Suicide

Suicide is not a fictionalized account of Lev s death; in some respects it is a negative image of it. You didn t leave any letters for loved ones to explain your death, he writes, although Lev himself reportedly did. Lev s art and life nonetheless converge, fuse, and end brutally together. Ironically, Suicide represents a new departure for Lev : his previous books could be considered conceptual conceits, whereas Suicide is something else, a purely literary work. At the end of his life, Lev had by no means exhausted his art. --Hugo Wilcken