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Autoportrait (2012)

by Édouard Levé(Favorite Author)

4.35 of 5 Votes: 4

ISBN

1564787079 (ISBN13: 9781564787071)

languge

English

genre

Memoir & Autobiography

publisher

Dalkey Archive Press

review 1: This small, strange book is unlike anything I have read. Made up of disconnected and seemingly random statements about the "I," it strikes me as a kind of pointillist autobiography, and the author in fact was a painter and photographer before turning to writing. "Autoportrait" also is a denial of both depth and meaning, although there are, to be sure, deep anxieties, in fact a few neuroses, lurking not too far below the surface. Some of Levé's self-observations are humorous ("When I want to see theater, I go to mass"), some poignant ("To describe my life precisely would take longer than to live it"), some baffling ("I do not trust untranslatable texts"), some tragic ("I am afraid of not dying"). But in the end I could not help but read "Autoportrait" as tragedy: Lev�... more� published this book two years before he took is own life in 2007 at the age of forty-two. While I am not ready to declare his work masterpiece of "self-writing," it is a daring and quite disturbing effort to present a life as little more than disjointed surface.
review 2: Initially, I suspected I would grow tired of this book's form: each page a wall of simple, declarative sentences wherein the author offers a little anecdote about himself, without any real pattern or structure. But, thankfully, this proved to be quite a treat! The book reads nicely, and I feel confident in Lorin Stein's (editor of The Paris Review) translations from the French. Most striking, though, are the similarities between the author and myself. Never has anther person's life so closely mirrored my own. After about 15 pages, I grabbed a highlighter and restarted the book. There are probably an average of 3-4 highlighted sentences per page. Were I to extract these sentences and compile them I would have a concise little autobiography of my own! less

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