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Levè bucks this mentality Autoportrait is a static portrait. Vincent Van Gogh comes to mind, before and after cutting off his ear. Looking at a given artist’s self-portraits over time, it’s impossible to focus on the changing image of a self, without wondering about the forces that changed that person. Self-portraiture is necessarily self-reflexive and reflective, but it can’t exist in a vacuum it’s beholden to context. auto-mobile, auto-focus, even auto-biography), and it underscores the entire work. Although in English “autoportrait” would have been “self-portrait,” translator Stein decided to maintain the original for its resonances the auto- prefix - from the Greek autos for self - comes with the connotation of self-reflexivity (e.g. Conversely, with Autoportrait you can expect just that. When you pick up Suicide, you know you’re reading a book about suicide. 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.Edouard Levè pulled no punches when titling his books: when you open one, you know what you’re getting into. It will frustrate because there is no catharsis, no moment of connection across the divide. Levé has a light touch and a talent for creating drama in the movement and accumulation of sentences. Not because the writing is difficult or boring-in fact, the opposite. They function as discrete units, repelling each other, refusing to build as the novel progresses. These scenes have a dreamy, opaque quality. 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. 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. 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.