Introducing Édouard Levé

The article was published in The New Indian Express, Jan 28, 2016, in a somewhat altered form.

On October 5, 2007, a French writer named Édouard Levé, who was also a painter and a photographer, delivered a manuscript titled Suicide to his publisher. Ten days later, he ended his life. He was 42, arguably a ripening age for writers.

Suicide became Levé’s fourth and final literary work. One can imagine what the dramatic goodbye did to stoke curiosity in his work. Here was a writer who had complicated, for eternity, the way his books would be read. In moments more morbid than usual, one wondered if his suicide was conceived as a necessary addendum to the final book.

Levé’s work did indeed have a rabid originality that somehow allows for such possibilities. His first book, Works, provides nothing more than a list of 500 conceptual artworks, none of them realized. These range from the highly imaginative to the completely zany. For example: “The world is drawn from memory. There are missing countries, altered borders.” And: “A leather jacket made from a mad cow.” The book speaks to that part of one’s mind that comes up with artistic ideas and later bemoans not having written them down. Levé seems to suggest that a mere list of our imaginative fancies can be Art.

In Autoportrait, too, the list-making style is maintained. Through a chain of declarative sentences, Levé tells us about himself, about his personality, his possessions, his physicality, his proclivities, and so on. There is an incredible realism here, one that gnaws at its own definition. The sentence – “I’m making an effort to specialize in me” – also conveys how this specialization can only ever be an effort. Levé is making honest declarations, but it isn’t lost on the reader how honesty itself is refracted through his memory and perception. Also, Levé is trying to convince us that a collection of dour declarations about ourselves can be Art.

Suicide, the climactic book, is the closest to what may be called convention. Levé writes in second person, referring to a friend who committed suicide twenty years back. He remembers the friend, interestingly, boringly, lovingly. There are passages where he ruminates about the act of suicide itself, aiming to bring forth insights about it.

Reading Suicide, one is left with an empty feeling in which death’s abyssal reality competes with its eminence as a concept. The strain of melancholy that runs through the book is as much the reader’s as it is Levé’s – upon confronting the realization that faint memories in the minds of others will be all that is left of our identities. Some might call Suicide a terrifying book, but it can also make its space on the self-help shelf.

With or without consideration for his suicide, it is safe to say that Levé produced very important works of literature. His Works is an invitation for all to note the outputs of their imagination. His Autoportrait is an invitation for all to make self portraits. His Suicide is an invitation for all to sober down.