/lit/ - Literature

[Anonymous No.12405295]

Hi /lit/

What are your suggested books that deal with melancholy and suicide?

If you're not already familiar, I highly recommend Edouard Leve's Suicide along with his other few works.

It speaks of suicide without exaggeration, melodrama or pseudo-intellectual waffle. It's the straight forward, first-person perspective of a man doing through his mundane hum-drum days leading up to his suicide.

It neither glorifies or denigrates suicide.

What is most remarkable is its candid self realisation that amongst the inner turmoil and drive toward self destruction, that it is to a degree also a selfish decision with ramifications on his wife.

Despite this acute awareness, the author took his own life in a rather similar manner not too long after writing.

The book has no side to sell, and I again strongly recommend it.

It's a

[Anonymous No.12405393]

>>12405295
Suicide - Durkheim

[Anonymous No.12405723]

>>12405295
You are the first person I have seen posting about Leve ever on /lit/ other than myself. I have only read his book autoportrait but I enjoyed it. I myself could relate to it as I am also an artist and feel as though I am similarly drifting through life in a detached manner while somehow still managing to pursue sex.

[Anonymous No.12406913]

>>12405295
>It's the straight forward, first-person perspective
The whole point is that Levé is absent from the narrative despite the fact that his death can't be divorced from it, and the huge emphasis on second-person form (you, you, you) is a performativity mimicking the public trying to find out why he did it (no answer is given of course - consider the father writing heaps of theories on which page of the book his son set up before killing himself). The terzetto in the final pages - which is the original belonging to "You" - gives us the clue that the work is polyphonic, where each line intertwines the voices of the living and the dead in a triadic structure - the reader, Levé's ghostly presence and "You".

It's a suicide note lacking an "I", but not the author's corpus.

[Anonymous No.12407163]

I really enjoyed Suicide, which other works of his do you recommend? I have another book of his called Fragments (?) which is basically a long list of memories, thoughts etc. It's ok.

I recommend a book called The Ethics of Suicide, which is about 450 pages long and is pretty huge (I'm about halfway through).