April’s Pages

SUICIDE

by Edouard Levé

(Dalkey Archive Press, 2011)

The French writer and photographer Edouard Levé killed himself in 2007, well before his publisher had even typeset the galleys for his final book, Suicide. Levè's bizarre demise—he hanged himself at home just after turning in a manuscript written in the second-person to a young man who killed himself at home—contains all of Levé's signature artistic motifs: meticulous stagecraft, elaborate gestures void of emotion, and whispers of droll absurdity. French readers, of course, have long appreciated the art of suicide as an act of self-determination in a cruel world—Antonin Artaud, for example, exalted suicide as "the fabulous and remote victory of men who think well." Suicide has just been published in English by Dalkey Archive and we can only hope translations of Levé's previous three books will soon follow.

Levé was a biz-school grad who decided to become an artist. Two of Levé's photographic series, Pornographie and Fictions, illustrate his predilection for the frozen contortions of human intercourse. His contemporary tableaux are classical in structure and playfully evocative of grander eras and themes in art by, say, Jacques-Louis David or Nicolas Poussin.

Certainly, while you're reading Suicide, you are flooded with an inherent trust in the author, merely because you do not have to even doubt for a moment that he knows his subject. (In the case of suicide, the advice to "write what you know" is a challenge.) There are insights here that veil and unveil possible conclusions—

"Your life was less sad than your suicide might suggest."

"Dead, you make me more alive."

"The sheer number of things you didn't do is dizzying, because it throws light on the number of things we will ourselves be stripped of."

Sensitive, intellectual, atheist types will find it hard to resist the temptation of tallying the pros and cons: Does longevity alone guarantee a happier life? Does suicide ever make sense? "Your suicide was scandalously beautiful." Levé's simple queries and declarations to an unnamed "you" have a chilly exterior but they are also tricky and gentle and they pile up like steps leading up or down—the direction is up to you.

—CAF

STATE OF MINDS: TEXAS CULTURE AND ITS DISCONTENTS

by Don Graham

(University of Texas Press, 2011)

In this month's issue of Texas Monthly, longtime Texan Paul Burka writes, "Texas, with its frontier background, has always valued common sense above schooling...." His statement lends an indirect nod to the outsider notion—held by the same folk who believe Lone Star kids still ride horses to school—that "Texas culture" is an oxymoron. In State of Minds, Don Graham, who for thirty years has taught the University of Texas course "Life and Literature of the Southwest," lays the myth down. Graham is hilarious, meticulous, critical, and keen-spirited in his survey of Texas art and culture, as he covers topics ranging from Cormac McCarthy's Oprah interview to the politics and passion behind The Last Picture Show to Mary Karr's early memoirs (in a piece titled "The Pits"). In 1960, John Steinbeck wrote that "Texas is a state of mind...a mystique closely approximating a religion...that people either passionately love...or passionately hate...Texas is the obsession, the proper study, and the passionate possession of all Texans." Graham both supports this observation, and shows why it's so. For all Texans, and for anyone with even a passing interest in the state, this collection of essays is an essential read.

—JHB

THE WEIRD SISTERS

by Eleanor Brown

(Amy Einhorn Books/Putnam, January 2011)

Eleanor Brown's Shakespeare-soaked debut novel examines the lives of three sisters—Rose (Rosalind of As You Like It), Bean (Bianca of Taming of the Shrew), Cordy (Cordelia of King Lear). While their mother's breast cancer is the tragedy that brings them back to Barnwell, Ohio, where their father is a Shakespeare professor at the local university, each sister has her own weirdness (which taken as its original meaning, derives from wyrd: "fate"). Rose has all but doomed her engagement by refusing to move to England, while Bean flees New York City after her means of funding her boys-and-clothes addiction fails. And Cordy, youngest and most aloof of them all, finds herself bound to the (accidental) life growing inside her. Heavy on the Shakespearean quips and dysfunctional tangles of a family, THE WEIRD SISTERS is at times overly self-conscious of these domestic hallmarks, as if the author is acknowledging the rules before she breaks them (and readers will be glad she did).

LINES WE LIKED: "Sometimes we had the overwhelming urge to grab our father by the shoulders and shake him until the meaning of his obtuse quotations fell from his mouth like loosened teeth." 

—MTP

DEVIL RED

by Joe R. Lansdale

(Knopf, March 2011)

Joe R. Lansdale's tenth installment in the Hap & Leonard crime series is set in East Texas among chilly Houston skyscrapers and desolate stretches of country roads and decayed neighborhoods, where the residents don't care enough to bury rotting stray cats. This time, Hap Collins and Leonard Price track down the serial murderer Devil Red in a mystery that's chock-full of satanic symbols, wannabe vampires, greasy regional thugs, a geeky newspaper fact-checker, and unchecked assassins. Lansdale deftly executes rapid-fire humor and violence, leaving the reader clinging till the end.

LINES WE LIKED: "As we sniffed the urine on the fall air, brown oak leaves were dropping and tumbling across the lot with a crackling noise, like someone stepping on paper sacks, or like someone breaking a big guy's knee with a baseball bat."

—DHW

WHAT WAS THE HIPSTER?

(n+1 Research Branch Small Book Series #3, 2010)

The OA's favorite passage: 

James Pogue: I don't think [hipsterism] is a very Zizekian 'do nothing' [political philosophy]. It's: "be an activist by not participating." I think that is, to a certain extent, one of the things that's harder to criticize about the hipster than others. I think that it's produced some positive things, as easy to make fun of them as they are.

Kyle Sturgeon: I just met a thousand Zizekians at Barnes and Noble, where they were all buying his book.

Moe Tkacik: I used to work at American Apparel and he was seriously the only intellectual that any of them had heard of.

Pogue: Do they have the sense of that, inasmuch as we're arguing...I just feel like hipsters are denuded of political impulses.

Sturgeon: They're not! Like cumbia—like the biggest club of one of the biggest new music styles coming out—a global phenomenon—the club is called Zizek.

Pogue: I know, but what does that matter?

Sturgeon: That's my point. It's completely vacuous. They're adopting a political philosophy that is empty.

Christian Lorentzen: I don't think they know what the political philosophy really is.

Pogue: That's what I'm saying.

—WGE