M HKA Ensembles

Book, 14 x 20.5 cm, 128 p, language: French, publisher: P.O.L Editeur, ISBN: 978-2-84682-236-7.

Collection: Collection M HKA, Antwerp (Inv. no. B 2027/45).

Literary synopsis

Suicide by Edouard Levé tells two intertwined stories. In one, a young man has killed himself and a friend meditates on the dead man's life. In the other, a young author has killed himself, but not before writing a novel in which a young man has killed himself and a friend meditates on the dead man's life. Part of what makes the experience of reading Suicide so singular is that the young author in question is Edouard Levé himself. Ten days after handing in his manuscript, Levé hanged himself, at age forty-two. It is all but impossible when reading, then, not to be constantly aware that Levé was about to kill himself when he was writing and did kill himself soon after he stopped.

- Laird Hunt, 2011

Relation of the novel to the artist’s practice

Levé wrote Autoportrait in 2002, while he was traveling across America, taking the photographs that became Série Amérique. The series looks at towns in the United States bearing the same names as towns in other countries. Amérique was Édouard Levé's final collection of photos. In 2007, the year after its publication, he took his own life at 42. His last prose work, the short novel Suicide, was completed 10 days before his death, and expands on an anecdote in Autoportrait about a childhood friend. "To survive an ordeal," Levé says elsewhere, "I break it up into sections." One might glean that those sections were his projects—his photos and his books—and that the ordeal was life itself.