Suicide

Edouard Leve's fourth novel Suicide is told in the second person, and while it loosely involves a suicide-related plot (about an unnamed man who kills himself at age twenty-five, leaving his friend to try to explain it) the book is primarily comprised of various death-related observations and aphorisms:

You kept your day planners from previous years. You reread them when you doubted your existence. You would relive your past by randomly flipping through them as if you were skimming through a chronicle of yourself. You sometimes found appointments you no longer remembered, and people’s names, written in your own hand, which meant nothing whatsoever to you. However, you could recall most events. And so you worried about not remembering what happened in between the things you wrote down. You had lived those moments too. Where had they gone?

[...]

You remain alive insofar as those who have known you outlive you. You will die with the last of them. Unless some of them have made you live on in words, in the memory of their children. For how many generations will you live on like this, as a character from a story?

[...]

Your life was a hypothesis. Those who die old are made of the past. Thinking of them, one thinks of what they have done. Thinking of you, one thinks of what you could have become. You were, and you will remain, made up of possibilities.

Leve's book became a media sensation in France when the author hanged himself just ten days after completing his manuscript; even today, it feels appallingly exploitative as the dust jacket sensationally announces the author's fate.