The Foundational Act | Review 31

Review 31 is an online literary review.

The Foundational Act by Jon Repetti Édouard Levé, trans. Jan Steyn, Suicide Dalkey Archive Press, 100pp, ISBN 9781628976106, £12.00 A conceptual artist completes a novel titled Suicide and kills himself ten days later. The book becomes a cult hit after the act provokes a media frenzy. This sounds like satire, but it really happened — in France (where else?) — circa 2008. That novel, by Édouard Levé, was translated into stark, devastating English by Jan Steyn in 2011. It’s out in a new edition from Dalkey Archive this year. The circumstances of Suicide ’s publication immediately prompt question

related reading

• Men Who Kill Themselvesmetropolitanreview.org
• the life you were meant to livepersonalcanon.com
• “Infinite Jest” Has Turned Thirty. Have We Forgotten How to Read It?newyorker.com
• The Painted Protest, by Dean Kissickharpers.org
• brutalism of the mindblgtylr.substack.com
• Nobody’s Protest Novel | Frank Guannplusonemag.com
• Frontpagesternberg-press.com
• never let me go - by Kai - golden bluegoldenblue.substack.com
• Nothing Ever Happens: “Mister Squishy” and the Year of the Sentence Diagram | Los Angeles Review of Bookslareviewofbooks.org
• Human, All Too Inhumannewrepublic.com
• Fruit Without Taste: On Marguerite Duras’s “The Easy Life” | Los Angeles Review of Bookslareviewofbooks.org
• ‘Infinite Jest,’ the Internet, and the Politics of Reading | Los Angeles Review of Bookslareviewofbooks.org