(.) Works is a book charged with wit and wonder, seeded with the prospect of future masterpieces." - Jim Ruland, The Los Angeles Times " Works is a slim volume of big ideas.(.) Some of the works imagined are silly, some tiresome, but almost all of them have the quality of a wish, a poignancy that comes from having been imagined but not enacted." - Nicholas Lezard, The Guardian
#Edouard leve full
In some cases, it’s a force that can’t be explained at all. It simply asks us to view mental illness through different lenses - sociological, medical, and perhaps philosophical ones too. What to do about depression, then, if it is so multiple and hard to capture and treat? Suicide is certainly not a pro-suicide manifesto even if that was his eventual end. Levé asks people to understand this: the sufferer of depression and associated mental conditions is experiencing something that perhaps cannot be explained by the contemporary scientific discourse or by our current linguistic paradigms. It is both to different extents for different people - it’s multiple, hard to grasp and therefore hard to treat.
The idea communicated by his prose, however, is that depression as a lived experience is neither simply external events that can be modified nor chemical imbalances fixed by medication. People wanted to know why, as if there were specific circumstances that pushed him to this end. Levé notably committed suicide shortly after turning in his manuscript to the editor, and the news turned the book into a best-seller. This is not an easy decision: he sincerely regrets he will inflict pain on his wife and family, but sees no alternative. His dissatisfaction with life is so heavily felt by his whole being - his thoughts and his body - that he decides to bet on death solving this suffering.
Is it just chemical imbalances? After consulting a psychiatrist and trying medications that induce mania, panic and disassociation, this unnamed man starts to wonder whether his depression is not just chemical imbalances in his nervous system. This conflict drives much of the narration: he has beauty, health, a wife and a family, friends and colleagues and a stable income - so why is he always so melancholic, so reluctant to step outside his room? The easy answer is that depression is a medical condition somewhat independent of external factors: it is chemical imbalances in one’s brain what stops people from wanting to lead a regular life. Suicide remarkably uses the second person throughout its pages, with a close friend addressing a 25 year-old man with a plethora of unique traits and a life that on paper did not seem bad but who nonetheless has entertained the idea of suicide for a while. But the book was brief, and I wanted to see if Levé had anything illuminating to say about an action embedded with so many cultural and clinical meanings. There was no reason then for me to want to immerse myself in a book dealing with that subject, especially as I had just finished reading another novel dealing with it and I am trying to stabilize my own struggles with my mental health. I had read plenty about the topic throughout my life and have had myself suicidal ideations at different points in my life. Someone committed suicide and the author had much to say about that. A novel? Poetry? Regardless of its format, the subject matter was clear. The title alone grabbed my attention: suicide. I had heard of Édouard Levé’s Suicide a few months ago.
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