Suicide - Edouard Leve

Suicide by Edouard Levé

Suicide is a short novel by Edouard Levé noted for its precise language and seemingly random structure meant to imitate human memory.

An excerpt of Suicide titled Life in Three Houses appeared in the April 2011 issue of Harper's.

Edouard Levé delivered the manuscript for his final book, Suicide, just a few days before he took his own life. Suicide is not, then, simply "another" novel -- it is, in a sense, the author's own oblique, public suicide note, a unique meditation on this most extreme of refusals. Presenting itself as an investigation into the suicide of a close friend -- perhaps real, perhaps fictional -- Levé gives us, little by little, a striking portrait of a man, with all his talents and flaws, who chose to reject his life and all the people who loved him in favor of oblivion. Gradually, through Levé's beautiful, casually obsessive, pointillist ruminations, we come to know a stoic, sensible, thoughtful man who bears more than a slight resemblance to the author himself. Suicide is a near-exhaustive catalog of the ramifications of the act for which it was named, and a unique and melancholy farewell to life.