Autoportrait by Édouard Levé, (trans.- Lorin Stein)
Requirements: ePUB Reader, 100 KB
Overview: In this brilliant and sobering self-portrait, Edouard Leve hides nothing from his readers, setting out his entire life, more or less at random, in a string of declarative sentences. “Autoportrait” is a physical, psychological, sexual, political, and philosophical triumph. Beyond “sincerity,” Leve works toward an objectivity so radical it could pass for crudeness, triviality, even banality: the author has stripped himself bare. With the force of a set of maxims or morals, Leve’s prose seems at first to be an autobiography without sentiment, as though written by a machine–until, through the accumulation of detail, and the author’s dry, quizzical tone, we find ourselves disarmed, enthralled, and enraptured by nothing less than the perfect fiction… made entirely of facts.
Drawing direct inspiration from Joe Brainard’s I REMEMBER, a cousin to David Markson’s author tetralogy, a personalized variant on the world historical sentence-long riffs in Patrik Ourednik’s EUROPEANA. Edouard Leve’s AUTOPORTRAIT is an unconnected series of single sentences about his life. Preferences, memories, allergies, turn-offs, proclivities, escapades, travels, loves, sexual positions, musical favorites, observations. Wisely, the book’s title was not translated as “Self Portrait” – the automatic quality of the construction, of the mind remembering, is key here. The first pages of these fragments will probably strike most readers as narcissistic to the max, but the deeper you read the more you realize Leve is simply using himself as material, that the larger point isn’t how these particular observations are attached to him but how they could be attached to anyone, a sort of simultaneous knitting and unraveling of identity, an invitation to imagine your own Autoportrait. Deeply compelling and compulsive reading
Genre: Biographies & Memoirs
Download Instructions: (Links updated on 9th January 2021. Thanks to Anonim)
UsersCloud
ZippyShare
