Awful endings

[Set of Keys]

Well, not exactly. Book endings to soil an otherwise perfect read.

Each of these respective codas either bored me or felt disappointingly inconsistent or ill-conceived.

Off the top of my dome-

'Concrete'- Thomas Bernhard
'Lolita'- Vladimir Nabokov
'Lanark'- Alasdair Gray
'Albert Angelo'- B.S. Johnson

[hedbanger]

Oh god, there's a lot of them.

Not a book, but "Jesus Understood" was a short story with a horrid ending. D:

[RobinHood3000]

Things Fall Apart - Chinua Achebe; it just felt like a cop-out to me. A great warrior with nothing to lose does not resort to suicide, he resorts to war.

[Mr Spoon]

From what I remember, I enjoyed most of Wyndham's books right up to their abrupt ends. The Midwich Cuckoos, especially.

The Dice Man had a pretty weak ending. Come to think of it, the whole second half wasn't great.

I'd be interested to hear why you think Lolita had a poor ending, though. I'm so blinkered by my love for all things Nabokov, I don't think I've ever questioned his choices.

I'm new by the way, so hi. I've read these forums on and off for a while now and thought tonight that the time has come to dive in.

[hedbanger]

From what I remember, I enjoyed most of Wyndham's books right up to their abrupt ends. The Midwich Cuckoos, especially.

The Dice Man had a pretty weak ending. Come to think of it, the whole second half wasn't great.

I'd be interested to hear why you think Lolita had a poor ending, though. I'm so blinkered by my love for all things Nabokov, I don't think I've ever questioned his choices.

I'm new by the way, so hi. I've read these forums on and off for a while now and thought tonight that the time has come to dive in.

Welkommen. <3

[grace86]

Ethan Frome.....grrrrrr :flare: I loved that book until the weird ending.

[Stieg]

Not necessarily a book I admire as much as others but what about Stephen King's IT. WT...?

Have to say Jack Finney's Invasion of the Body Snatchers is quite abrupt and unexplained in what amounts to an exceptionally intense book. But forgiveable.

George R R Martin's Storm of Swords, there was a time when The Others alone had the frightening gruesome talent to resurrect the dead now everyone and their grandmas can too. The ending of this book was rather anticlimatical and unintentionally tongue-in-cheek. Hail Ser RottingIam!

[chasestalling]

i'm not biting

[Bakiryu]

Ptolemy's Gate~ the main character may have died in the end and we'll never know if he didn't because it's a trilogy! It was so sad I cried :bawling:

[Video Drone]

The Sea Wolf. I felt as though the ending could as well have not been there at all. It was so ridiculous compared to the rest of the novel.

[tudwell]

A Clockwork Orange. I think the American version (missing the last chapter) is the better version. The last chapter is just silly.

[Idril]

Mostly Harmless by Douglas Adams had a rather abrupt and unsatisfying ending. :rolleyes: And the ending to Infinite Jest just about killed me. :( It's about 1000 pages long, when you count the endless notes and since you really do need to read those notes in order to make sense of things, I think they should count...anyway, there are were all these threads to pull together, there are so many completely divergent story lines going on at the same time all heading in the general direction of each other, I had put so much time and energy into that book, besides the 100 pages of notes, there was at least one or two words on each page that I needed to look up, it was not an easy read but I loved it! I loved the characters, I loved the humour, I even loved the brutal, tragic scenes and relationships but then it just ends, with little to no resolution! I think I may have actually screamed at the end. :p I had read you had to reread the beginning to see how it ended and that helped a wee tiny little bit but it still wasn't nearly enough.

[Set of Keys]

I'd be interested to hear why you think Lolita had a poor ending, though. I'm so blinkered by my love for all things Nabokov, I don't think I've ever questioned his choices.

Would I be a philistine if I said my only reason was that it felt a little overlong? I ain't really knocking the book though, guv. Overlong or not, the blinding prose was exhilarating to the very end.

But between the breathers I took in the final 50 pages, the words "too many motels for one book" darted about my mind like a praying swan queuing in a Soviet bread line.