“The Suicides” opens with a quote from Camus so I figured it was time to stop putting it off.
I received “The Suicides” from the NYRB Classics Club subscriptions that I had last year (which have mostly just gone to a colorful stack). Can’t say why I chose this over the others but I’m glad that I did.
The book opens like “The Stranger.” An unnamed narrator realizes that he’s about to turn 33–the age his father committed suicide. As a journalist trying to sell stories to magazines, his boss assigns a story about three suicides with no information besides pictures. He spends the remainder of the novel trying to find details from the three pictures while also following new suicides in the region. He is quick to ask favors and put others in uncomfortable positions to find any small amount of information. However, he’s much more interested in the women he meets along the way (though not his girlfriend) while he spends time at the fights of movies.
The writing is sparse and interspersed with statistical studies of suicide from one of the characters. The story moves and reaches conclusions in a way but generally is very stagnant. The narrator feels trapped for most of the novel with only a few glimmers of hope. Other reviews connect this to the political state of affairs around this time in Argentina.
Maybe the situation reaches Camus’s absurd where the narrator finds little reason to continue living or go along with any typical role. At times there is passion and revolt, but hardly freedom. Certainly his job is Sisyphean. But maybe the situation is more Kafkaesque which, according to Camus, is too hopeful to capture the absurd, but somehow “The Suicides” might also have some hope.
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