Book review : Legend of a Suicide

 Hi Charlie ! 

Today I am going to write a book review (yayy :D). The book I chose is Legend of a suicide, which was written by David Vann in 2008. It’s a story collection composed of five short stories and a quite long novella. The book is a semi-autobiographical tale about the impact of a father's suicide on his teenage son. The author, David Vann, represents his fictional self as Roy Fenn, and his father as Jim. The story is however a fiction and not a real autobiography, but as the author said, « Every fiction has its part of truth ».

What made me choose this book was the title of course (:D). I wonder why a suicide would make me want to read a book, but that’s one of the reasons why I did ! The other reason was (more understandable lol) it’s cover. It’s honestly very beautiful, a fish is basically represented by multiple little drawings, and the vivid colours caught my eye. 

Legend of a Suicide tells the story of a young man named Roy trying to contend with the pain of his father’s suicide. The book is an exploration of the tragic gaps between a boy and his father.

The first story is Ichthyology. Roy remembers his childhood in Alaska, where his father was a dentist. When Roy was about five years old, his father had an interest in women other than his wife. The marriage then breaks up and Roy moves to California with his mother.  After this event, Jim, the father, bought a fishing boat to wander lonely in the sea.

Rhoda is the title of the next story or chapter and the name of Roy’s new stepmother. Jim married Rhoda but it also ended with a divorce.  

A Legend of Good Men relates how Roy's mother was desired by many suitors after her divorce.

In Sukkwan Island, Jim decides to take his son to this island, to live in an isolated cabin for a year. It’s a wild island in southern Alaska, accessible only by the sea. Because of several personal failures he has done before, the father sees this as an opportunity to make a new start and to reconnect with his son, that he actually doesn’t know that much. The harshness of this life and the failings of the father who didn't prepare well for that stay and despite his confidence, has not any experiment in this domain soon turn their trip into a nightmare, and the situation quickly becomes hard to manage. 

In Ketchikan, Roy, who is now thirty, returns to the town of his early childhood, the place where his father had first gone astray. In Roy’s opinion, that’s the place where he should finally leave his father to eternal rest despite his grief.  

The last story, The Higher Blue, is a mixture of fantasy and narrative reality. They’re comments about Jim made by Roy's mother serve to bookend the novella.

I think the first word that comes to my mind when I think about this book is unforgettable. It brings very strong emotions and puts the reader face to face with the dark side of human nature. It’s difficult to read not because of the vocabulary, but because of the heavy atmosphere, the dark images, which make the book impossible to put down or to forget. The writing, intimate and, at times, painfully honest, takes the reader by the feelings by giving a lot of details about the situations. According to the author, the writing was supposed to be simple and to the point, while I only had this impression when it wasn’t omitting upsetting and dark details. The writing might be simple, but the meaning is hard to understand in the first place because of the complicated story.

Sukkwan Island, the novella in the heart of the book, was actually the most striking part. The other stories give a sort of context, a certain setting to the novella even though trying to link them is quite complicated (don’t make the understanding more difficult or your brain will explode lol). These stories also provide a framing to the main novella, which is told with the third-person while the others are told with the first-person through Roy’s point of view.

To conclude, I would vividly recommend this book. However, I would not advise it to the faint of heart, some moments are really hard to take and to imagine and the subject of the book treats a quite sensitive subject ( come on, it’s easy to get with the title lol ). I really liked the book anyway, the stories are very short (about 20 pages each), but Sukkwan Island is quite long (about 200 pages) . The book in the school’s library, do not hesitate to borrow it if I managed to convince you ! 

Have a good day ! 

Mélissa :D