Suicide cannot be read as 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-more than twenty years earlier, 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 casually obsessive, pointillist, beautiful ruminations, we come to know a stoic, sensible, thoughtful man who bears more than a slight psychological resemblance to Levé himself. But Suicide is more than just a compendium of memories of an old friend; it is a near-exhaustive catalog of the ramifications and effects of the act of suicide, and a unique and melancholy farewell to life.
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Suicide is not a fictionalized account of Levé's death; in some respects it is a negative image of it. 'You didn't leave any letters for loved ones to explain your death,' he writes, although Levé himself reportedly did. Levé's art and life nonetheless converge, fuse, and end brutally together. Ironically,
Suicide represents a new departure for Levé: his previous books could be considered conceptual conceits, whereas
Suicide is something else, a purely literary work. At the end of his life, Levé had by no means exhausted his art. " -Hugo Wicken,
The Berlin Review of Books "A book that will never disappear, a book too provocative ever to be forgotten." -Jacques Morice
"An astonishing novel." -Zadie Smith, author of
White Teeth
