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A review by screen_memory
Suicide by Édouard Levé
2.0
Suicide is an austere portrait of an unnamed "You" remembered by the narrator twenty-five years after their suicide. There are no chapters, and the events remembered by the narrator are recollected according to no discernible pattern and quickly passed by in order to accommodate the hasty retelling of further circumstance. They are not recollected in a chronological fashion, and soon enough they begin to list off like a laundry list of trivialities, of minutiae which we would have little to no interest in were it not for the factual suicide of the author.
The significance of Suicide is made coherent by the same action Leve undertook days after turning the manuscript for Suicide over to his editor. Otherwise, Suicide would seem incoherent, decrypted, or, at worst, it would seem boring, unnecessary. Indeed, the narrative is quite bland. I was constantly wondering what significance nearly every anecdote had to the story, but I suppose it all comes back to, “Oh, yeah, I guess he did commit suicide.” Unfortunately, that single grandiose act of self-annihilation, of the elimination of all possibility, is not enough to lend every tedious memory importance. Of course, what do we have left of the dead but memories alone? This makes Suicide a jaunt through an avenue of memory regarding a life that the narrator fails to make the reader interested in.
Who was this "You"? Why did the cause of his suicide remain undivulged? Why, following the conclusion of Suicide, were we left with more questions than answers were given? One grand reply to dispel all questions yet still leave them unanswered would be that Leve was as confused by his own inevitable suicide as readers were over the cause of the unnamed man in the story. It was probable that he contended with far more questions than any of his readers had formed in response to his work. Edouard was bargaining with uncertainty and ultimately passed on to forever experience the grand phenomenological negation of death. It is unfortunate that his act of suicide could not invigorate the tedious prose.
The significance of Suicide is made coherent by the same action Leve undertook days after turning the manuscript for Suicide over to his editor. Otherwise, Suicide would seem incoherent, decrypted, or, at worst, it would seem boring, unnecessary. Indeed, the narrative is quite bland. I was constantly wondering what significance nearly every anecdote had to the story, but I suppose it all comes back to, “Oh, yeah, I guess he did commit suicide.” Unfortunately, that single grandiose act of self-annihilation, of the elimination of all possibility, is not enough to lend every tedious memory importance. Of course, what do we have left of the dead but memories alone? This makes Suicide a jaunt through an avenue of memory regarding a life that the narrator fails to make the reader interested in.
Who was this "You"? Why did the cause of his suicide remain undivulged? Why, following the conclusion of Suicide, were we left with more questions than answers were given? One grand reply to dispel all questions yet still leave them unanswered would be that Leve was as confused by his own inevitable suicide as readers were over the cause of the unnamed man in the story. It was probable that he contended with far more questions than any of his readers had formed in response to his work. Edouard was bargaining with uncertainty and ultimately passed on to forever experience the grand phenomenological negation of death. It is unfortunate that his act of suicide could not invigorate the tedious prose.