VivaSync

Suicide is packaged as directly as pornography. Its title leaves no room for ambiguity. Its marketing holds out the promise of voyeurism. The text on the back cover dictates how the novel will be consumed: "Edouard Levé delivered the manuscript for his final book . . . just a few days before he took his own life. Suicide is not, then, simply another novel – it is, in a sense, the author's own oblique, public suicide note . . ."

In his 42 years (1965-2007), Levé accomplished a considerable amount, publishing four books of prose and three of photography. His work in each medium is conspicuously conceptual. For example, Oeuvres (2002) is an assemblage of 533 proposals for different artistic projects, while Autoportrait (2005), a continuous block of autobiographical statements, has been likened to a form of literary cubism. On the photography side, Levé's work is characterised in part by a taste for expressing the sensational in mundane terms – appending famous names to portraits of everyday people, staging his subjects in mock-pornographic configurations while fully clothed in business attire, and so on.

Suicide shows another side of the French artist's interest in transfixing phenomena. Since suicide normally takes place behind a curtain of privacy even more exclusionary than the one reserved for sex, its ability to drum up interest is assured. As the narrator of the novel remarks, "I've never heard a single person, since your death, tell your life story starting at the beginning. Your suicide has become the foundational act." The "you" of this statement refers to the narrator's friend, who took his life 20 years ago, at the age of 25. In so doing, he conferred upon it a grim symmetry – his birthday being 25 December.

Aside from offering up elliptical remarks as to the reasoning behind his friend's suicide ("You died because you searched for happiness at the risk of finding the void"), the narrator devotes his attention mainly towards theorising upon the significance of his action. Early on he declares: "Your suicide was the most important thing you ever said." There are a number of ironies to this statement. For one, its ponderous nature actually works to freight the narrator's other recollections, of his friend's quotidian activities, with a surplus of ominous meaning. What's more, whatever significance the departed wished to attach to his death was made uncertain when his wife accidently closed the comic book that he'd left open for her to find. The unsettling comedy continues: "Your father bought dozens of copies . . . He came to know the text and the images of this book by heart; this was not at all like him, but he ended up identifying with the comic."

At another point, the narrator avows: "You don't make me sad, but solemn . . . I take advantage on your behalf of things you can no longer experience. Dead, you make me more alive." Nestled within that brief passage is the basis of the book's muted sense of hope.

If this irony-laden book contains a message to the reader it may well be this: "You suffered real life in its continuous stream, but you controlled the flow of fictional life by reading at your own rhythm . . . As a reader, you had the power of a god: time submitted to you." If one were to substitute "reading" and "reader" with "creating" and "creator" one might conclude that it's possible to read Suicide not simply as a veiled cri de coeur by a man looking to air the messy circumstances for which he took his life, but as a controlled work of art by a conceptual artist who wanted to leave us with a lasting document from which we might, paradoxically, muster the strength to carry on.

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