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Yeah, me too. Just finished reading his bio, So It Goes and Kurt Vonnegut The Last Interview. You might want to check those if you still haven't.Quote:
Originally Posted by SFG75
Vonnegut's Mother Night, might qualify in this thread as well. Deciding to hang yourself in the end is, could be, depressing enough.
1. Diary of A Young Girl, by Anne Frank. This is mostly because I'm in love with Anne Frank, and I felt that if she was alive now I would be in love with her. I was about fourteen when I read it, so her age.
2. The Catcher in the Rye. My teacher made me read this book freshman year of high school. I contemplated suicide the entire time we studied it in class, which was about three weeks in length. I thought I was insane.
Tess. Always Tess.
I read The Jungle by Upton Sinclair last week. THAT was depressing. Despite the huge 180 near the end of the book, and the weak characters overall, I was thoroughly engaged and really felt for the main character of the story. Some of my feelings may have to do from also having worked hard manual labor, many times in dangerous or harsh conditions, though not to the extremes as presented in this book. I would heartily recommend the book even though it's a real downer.
Islands in the Stream by Hemingway. The death of the main character's children is not even the saddest part of the book.
Read the original short story, written in diary form: it was indeed a tearjerker.Quote:
Originally Posted by Dinkleberry2010
Jude the Obscure. My God, that was BLEAK!
I'm with you...'The House Of Mirth' & 'Sister Carrie' were very sad books (they are also two of my favorites.) 'American Pastoral' & 'Revolutionary Road' weren't a bundle of laughs either.
Agreed, "Revolutionary Road" was quite sad. Had read that one right after reading John Barth's "The End of the Road." Gotta love abortions eh. Another good sad one is Joseph Heller's "Something Happened"...where abortion seems like it would have been preferable. It was Heller's second novel and was published 13 years after "Catch-22", a work I read two chapters of before putting down, finding it overpromoted, similar to "A Confederacy of Dunces", which I finished for some reason, though I felt like killing myself afterwards.
Agreed. Jude the Obscure is also incredibly bleak. Oddly, though, I don't find Hardy depressing. Maybe it's because, though he did have a bleak view of existence he was himself relatively cheerful. Other writers, like Conrad and Larkin, who suffered from depression, really get me down. It's as if the depression seeps into their work.Quote:
Originally Posted by Annamariah
Dickens is a fairly cheerful writer, but there are desperately sad moments in his novels. When Joe the roadsweeper cleans up the grave of his friend, because it's all he can do for him, it really gets to me. Even thinking about that scene brings tears to my eyes. Then there is A Christmas Carol. Yes, it's sentimental, and yes Tiny Tim is nauseating, but I cannot get through any version of this, not even the Muppet one, without crying like a baby. I also find Pip's treatment of Joe in Great Expectations unbearable.
The Patrick Melrose novels, by Edward St Aubyn are very sad.
There is a poem by Blake, called The Chimney Sweep' which I can't read without crying. I have no idea why. It is literally the only poem to have that effect on me. The line "wash in a river and shine in the sun" gets me every time.
Agreed. Jude the Obscure is also incredibly bleak. Oddly, though, I don't find Hardy depressing. Maybe it's because, though he did have a bleak view of life, he was himself relatively cheerful. Other writers, like Conrad and Larkin, who suffered from depression, really get me down. It's as if the depression seeps into their work.Quote:
Originally Posted by Annamariah
Dickens is a fairly cheerful writer, but there are desperately sad moments in his novels. When Joe the roadsweeper cleans up the grave of his friend in Bleak House, because it's all he can do for him, it really gets to me. Even thinking about that scene brings tears to my eyes. Then there is A Christmas Carol. Yes, it's sentimental, and yes Tiny Tim is nauseating, but I cannot get through any version of this, not even the Muppet version, without crying like a baby. I also find Pip's treatment of Joe in Great Expectations unbearable.
The Patrick Melrose novels, by Edward St Aubyn, are very sad.
There is a poem by Blake, called The Chimney Sweep' which I can't read without crying. I have no idea why. It is literally the only poem to have that effect on me. The line "wash in a river and shine in the sun" gets me every time.
The war poetry of men like Wilfred Owen and Keith Douglas are very sad, mainly because both were killed.
For me, the most depressing novel was Leo Tolstoy’s “Anna Karenina”. This is really a very emotional story.
I read Anna Karenina in college. We had a task to write an essay about a work of Russian literature. I chose this particular novel because my sister advised me. I was very impressed after reading this book. I learned many life lessons from this book. Love and family relationships are the main issues in this book. Many say that books are just papers, but they are greatly mistaken. In the books you can see the emotions and experiences of the author. His world view on life situations. If you do not want to read the book, but you need to complete the assignment, then you can buy a college essay on the Paperial.com. But I highly recommend reading this book to understand what the author wanted to say. Love in this book is described as something highly moral. This unexplained feeling that people sometimes feel unwillingly. This is something that cannot be called a purchase or something that can be bought.
Funny you should mention those precise three because I found them deeply depressing as well. Mind you I was reading The Riddle of the Sands (set just before the outbreak of World War 1) just after 9/11 and it seemed horribly possible.Quote:
Originally Posted by Haroldskimpole
I haven't a clue why I found Raffles depressing but I did. I read Vilette at a time when I was anxious for other reasons.
I don't find The Idiot depressing at all. I'm a bit sorry for Anna Karenina but none what so ever for Vronsky.
And there is a big difference between depression and feeling sad or emotionally moved. I'd say depression means an inability not to feel and knowing misery as a result. I used to feel emotionally uplifted if I was moved to tears and that made me love the novel. I've cried reading all George Eliot's novels when I was younger. Now I find them worthy and leaving me cold.
Someone above mentioned Ian McEwan's Atonement, which was the first title that occurred to me when I read the title of the thread. But Atonement is also one of the best modern novels I have read in maybe ten years, so my second thought was similar to JR's distinction between depressing books and sad or emotionally moving ones.
I would go even further: novels that depress rather than move are doing something wrong, usually aiming for the latter but not achieving it. I think of Chang-rae Lee's irritatingly depressing Native Speaker, which included a deus ex machina toddler death. Yuck--who needs that? Another Korean-American novel, Pachinko, is full of upsetting incidents, but it is (usually) genuinely moving because its tragedies great and small derive from human nature and paradoxes and smallness before history.
With that distinction in mind then (and at the cost of writing my first LitNet list in years), I found the following books (in no particular order) sad but moving:
Atonement by Ian McEwan
Pachinko by Min Jin Lee
Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro
Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro
The Human Stain by Philip Roth
The Road by Cormac McCarthy (I note that some do find this one depressing--it is at least mighty bleak).
I have reviewed Atonement, Pachinko, and Remains of the Day on the Book Review thread (if anyone is interested). I will probably add Never Let Me Go, The Human Stain, and a few others before long. I've written enough on LitNet about The Road, though
I was very touched by the meningitis deaths of children in Thomas Mann's "Doctor Faustus" and Hermann Hesse's "Rosshalde." While still having to read Anna Karenina I was deeply moved by the plight of Effi Briest and Madame Bovary.
Wide Sargasso Sea - Jean Rhys