Content warning: this piece deals with both suicide in fiction and disclosure of a real suicide attempt
I’m going to tell the readership this bluntly: Coup de Grâce by Sofia Ajram (he/she) is a book about suicide. This is a slim novella about a man who boards the subway to the end of the line intending to drown himself, but upon leaving the train finds himself in an endless maze of corridors and rooms, with only one other person for company.
I’m going to tell the readership another thing bluntly: in April 2023 I tried to kill myself by jumping off of a bridge. The way I experienced this book, and the way I have interpreted its themes, is completely and utterly inseparable from having had that experience. This is going to be a thematically heavy piece on that front so I am warning people now.
With that said: this whole thing also, at first, reminded me of the new season of Severance, which I watched the week before writing this review. The unending corridors with the occasional vaguely recognizable business (such as the convenience store, always empty, from which our protagonist pilfers his nourishment) strike the same chord as the featureless corridors of the severed floor of the Lumon building. Both works are wrangling with the meaning of living when the world around you is so crushingly, miserably oppressive, and why ending your own life wouldn’t be a rational response to it (such as when Helly R. tried to hang herself in the escalator). The severed floor, however, at least has decent lighting. For at least the first half of the rather slim book the narrator had the voice of Seth Milchick in my mind.
The supernatural element here is something that is more hinted at than displayed, the most vivid of that rare open depiction is a harrowing physical depiction of the narrator’s grief. The entire feeling of all of this is a certain grottiness, a sort of brutalist gracelessness that makes the whole novella feel cold, uncaring, impersonal. The few other characters there are in this wasteland of corridors are not much better; all of them are too locked in their own problems, their own focuses, their own obsessions to care about our main character, a man named Vicken who is of Armenian heritage living in Montreal.
Vicken is a medic who has himself talked people out of suicides. Ajram spares you gory details of what brought Vicken to the metaphorical ledge, and chooses rather to shine a light on the voids in his life. In Vicken, you see an ultimately decent human being, but one who is on some level deeply empty of things that make life worth living. To borrow from Mark Fisher’s book of criticism The Weird and the Eerie, this is a very eerie book by Fisher’s definition, which is the deep unnerving lack of something that should be there, but isn’t. Vicken’s life is deeply and profoundly unwhole, and that is the focus of the novella: not details, but mood.
It’s a mood I can relate to all too well. When I look back to the months before I drove to that bridge in the middle of the night, the feeling was that of a profound emptiness. I am not comfortable making too many details public, but suffice to say it was about me, in my status as an autistic person, to be able to truly fit in a neurotypical world. Human beings are social creatures; we evolved to live in small groups. What had set me down that dark path was the fact that I had not even a small group, but no group, or so my mind had resolved, and that removing myself from aforementioned neurotypical world was my only realistic option. After my attempt failed due to the intervention of a kindly passerby, I spent the next several months in a sort of aimless state.
It’s that aimless state that this novella captures so crushingly well. Vicken is, and I once was, someone who had every intention of ending his life and then found himself in a situation where life was going to go on. The end result, for both of us, was an unnerving existential shrug, a sense of ‘now what?’ pervading every aspect of our being. There is the unpleasant undercurrent where you ask yourself what the point of any of this was, and what the point of still being here is. Once you’ve walked back from the metaphorical ledge, you are confused on an existential level. Your soul, as much as that could be said to exist, is bewildered, and you just keep thinking about it. Your internal monologue becomes a droning question, never ceasing, affecting every single fiber of your being.
Not everyone will like the ending to this book. I think it worked, for what it’s worth, but it absolutely refuses to wrap up the narrative neatly, all wrapped up in paper with a colorful bow with a knot. The ending is deeply, profoundly messy, and it will make you wonder, as I did, what in the narrative is ‘real,’ as firmly you can define that in a work of fiction. I think that was the right decision, creatively. It is of the same sort of issue that makes too many works about historical tragedies, the Holocaust and American slavery being the most prominent examples although by no means the only ones, end neatly, where the victims live on, learn to be happy, and are improved through suffering. This book does not do that; Vicken is harmed by all this, indubitably, but it is not a purifying experience in that nigh-omnipresent Christian way. I can speak from personal experience: attempting to kill yourself and surviving is not an ultimately uplifting thing to go through, and Ajram knows this well enough to leave enough threads dangling that it feels true to life.
The phrase ‘coup de grâce’ is a French term meaning ‘mercy kill.’ It is the shot from a gun that puts down a wounded animal that will never recover. When I was in that state, leading up to that dreadful night, removing myself from the world certainly felt like a mercy to myself, who would never fit in with the neurotypical world, and to the world, so that my inability to read it would harm nobody else. It is a title that is provocative, attacking not the need to talk suicidal people out of that self-destructive haze, but rather to everyone else, challenging them to understand the dejection, and all too often the crushing sense of abandonment, that leads people like Vicken, and me once upon a time, to take their lives. The title, and the novel, are pleas for mercy from the world towards those it has abandoned so utterly. It is a plea I hope you, the reader, will heed, if you feel you can handle the telling.
I’m going to tell the readership this bluntly: Coup de Grâce by Sofia Ajram (he/she) is a book about suicide. This is a slim novella about a man who boards the subway to the end of the line intending to drown himself, but upon leaving the train finds himself in an endless maze of corridors and rooms, with only one other person for company.
I’m going to tell the readership another thing bluntly: in April 2023 I tried to kill myself by jumping off of a bridge. The way I experienced this book, and the way I have interpreted its themes, is completely and utterly inseparable from having had that experience. This is going to be a thematically heavy piece on that front so I am warning people now.
With that said: this whole thing also, at first, reminded me of the new season of Severance, which I watched the week before writing this review. The unending corridors with the occasional vaguely recognizable business (such as the convenience store, always empty, from which our protagonist pilfers his nourishment) strike the same chord as the featureless corridors of the severed floor of the Lumon building. Both works are wrangling with the meaning of living when the world around you is so crushingly, miserably oppressive, and why ending your own life wouldn’t be a rational response to it (such as when Helly R. tried to hang herself in the escalator). The severed floor, however, at least has decent lighting. For at least the first half of the rather slim book the narrator had the voice of Seth Milchick in my mind.
The supernatural element here is something that is more hinted at than displayed, the most vivid of that rare open depiction is a harrowing physical depiction of the narrator’s grief. The entire feeling of all of this is a certain grottiness, a sort of brutalist gracelessness that makes the whole novella feel cold, uncaring, impersonal. The few other characters there are in this wasteland of corridors are not much better; all of them are too locked in their own problems, their own focuses, their own obsessions to care about our main character, a man named Vicken who is of Armenian heritage living in Montreal.
Vicken is a medic who has himself talked people out of suicides. Ajram spares you gory details of what brought Vicken to the metaphorical ledge, and chooses rather to shine a light on the voids in his life. In Vicken, you see an ultimately decent human being, but one who is on some level deeply empty of things that make life worth living. To borrow from Mark Fisher’s book of criticism The Weird and the Eerie, this is a very eerie book by Fisher’s definition, which is the deep unnerving lack of something that should be there, but isn’t. Vicken’s life is deeply and profoundly unwhole, and that is the focus of the novella: not details, but mood.
It’s a mood I can relate to all too well. When I look back to the months before I drove to that bridge in the middle of the night, the feeling was that of a profound emptiness. I am not comfortable making too many details public, but suffice to say it was about me, in my status as an autistic person, to be able to truly fit in a neurotypical world. Human beings are social creatures; we evolved to live in small groups. What had set me down that dark path was the fact that I had not even a small group, but no group, or so my mind had resolved, and that removing myself from aforementioned neurotypical world was my only realistic option. After my attempt failed due to the intervention of a kindly passerby, I spent the next several months in a sort of aimless state.
It’s that aimless state that this novella captures so crushingly well. Vicken is, and I once was, someone who had every intention of ending his life and then found himself in a situation where life was going to go on. The end result, for both of us, was an unnerving existential shrug, a sense of ‘now what?’ pervading every aspect of our being. There is the unpleasant undercurrent where you ask yourself what the point of any of this was, and what the point of still being here is. Once you’ve walked back from the metaphorical ledge, you are confused on an existential level. Your soul, as much as that could be said to exist, is bewildered, and you just keep thinking about it. Your internal monologue becomes a droning question, never ceasing, affecting every single fiber of your being.
Not everyone will like the ending to this book. I think it worked, for what it’s worth, but it absolutely refuses to wrap up the narrative neatly, all wrapped up in paper with a colorful bow with a knot. The ending is deeply, profoundly messy, and it will make you wonder, as I did, what in the narrative is ‘real,’ as firmly you can define that in a work of fiction. I think that was the right decision, creatively. It is of the same sort of issue that makes too many works about historical tragedies, the Holocaust and American slavery being the most prominent examples although by no means the only ones, end neatly, where the victims live on, learn to be happy, and are improved through suffering. This book does not do that; Vicken is harmed by all this, indubitably, but it is not a purifying experience in that nigh-omnipresent Christian way. I can speak from personal experience: attempting to kill yourself and surviving is not an ultimately uplifting thing to go through, and Ajram knows this well enough to leave enough threads dangling that it feels true to life.
The phrase ‘coup de grâce’ is a French term meaning ‘mercy kill.’ It is the shot from a gun that puts down a wounded animal that will never recover. When I was in that state, leading up to that dreadful night, removing myself from the world certainly felt like a mercy to myself, who would never fit in with the neurotypical world, and to the world, so that my inability to read it would harm nobody else. It is a title that is provocative, attacking not the need to talk suicidal people out of that self-destructive haze, but rather to everyone else, challenging them to understand the dejection, and all too often the crushing sense of abandonment, that leads people like Vicken, and me once upon a time, to take their lives. The title, and the novel, are pleas for mercy from the world towards those it has abandoned so utterly. It is a plea I hope you, the reader, will heed, if you feel you can handle the telling.
--
Reference: Sofia Ajram, Coup de Grâce, [Titan Books, 2024]
POSTED BY: Alex Wallace, alternate history buff who reads more than is healthy.
