For my second book for Lizzy and Karen’s Fitzcarraldo Fortnight, I read Notes on Suicide by Simon Critchley – a very, very short 2015 book. It’s 92 pages in total, but the last fifteen or so of those reprint a David Hume essay on suicide. So Critchley is covering an astonishingly complex subject in very few pages. So this will be an equally brief review!
Not only that, he says he wants to do it from personal, philosophical, literary, religious, and moral angles.
It’s a tall order and, of course, he only scratches the surface. And I think it was best when he nudged towards the personal – not necessarily his own life (though the book opens ‘this is not a suicide note’) but other individuals, famous or not. He looks through the common themes of suicide notes, and considers them almost as art. They appear in the narrative to illustrate Critchley’s point, or to divert the paragraph into a different direction, even though we seldom know from where or how they’ve been selected. For instance, Critchley described this as one of the most poignant suicide notes he’s read:
Dear Betty,
I hate you.
Love, George.
I found the sections on moral philosophy a little less interesting, because they are rather cursory and abstract – and have obviously been considered in rather more detail elsewhere. He can hardly hope to plumb the depths of the topic in a handful of pages. But even a moment like his question ‘Why do we find suicide sad?’ can lead to all sorts of other questions in the reader’s mind, to contemplate in their own time.
And somehow the mix of the intimate and the global, the detailed and the distant, make Notes on Suicide a brief but captivating book. It barely touches the surface of what could be said about it, but it still made me think more deeply about this difficult and curious topic. And that’s probably one of the best things you can ask of an essay.