Selbstmord

You used to believe that with age you would become less unhappy, because you then would have reasons to be sad. When you were still young, your suffering was inconsolable because you believed it to be unfounded.

When I first read Édouard Levé's Suicide back in 2018, I wasn't quite sure what to take from it, even though I liked parts of it. Giving it a second shot this week left me with much of the same impression and I find it a bit difficult to find my own stance on this text though I definitely appreciate it.

It is odd to write about Édouard Levé's Suicide because without further context that could be either mentioning his novel or his actual death. The book is irreversibly linked with the author's unfortunate suicide that happened just days after he sent the manuscript to his publisher. Many interpretations of this short novel therefore theorize if this text might have been at least partially meant as his own personal suicide letter. Apparently, there is also a possibility that the text is in relation to the suicide of a friend that happened decades before.
The novel itself is a fictional text about a man that committed suicide and the book basically consists of a narrator recounting their thoughts and memories about that nameless man. One of the interesting things about this book is that it is written in second person singular. It is “you” who committed suicide, it is “you” that liked to stay inside so much, and it is “you” that the narrator remembers. It is also “you” who preferred books written by dead authors, published after their death, which is another line that puts more emphasis on the suicide of Levé himself and the post-mortem release of this very book, be it premeditated or not.
It's a unique writing style that I really like and definitely adds to the tone.

The book is also intentionally written like a string of unsorted thoughts. The narrator jumps from one memory to the next, from one observation and question to the next. It's actually a very quick and light read despite the heavy subject matter. It's a memoir for a person that doesn't exist through personal anecdotes and speculations about their mindset.
What I like about this book is the many individual sentences or paragraphs that put the nature of depression or existentialism into words. Many of them I found very authentic and I'm sure will seem relatable to many people who have thought about the end of life. It talks about how the death of a person seems to make up the whole narration of someone's life for the ones that outlive them or how much worse it can feel to be depressed without being able to determine an actual reason for those feelings. There are some clever observations here, put in words well.
I also liked learning about this person's life to a degree but this is where I felt a certain disconnect. The narrator mentions multiple times that “you” didn't like to travel or go outside, but there are also many lengthy stories about “you” spending time in different countries and exploring the locations. It doesn't really all fit together to me.
It also might just meander a bit too much about these subjects for my liking.

I think the book is often presented as being about someone trying to figure out the reason why “you” committed suicide and there are brief mentions near the beginning of a possible final message through an open comic book placed on a table before the character ended his life, but then was accidentally thrown off the table when the wife found the corpse, so no one ever knows for sure if that was meant to be some sort of a suicide note or not. But it's not much more than that. It's better to not go into this book expecting an answer to that question or even much of an investigation to begin with.
For a while, through the first few pages, I also thought the book was going to focus on how depression and suicidal tendencies can hide in the most mundane, unassuming lives, but that thread isn't followed much either.
There is no real line going through this book. It's a collection of thoughts without a conclusion and that certainly has its own effect, but it also makes the text seem somewhat aimless to me in certain regards. Which is one of the main reasons why I'm a bit ambivalent towards this book.

Levé's book is like a thought exercise in what a suicide might mean for the people surrounding it and an interesting contemplation about the wish to die, backed up by real-life circumstances that tie in too well into the fictional text. But it's also a book that, to me, rarely seems to follow a specific intention or aims at something to give more depth to this string of thoughts.

I still enjoyed reading it, I still find it very interesting as the book that it is, and I would still recommend it to anyone interested. It's a short and quick read that's easy to get through in one sitting, in my opinion. And it definitely does have some great sections.
What kind of shocks me about this book is that it never becomes melodramatic in any way. In fact, it doesn't even strike me as very emotional in general. It's a pretty sober and clearheaded read, which I probably didn't expect from a book bluntly titled Suicide and being written in the second person singular.

At one moment Levé writes something along the lines of

The desire to live can not be dictated.