Autoportrait

Like a monologue by a fascinating manic-depressive. I loved it. I’d like to see it performed onstage. Please, read this out loud. Literature as Performance Art.

I almost gave this book four stars until I saw the heap of adjectives that has been dumped on it in praise. It's one of those books, like Joe Brainard's "I Remember" that will have you thinking, "I could have done this. If only I'd thought of it first." But of course, you didn't think of it first. (Of course that hasn't kept several people from writing their own versions of Brainard's book.) Anyway, for page after page the writer tells you what he likes and dislikes, what he has done, what he thinks of doing, what he owns, etc. etc. Once in a while there are two or three sentences which "dwell" on the same subject, but mostly it's just statements on different subjects, one after the other. In a way it's an ego trip, as is often suicide in a way, another of the writer's accomplishments. It's interesting enough to keep me reading, and I enjoy agreeing or disagreeing or learning about some things in this man's life. But it's no masterpiece.

A beautiful book more or less in the tradition of Brainard’s I Remember and Perec’s Je me souviens (more like Brainard), giving you an arresting and invigorating sense of a wonderful personality.

This book sticks with you, and maddeningly Leve creates a dark, cold, empty portrait. At one point, he said maybe he was writing this so he would never have to speak again. It reads like a confession written in the throws of a manic episode.

I read Leve's Suicide before this and bought it after learning of its existence. Written in first person, it is a fantastic look into Leve's mind and above all, his lyricism. It is haunting. It is beautiful. It is his photograph.

Engaging read!

In the noble and under-utilized lineage of Sei Shonagon and Joe Brainard, here is Levé’s Autoportrait. Each sentence is a fresh start, “I” is the touchstone, but the point is not so much to trumpet the self as to endlessly give it away. Like Joe Brainard’s “I Remember”, Autoportrait is an act of generosity, an intimate act. Here is the self, its memories, habits and preferences, endlessly raveling and unraveling, appearing suddenly and disappearing to make way for whatever is next.Autoportrait is 117 pages of unbroken text. It may be daunting to not see a paragraph break, a place to take a breath, but this book is utterly and helplessly readable -- the only trouble is when you try to stop.On page 9 Levé writes, “In India, I traveled in a train compartment with a Swiss man whom I didn’t know, we were crossing the plains of Kerala, I told him more about myself in several hours than I had told my best friends in several years, I knew I would never see him again, he was an ear without repercussions.” Reading Autoportrait is just like that -- I felt I was that man on the train, intimate from the start, hearing Leve’s memories, preferences, anguishes and tics in a rush. (He mentioned never having had gay sex so frequently I wanted to tell him, “Come here, sweetheart, let’s tic that box already.”)When I reached the end I wished there was more, so immediately I read it again. After reading it twice -- because Leve writes he would be glad to live his life a second time but not a third -- I wished that this could become an established and recognized form: “the autoportrait” in honor of Leve. It seems to me that the autoportrait is in some ways superior to the memoir, because it is closer to life than the story of it. The autoportrait presents the “I” as it actually is -- an unstable, flickering, changeable multitudinous semblance, instead of one big unified project. Think of how much better we would understand people and eras if we could sprinkle across time people like Sei Shonagon, Joe Brainard, Edouard Levé, and if autoportraits could be written, instead of the inherently misleading memoir: Chapter One, My Highly Promising Childhood.Inevitably, I had to try writing an autoportrait of my own and, sure enough, once the process got underway it seemed to turn to turn up much that was fresh and alive, as well as truths seldom glimpsed in the “official” version of me and who I’d like to think I am. (* If anyone else has tried this, or knows others who have, I would like very much to read the result -- please contact me!)This book is unnervingly poignant because it appears to include both Leve’s suicide and how it might have been averted. I am certain that reality was not so simple but reading this I could not help but wish that I could hurry back in time to 2007, to the final ten days between when Levé delivered his final manuscript (“Suicide”) and when he ended his life. “Excuse me, sir, here is your ticket to India, it’s business class but you must leave tonight.”As that is not possible, we are left with this brilliant and fascinating small book, crammed with digressions, illuminations, and possibilities. May it be read and emulated.

Currently there is no "Click to LOOK INSIDE" option for Édouard Levé's AUTOPORTRAIT here on Amazon, as there is for his final book,  Suicide (French Literature Series) . That's unfortunate. While it's easy enough to describe AUTOPORTRAIT's singular construction -- one long paragraph containing a string of over 3000 declarative sentences about the author himself -- it is difficult to predict the effect the book will have on any individual reader.You might find it a profound statement of the unknowability of another human being. You might find it a source of amusement, as it sometimes reads like a parody of a personal ad (with such declarations as "I consent to feeling moved by sunsets" and "I like rain in the summer") while at other times it mimics the bon mots of a deadpan standup comic ("After I get a haircut, my hair's too short"). But it's very possible you'll find only frustration in pages that are self-indulgent to the Nth degree. Some will say Levé's a bore.So this may be helpful: The online edition of the Spring 2011 issue (No. 196) of The Paris Review contains a substantial excerpt from the text. The piece is entitled, "When I look at a strawberry, I think of a tongue." In it the book's translator, Lorin Stein, has assembled about ten percent of AUTOPORTRAIT's sentences and laid them out in an easier to experience paragraphed format. He begins his excerpt with the first sentence that appears in the book, and ends with the book's final sentence, but otherwise rearranges bits internally. Not that this matters, as there's no arc and no direction in AUTOPORTRAIT. Treating its sentences to a game of 52-card-pickup is not mistreatment; it works just fine. To find the material online, Google the words, Paris Review Autoportrait.

c'est un autoportrait touchant, touchant parce qu'il aurait pu être écrit par vous, par moi, c'est la vérité nue d'un être humain qui se livre de manière tellement différente: une succession de phrases qui n'ont apparemment aucun lien entre elles, comme des pensées sur soi jetées sur le papier mais qui peignent progressivement le portrait d'un homme touchant. Je vous le recommande vivement, c'est un petit prix pour un livre différent de tous et qui m'a donné envie de faire mon propre autoportrait .