AFTERWORD
Edouard Levé committed suicide on October 15, 2007. Ten days earlier he had given a manuscript to his editor; it was a novel entitled Suicide, the same you hold in your hands.
Suicide’s reception in France has been deeply influenced by the circumstances of the author’s death. Although it is a fictional work, written in the second person about a friend of the narrator’s who had committed suicide twenty years earlier, its title and subject matter ensure that, despite reports that Levé did leave a suicide note, the present text is taken as a sort of literary explanation of his decision to die. Levé’s readers are left to ask, along with the narrator of Suicide:
Did you know why you wanted to die? If you did, why not write it down? Out of fatigue from living and disdain for leaving traces that would survive you? Or because the reasons that were pushing you to disappear seemed empty? Maybe you wanted to preserve the mystery of your death, thinking that nothing should be explained. Are there good reasons for committing suicide? Those who survived you asked themselves these questions; they will not find answers.
Suicide demands interpretation. No one who reads this novel and knows of Levé’s suicide (and its timing guarantees that nearly every reader does know of it) can avoid projecting Levé’s questions back onto his own choice of death.
To what extent can we conflate Levé’s characters and their motivations with the author and his? The “you” of the novel shares at least two factual details with Levé’s life: each were born in winter, and each ended his life by his own hand. But we can find Levé in the artistic method and philosophy of Suicide’s “I” as much as we can in the taste for sparseness and stoicism of Suicide’s “you.” The narrator claims that
[t]o portray your life in order would be absurd: I remember you at random. My brain resurrects you through stochastic details, like picking marbles out of a bag.