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meaning…” (17). The actual suicide at the beginning is simultaneously THE event and ONE event in the book because in this case any life that ends gets analyzed. But suicide “rewrites” (Levé suggests) the entire story from the beginning. Like a good song, this novel is made up of segments of time/action in which different narrative elements and moments in time from the character’s life are presented in fragments. We are given hints – hints that allow the reader to “rewrite” the story again for ourselves - thus building little events and endings /beginnings throughout the book. Brilliant. We the audience are not allowed to distill the “facts” from our own words about those facts. For example, on pages 37 and 38, the narrator recounts the character’s obsession with little details of existence, the constant flow of life, and that later on, when alone, the character found more value for himself in analyzing those moments and making their meaning and their “truth.” I am not saying here that all reality is about our telling of it, but Levé certainly pokes at the idea with his style in the novel. Yet he makes the point that the character does not believe any of his own meanings. He prefers to read other people’s meanings in good books. And this last point about reading is, as if we did not already see it, in the section of the book in which the character’s suicide and the narrator’s ruminations states its most profound evidence that this book is ALSO a book about writing as much as it is a book about analysis of events and making meaning. Again, brilliant. For even though we are told that the character prefers others’ writings to his own, we are also shown a most magnificent example: The narrator states that his friend also preferred writings of dead authors as opposed to living ones. Levé’s intelligent inclusion of this example seems to be two-fold. The first reason is that he says it is easier to think about authors from times past because if they were living, their books would be as incoherent as any single life. And secondly, the character has just given justification for his suicide. Or rather, that’s what the narrator says. Nevertheless, this is where the words “about” the song and the song are indistinguishable. We only have the artifice itself and relationships to it. Edouard Levé accomplishes all these features and many more in this novel of vignette after vignette. And just like a good song, he changes rhythm throughout and concludes with a series of short poems – items that could easily be put to music. And to top it all off, just a few days after Levé submitted his novel to the publisher (originally in French in late 2007), he also committed suicide.
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The Long Black Song: Alonzo McBride on Edouard Levé’s Suicide