Recommend some good existentialist literature

[Diceman]

G'day folks

I'm just beginning to get into literature with an existential bent to it. By way of example, I have read Camus' "The Outsider" and "The Plague", and recently completed Fowles' "The French Lieutenant's Woman". I find the existential themes in these novels interesting and wish to read more of the same. I'm not after deep philosophical treatises, just literature - stories - with an existential theme.

I have just begun Dostoevsky's "Notes from the Underground" which I am led to believe was a precursor to modern existential literature. Other books I've seen given as examples include stuff like Sartre's "Nausea" and "The Wall", and even Salinger's "Catcher In The Rye". However it's hard to know where to start.

So - can anyone out there recommend a book which explores existentialist themes, and is a cracking good read to boot?

Thanks in advance.

[subterranean]

Try Satre's trilogy: The Age of Reason, The Reprieved, and Troubled Sleep

:)

[IWilKikU]

I would have said Camus and Sartre, so I guess your already on the right track. But if you havn't read "Catcher in the Rye", you need to, whether for its existentialism or just cause its a damn good book.

[Munro]

I have only just bought a copy last night, but my English teacher strongly recommended and told me to read "Siddartha" by Herman Hesse, after reading "The Plague". It's an existentialist journey and very close in philosophy to Camus, Satre etc. I'll tell you what I think once I've read it (but don't wait up).

Kafka also, namely "Metamorphosis" and "In the Penal Settlement".

[Isagel]

Rollo May is a psychoanalyst who has written a lot about existentialism in psychology - Freedom and destiny, for example. Not the stories you where after but still...

Hesse is really very good, as mentioned by Munro.
There is also Richard Bach, who is a bit new age, but I really liked Jonathan Livingstone Seagull.
Flowers for Algernon, by Keyers, might be interesting too. Sciencefiction diary about a man with mental retardation who undergoes a experiment to be made smart. Easy read, but poses a lot of questions about what it means to be a human being.

[piquant]

Another good Hesse, I'll say it again, Steppenwolf. Has anyone here read it? Highly recommend. It starts with a man and suicide...as all good books should. To live or not to live, and if to live, then how?

[Munro]

I'll add it to my list, you've convinced me already!

[piquant]

I'd like to talk about it when you finished, I haven't had a discussion with anyone about it yet. While you read I'll try and get my copy back. I lent it to my boyfriend and told him that I didn't care if he broke up with me and diappeared from my life foreverever, as long as I got my copy of steppenwolf back. I told him I would send him a letter bomb if he didn't give it back to me (I may have been joking around, but I was serious about getting the book back). The bastard didn't even read it, and then dispeared with my copy of the book. No, I'm not at all bitter.

[Diceman]

Thanks for the advice, folks. Hess, Sartre, Salinger, Kafka, Keyers: here I come!

[Munro]

Originally posted by piquant
I'd like to talk about it when you finished, I haven't had a discussion with anyone about it yet. While you read I'll try and get my copy back. I lent it to my boyfriend and told him that I didn't care if he broke up with me and diappeared from my life foreverever, as long as I got my copy of steppenwolf back. I told him I would send him a letter bomb if he didn't give it back to me (I may have been joking around, but I was serious about getting the book back). The bastard didn't even read it, and then dispeared with my copy of the book. No, I'm not at all bitter.

This is how anarchists are born.

[subterranean]

I have another refference: Simone De B..(I don't how to speel her last name). She's Satre's lover. She wrote stuffs about female issues, but She's also an existensialist

[Zooey]

I'll also throw out Beckett, if you can handle him. I'd recommend Waiting for Godot.

[llall]

How about 'They Shoot Horses, Don't They?'

[manuscript]

but are Beckett and Kafka more usually classified as existentialist, or more often as absurdist? but in any case it seems quite related, and they are both incredible writers to read.

the only three great existentialists i knew of, Camus and de Beauvoir and Sartre, were already mentioned, and i am at a bit of a loss for more. does anyone think Kate Chopin's The Awakening is existentialist at all? i think the gravity of what Edna decides to do with her life kind of proves its inherent value. or maybe i just love that book and make myself see anything at all worthwhile in it.

[Gladys]

Dostoevsky's The Idiot is wonderful portrayal of existential awareness in Prince Myshkin, whereas Crime and Punishment provides a thoroughly grim portrayal in Raskolnikov and Svidrigaïlov.

[aaron stark]

Well, you've already started with the right book. The Outsider by Camus is in many ways one of the easiest and "most comprehensible" of the existentialist works. I woud definitely advise you to read Beckett now. Start with his Waiting for Godot, it's terrific. There's so much more to it than just two hobos waiting beneath a tree and it will even make you laugh (although this is wasn't the author's intention of course)

[Sreenan]

Anything by Albert Camus.
Jean-Paul Sartre.
George Orwell (Fighting in Spain and The Road To Wigan Pier.)
Joseph Conrad's novels are, slightly.
Some of Franz Kafka's stuff.
Some of Irvine Welsh's stuff. A lot may disagree but in my eyes the man is a major existentialist!

As said above though, go for The Outsider by Albert Camus first. The amount of people who have told me that the book changed their life is unreal!

I live for Existentialism/Absurdism. I suppose I am an Existentialist in my writing (will be next anyway, first work is Absurdist,) in a way with how I'm approaching my first full novel, and I cannot wait for next year when I go out further into Europe for more inspiration! Only after my first novel is done, need to go back to London again in the process for street names/descriptions.

Had to stop myself delving into the subject matter of the novel I'm planning as I forget some people steal ideas haha!

[E.A Rumfield]

I would check out Louis Ferdinand Celine namely his novel Journey To The End Of The Night. Also Henry Miller. How about Anton Chekhov, he wrote some fantastic short stories.

[Desolation]

Well, you've already started with the right book. The Outsider by Camus is in many ways one of the easiest and "most comprehensible" of the existentialist works. I woud definitely advise you to read Beckett now. Start with his Waiting for Godot, it's terrific. There's so much more to it than just two hobos waiting beneath a tree and it will even make you laugh (although this is wasn't the author's intention of course)

What makes you say that? As bleak as he was, he was an ace black humorist through and through. He walked into the abyss laughing all the way.

[manuscript]

i too thought Beckett intended to be funny. but then i also thought Kafka intended to be funny. and probably just about any author at all.

[E.A Rumfield]

i too thought Beckett intended to be funny. but then i also thought Kafka intended to be funny. and probably just about any author at all.

I think all these guys intended to be funny. If you see the world in such a way most of the time there is nothing to do but laugh at how absurd everything is and how seriously some people take the whole charade.

[manuscript]

I think all these guys intended to be funny. If you see the world in such a way most of the time there is nothing to do but laugh at how absurd everything is and how seriously some people take the whole charade.

excuse me, but are you suggesting that i take all of this too seriously? in all my years i never expected to find myself in such an uncomfortable situation as i do at this moment.

[cafolini]

Camus was a stoic. Not an existentialist in my book. Beckett wrote about the absurd in very serious terms. Another good one in that context is Ionesco's Rhinocerous.

[manuscript]

Camus was a stoic. Not an existentialist in my book.

very interesting!

[E.A Rumfield]

excuse me, but are you suggesting that i take all of this too seriously? in all my years i never expected to find myself in such an uncomfortable situation as i do at this moment.

The uncomfortable feeling you are experiencing is something that you cultivated in your own mind. If you have food to eat and a bed to sleep in I am certain things are not as bad as you make them out to be. It's funny if things are so bad for you how do you have time or the energy to sit at a computer and make passive-aggressive comments?

[JuniperWoolf]

Of Human Bondage made me feel amazing, like someone turned the lights on.