"A friend takes his own life. You are left to jigsaw the details of his life into a fiction, as though anything about our time here resembles a story with curated beginnings and endings; rising action or falling action; thrilling denouements. But when the details of a life become overwhelming, a torrent of facts and observations that cannot be made logical, we get a book like Suicide. Not wholly fiction, not wholly anything. A perfect window of grief. 'I remember you at random,' Levé says. 'My brain resurrects you through stochastic details, like picking marbles out of a bag.' Suicide is a life told in facts instead of narrative, like reading a diary scratched in grief. It is the only book I can read again, again, and again."
Publisher Dalkey Archive Press
Publication Date 2011-04-14
Section Fiction / All Staff Suggestions / Fiction Suggestions / Archived Staff Suggestions / Spencer R.
Format Paperback
ISBN 9781564786289
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.
