught of information.” Levé is hardly the only contemporary writer who seeks to rescue spontaneous engagement with one’s surroundings from the rush and emotional sterility of most daily communication. But while writers like Michel Houellebecq and Gary Shteyngart express contemporary disconnectedness through characters and plots that embody alienation and competition, Levé is concerned only with the way it feels to be bombarded by discrete facts. Houellebecq and Shteyngart write page-turners. Journal is punishing-a litany of gruesome crimes, minute analyses of sales figures, weather reports, and job listings. The section titled “Culture” treats us to such items as: This relentlessness is also sometimes very funny, revealing the absurdity of culture industry clichés. The author who wrote, ‘There is no love in death,’ the monocle-toting mainstay of the capital’s salons, kept a journal his whole life. Now that the delay he had set for its publication has passed, his editor is publishing these one thousand pages, and predicts that they will constitute the best of his work. These are notebooks full of bitterness and despair, laden with melancholic aphorisms, trenchant judgments on literature, and incisive commentary on his contemporaries. One hundred pages of notes and a very detailed index make this edition a precious work for lovers of literary history. I was reminded of this passage while reading French reviews of Suicide. Jacques Morice, writing for Télérama, claimed that Levé’s suicide gave his work “a quality of madness without precedent in the history of literature. As if Levé managed to meld life, writing, and art in an aesthetic gesture that is absolute yet calm.” L’Express was equally rhapsodic: “If one is shocked by this experience of the extreme-what artistic project could justify such an act?- Suicide remains nonetheless an ultimate literary act, whose urgency and morbid beauty render so many other books vain and useless.” None of these reviews mention the book’s final twenty pages, a collection of tercets discovered in the suicide’s desk after his death.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |