Autoportrait
Ratings5
Average rating4.2
To describe my life precisely would take longer than to live it.
Levé's Autoportrait is a unique sort-off memoir. It's not a chronological retelling of the author's life or an assortment of memories guided by a coherent thread. This book is a string of random individual thoughts from the person about the person. Little glimpses into a personality.
Between mundane observations and trivial opinions is the occasional heavier facet of his life, but all of it is presented in a neutral way. It's funny at times, thought-provoking at others, and knowing some of Levé's other works and his ultimate fate makes certain parts stand out even more.
At one point, Levé writes “My death will change nothing.” But I'm certain that his death changed how people read this book.
Coming to this after having read Levé's Suicide (twice) made the stream-of-consciousness writing seem very familiar. Reading Levé's candid thoughts about his own struggles with depression and experiences with suicide attempts buried between a hundred different mundane statements felt intimate. While Suicide always brought with it the question of whether the text might have been Levé's own musings about suicide or maybe a premature suicide note for himself, hidden in fiction, here with Autoportrait there is no game to play anymore. He's looking you right into the face and telling you, nonchalantly and seemingly unbothered, his casual feelings about his own struggles. Fiction and reality kind of connect here.
It's even more interesting when he proposes ideas for his future or offers assumptions about his later life which, as we as the reader now know, will never happen. He writes that he expects to die at 85, but his life ended at 42. He also claims that he will not lose his eyesight or hearing because he will die before that happens. That has become true. He writes that he would like to visit Japan before he dies but has a feeling that won't happen. Seeing that he died three years after writing this text, he was probably right.
He also thanks his parents for giving him the gift of life.
But he also writes that the hole is his “favorite part of a sock” and that he thinks “the big toe is doomed to disappear”.
Near the end, during one of the longer tangents, he describes how he spent some of his favorite moments with a friend who he had many drunken conversations with in the past. He then continues to say that this friend, one day, told his wife he forgot something in the house when they were about to leave to play Tennis, went back into the house and shot himself with a gun placed in the basement.
It came out of nowhere, but I immediately recognized it as the setup for Levé's other book, the aforementioned Suicide, probably his internationally best-known work. I remember reading a lot of theories in the past about who people think that book might have been about. Seeing it here, described in this context, three years before he wrote that Suicide, ultimately linked the personal autobiography of sorts with his fictional text.
Autoportait makes for a brisk and at many moments entertaining read, but also gives a very candid and intimate look into a man's personality.
Édouard Levé was an interesting man. Not because he was special or glamorous, but because he was an ordinary person, with his own unique experiences and thoughts, which he decided to put to paper in such a straightforward way. His life ended way too soon, but parts of his mind are forever left behind for curious people to read.
Autoportrait is like a randomly shuffled deck of personal experiences which makes it a more intimate and human experience than some written-out, elaborate autobiographies that I have read.
