Chelsea Hodson on the Sentences of Edouard Levé

Chelsea Hodson writes for Hazlitt about the "quiet intimacy" of Edouard Levé's work and how it's influenced her own, parts of which follow her essay. "I’m interested in Levé’s work not only because I love his sentences, but because I’m interested in books as objects that have the capability to outlive the author," writes Hodson. Moving on:

...Most art has this quality—films are documents of actors speaking and moving long after they’ve died, records are documents of the way songs were sung and played at one particular moment in time. But the written word is what has fascinated me for most of my life, hence my interest in essays and its ability to capture one person’s line of thought at one point in time. It seems so specific, so small and quiet, and yet certain voices travel through time, reaching us when we need them. I happened to need Levé’s Autoportrait (published in 2005, two years before his death). I was fascinated by the way the book appears as one long, relentless block of text, and each declarative sentence feeds into the next. Sometimes they directly connect, sometimes they don’t. But, when read together, they begin to take on a human quality, as if the text itself is out of breath—desperate to get everything down before it’s too late.

The work below is the first of four parts of a project in which I wrote my own Autoportrait. Each sentence uses at least one (but usually three or four) words from each of Levé’s sentences, and I’ve followed the order and number of sentences exactly...

Read on at Hazlitt.