A review of Suicide by Édouard Levé – Compulsive Reader

Reviewed by Matt Martinson

Suicide
by Édouard Levé
Translated by Jan Steyn
Dalkey Archive Press
ISBN: 9781628976106, Paperback, July 2025, $25usd

When I was earning my English degree in the late 90s, “death of the author” was still, to some degree or other, a thing, which is part of why I now involuntarily cringe when I hear people substitute biography for critical reading. And even if you never subscribed to such a theory, I imagine you, like me, find it frustrating when an interlocutor can’t talk about Agatha Christie without bringing up her mysterious disappearance; seems incapable of reading Sylvia Plath except through the lens of her abusive marriage and eventual suicide; interrogates Shakespeare for hints about his beliefs, marriage, sexuality, or parenting style. No matter the state of the death-of-the-author theory, I think many of us bookworms—even when reading autofiction, new journalism, or confessional poetry—simply want to enjoy a book as a thing in itself.

Which leads me to the difficulty of talking about Édouard Levé’s final book, Suicide, submitted to his publisher a mere ten days before the author took his own life. And yes, in case you are wondering, the title is on the nose: Suicide is a slim novel, written as a second-person address to a long-dead friend who, at twenty-five, and with no warning, took his own life. In fact, here are the book’s opening sentences:

One Saturday in the month of August, you leave your home wearing your tennis gear, accompanied by your wife. In the middle of the garden you point out to her that you’ve forgotten your racket in the house. You go back to look for it, but instead of making your way toward the cupboard in the entryway where you normally keep it, you head down to the basement. Your wife doesn’t notice this. She stays outside. The weather is fine. She’s making the most of the sun. A few moments later she hears a gunshot.

To be honest, a book centered on suicide is not one that would generally appeal to me, doubly so when I think about it as connected to the author’s death. However, Levé’s novel transcends mere biography or explanation for what he did. In a way, yes, it is an extended suicide note, but only in the fact that it is a final work of art by someone who’d devoted his life to multiple artistic disciplines, acting as a philosophical meditation on what it means to live (and die), blending psychology and sociology through the lens of fiction.

The book’s jacket describes Suicide as melancholy, and I agree but would add that the tone is a bit detached, sometimes even ironic. The narrator cares enough to spend a hundred pages reminiscing, yet, at the same time, there is not the melodrama one might expect from such a conceit:

Your life was less sad than your suicide might suggest. You were said to have died of suffering. But there was not as much sadness in you as there is now in those who remember you. You died because you searched for happiness at the risk of finding the void. We shall have to wait for death before we can know what it is that you found. Or before leaving off knowing anything at all, if it is to be silence and emptiness that awaits us.

If anything, the narrator here is slightly poker-faced, forcing us to query small tonal shifts to get a sense of what he really thinks about the loss of his friend and the existential questions that arise because of it.

Note, too, the second-person narration. Nearly half the paragraphs in Suicide begin with the word “You,” but the book is obviously not addressing us, the readers. Right? With the author’s suicide, a reader can easily begin to wonder if the narrator is talking about himself, just as the second-person “You” makes us wonder if we are being implicated somehow, all while clearly addressing the dead friend. There is enough undecidability lurking in the text to make a reader feel a bit off balance, as if all of these things may be partially true. In other words, Suicide fits perfectly into the Dalkey Archive catalog.

Suicide, originally published in French in 2008 before being translated (by Jan Steyn) and published in the US by Dalkey in 2011, is a re-release, part of the Dalkey Essentials series. Dalkey has been up to this for some time, re-releasing some of its most important books, many of which were out of print. It’s thanks to the Essentials series that we recently had a Marguerite Young revival, and I can’t help but think it played a small role in helping Jon Fosse earn the 2023 Nobel Prize in literature. Essentials also includes works by authors like Anne Carson, Djuna Barnes, Nathalie Sarraute, Ishmael Reed, and Gertrude Stein, too. In other words, Levé’s novel is certainly rubbing elbows with some of the best and brightest works of the last century.

And he has certainly earned his place among such a modern pantheon, just as he deserves wider renown in the US, as Suicide is most certainly a work of art. The narration in particular demonstrates Levé’s artistry. The book’s speaker addresses his friend, recounting a wide range of events, conversations, and thoughts that took place before the suicide. But wait—he, the narrator, is recounting incredibly specific details about his friend’s life, quoting conversations, explaining worries and trains of thought that his friend, not the narrator, experienced. And these things happened twenty or more years ago! This is not, I’d argue, a cut-and-dry case of the unreliable narrator at work. No, Levé is doing something more complicated.

How can this narrator share what his friend was thinking thirty years ago, well before they were even acquainted? How can he quote conversations and events from the distant past?

At six o’clock you had breakfast. At seven you took the first train home. When, the next day, your friends repeated to you the words you had spoke to strangers in the café, you remembered nothing of them. It was as though someone else inside you had spoken. You recognized neither your words, nor our thoughts, but you liked them better than you would have if you had remembered saying them.

How does he know so much about someone with whom he a) had not been friends for many years, and b) does not seem to have been incredibly close during those years. There is a lie happening here—but is the narrator simply generalizing, explaining the deeper truths with the spirit of what once happened? Did he actually care more than he lets on? Is he creating story to help explain the mystery of his friend’s decision? Or is the narrator daydreaming about his own eventual suicide—how he might do it, what led him here, and how people might think about afterwards, to say nothing of his fear regarding death itself.

The narrative, cutting back and forth through time, dissecting the actions and ideas of a long-gone friend, is highlighting mystery. More than anything, Suicide is a mystery book, almost mystical, as it ponders the hardest questions we can ask, questions about life’s meaning and what happens after death, but also in regards to the mystery of the Other, the person who, as Emmanuel Levinas once wrote, contains infinity within them, is infinitely unknowable, and to whom we owe everything. Even the self is presented here as unknowable, our drives and fears being things we can only understand in part.

There is one last mystery in Suicide. The friend, before dying, opens a comic book to a specific page, thinking that this clue, in lieu of a note, will explain everything. But in the hubbub of the suicide, the wife discovering the body, and first responders coming soon thereafter, the comic book is knocked from its perch and the would-be explanation lost. (How does the narrator know all this? Yes, my question exactly!) Is this meant to be funny? Tragic? Perhaps both, yet what I see in this incident says a lot about what is happening in Suicide: a good book is like a good relationship; there is always more to know about the Other, and no elementary answer is going to explain or simplify what is infinitely mysterious and unknowable. Levé’s Suicide is a powerful reminder of what makes literature—and people—so worthy of our care and study, accepting, as we do so, that the deepest answers will always allude us:

Only the living seem incoherent. Death closes the series of events that constitute their lives. So we resign ourselves to finding a meaning for them. To refuse them this would amount to accepting that a life, and thus life itself, is absurd. Yours had not yet attained the coherence of things done. Your death gave it this coherence.

About the reviewer: Matt Martinson teaches honors courses at Central Washington University, and regularly reviews books for Heavy Feather Review and Another Chicago Magazine. Recent fiction and nonfiction appear in Lake Effect, 1 Hand Clapping, and Coffin Bell; his piece, “Trout and Trout Remain,” received a Notable mention in Best American Essays 2024.