EDOUARD LEVE SERIES
Before the publication of his novels, Levé was better known as a conceptual photographer. His photographs were often composed scenes that were not as transparent as their titles would suggest, as in his collection Pornography in which models, fully clothed, contort into sexual positions, or his collection Rugby, a series of photographs of men in business attire playing the titular sport.
EDOUARD LEVE HOW TO
Like most of Levé work, Newspaper leads to speculation about how to read it: it is one thing that pretends to be another after all, and the mind wants to resolve this discrepancy. What’s it about? A woman who is “a member of a narcotics agency, picks up a little extra money serving as bate for the vice squad.” I hear she’ll be scantily clad and heavily made up.
EDOUARD LEVE UPDATE
How do you want to spend your time? Naval sculptures in the morning, a film about parallel universes in the afternoon, and tonight we can check our lottery number at 8:25 before getting to the sports update and then falling to sleep while watching the nine o’clock movie. Finally the book peters out with its Entertainment Guide and Television listings. And so on, with the banality of good and bad weather, triumphs and letdowns in sports, the weirdness of the classifieds ads, births and deaths, the smallness of arts and culture reporting. Science & Technology fills us in on meningitis scares and radiation exposures, experiments with human cloning and risings in average yearly temperature. The economic report is all about interest rates and household consumption, worker strikes and worker rights, money laundering and a downturn in the market. Suicide, murder, rape, pedophilia, robbery, white-collar crime fill out the local news. Themes of power and death and terrorism dominate the international news. What these singular books explore is a kind of aesthetics of the incomprehensible as it acknowledges the multiplicities within its author and his world.Īs a book, Newspaper plays with some of these same ideas, and stands as an intriguing testament of life in the early aughts (it was first published in France in 2004). Works is a catalogue of 533 ideas for future art works-some he completed, most he didn’t (Levé committed suicide in 2007). In his books Suicide and Autoportrait, he writes pointillisticly, without the traditional patterns and techniques of fiction, and the sentences seem written down at random. Owing a self-acknowledged debt to George Perec, a founding member of the Oulipo (short for Ouvroir de littérature potentielle-”workshop of potential literature”) Levé’s work is often formal experiments that reframe reality and bring into focus the fragmentary nature of memory. The first book was Suicide in 2008, followed by Autoportrait in 2012 (which I reviewed for Numéro Cinq) and Works in 2014.
EDOUARD LEVE ARCHIVE
Newspaper is Edouard Levé’s second ‘novel’ but his fourth book to be translated into English and published by Dalkey Archive Press. And like any daily newspaper, Newspaper can be riveting reading, and at other times dry (deliberately so) to the point of numbing. It’s a newspaper, sans columns, a readymade novel, one event follows another. Organized into eleven sections-International, Society, Economics, Science & Technology, Classifieds, Weather, Sports, Arts & Culture, etc.-each part is comprised of individual news stories or items of interest. Such is the news in Edouard Levé’s Newspaper, a 124-page fictional newspaper packaged as a book. “The rains that have been sweeping over the west since early this morning are moving across the region.” “Internet site seeks numerologists and astrologists. “A simulated airplane crash has gone badly wrong.” “High-speed trains are once again running late.” “Two young people, ages sixteen and eighteen, are being investigate for the rape and murder of a sixty-night year old grandmother.” “Approximately twenty people have died in a suicide bombing at a seaside resort hotel.”
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