These, along with the windows and the doors, are not set square. The flagstones are not parallel to the walls. Looking closer, one sees numerous errors. “The materials are contemporary and the banal style is that of mass-produced houses. “Each measure is intuitively estimated,” he stipulates. On the same page, he lays out an idea for another lavishly impractical dwelling, this one built without the use of measurement. “A house designed by a three-year-old is built,” he suggests in one of the “works” early on in the book. There is a recurring interest, for instance, in the building of houses from some absurdly shaky conceptual foundation, a preoccupation that reveals Levé’s mischievous commitment to the defamiliarizing of everyday environments and objects. It’s filled with descriptions of objects the idea of whose existence is entirely absurd. In this sense, the content of Works is 533 variations on the theme of the eccentric notion of the book itself. In almost everything he has done, Levé demonstrates an obsessive interest in seeing eccentric notions through to creative fruition. It’s a single paragraph, 112 pages long, consisting of a continuous sequence of short declarative sentences, each of which states some or other fact about its author, a relentlessly present “I” to the enigmatic absence of Suicide’s “you.” To describe that book in basic terms is to risk making it sound outright unreadable. That strange combination of formal distance and emotional immediacy was also one of the most remarkable aspects of Autoportrait, the prose work that preceded Suicide, but whose English-language publication came later, translated in 2012 by Paris Review editor Lorin Stein. If at first you read it as an obliquely autobiographical exploration of the author’s decision to end his own life, what was most powerful about the book, finally, was how eerily controlled and impersonal a work of art it was, how forcefully it resisted that kind of interpretation, and how much more moving it was for it. Suicide was the last thing that Levé wrote, but the first of his books to be published in English translation, in 2011. You’ve put a bullet in your head with the rifle you had carefully prepared.” She rushes into the house, cries out your name, notices that the door to the stairway leading to the basement is open, goes down, and finds you there. “You go back to the house to look for it,” Levé writes, “but instead of making your way toward the cupboard in the entryway where you normally keep it, you head down into the basement. In the opening lines of the book, the protagonist-a deceased childhood friend of the narrator, to whom he only ever refers as “you”-leaves his house with his wife to play tennis, but points out to her that he’s forgotten his racket. What happened was that I became quickly consumed by the book’s impassive style, with its second-person declarative narration that somehow managed to be both tonally distant and uncomfortably intimate. My morbid insomniac interest was piqued by the promotional blurb’s mention of the fact that, in October 2007, the author had killed himself 10 days after submitting the book to his publisher I started reading, figuring that even if the book weren’t to my taste, a little French experimental fiction might be just the thing to finally send me off to sleep.īut that’s not what happened. One of the things Amazon’s mysterious recommendation algorithm had seen fit to suggest was a book called Suicide by a French writer I’d never heard of. I was in bed and unable to sleep, until at some point I stopped trying and reached over to my nightstand for my Kindle and began browsing for something new to read. The circumstances of reading are usually not very notable you’re sitting in a chair, you’re lying in bed, you’re leaning in a corner of the new releases section-so what’s to remember, really, in terms of contextual specifics? One of a very few exceptions, for me, is the French writer Édouard Levé, my first exposure to whom I clearly recall as a distinct and self-enclosed experience. It’s rare that I can remember where I was and what I was doing when I first encountered a particular book.
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