I guess my vote goes to Álvaro de Campos' poem, which doesn't have a title but I would name "Suicide: why haven't you tried it yet?"
http://www.secrel.com.br/jpoesia/facam16.html (in Portuguese)
http://milkfromthedish.blogspot.com/...pessoa-as.html (in English)
I would say that after reading A long way down by Nick Hornby I felt very depressed though it is meant to me tragicomic...
Stop asking where is God and keep asking where the hell is human!
Interesting you bring up tragicomedy. Often I find the tragicomic to be ultimately more depressing than something that is straight tragic.Originally Posted by Veva
I would say that after reading A long way down by Nick Hornby I felt very depressed though it is meant to me tragicomic...
I mean Waiting for Godot or something by Kafka. The idea (especially in Godot) that things are inescapable and ever repeating is far more frightening than the idea that even if love is fleeting, so is hatred and destruction. Hamlet may detest life, but at least his ends. For Didi and Gogo, however, there is no end.
Don't know if I've read anything I've found personally depressing, but I have to say that Jude The Obscure hit me pretty hard.
Waiting for Godot...
Thanks for reminding me of that ... definitely true..
Stop asking where is God and keep asking where the hell is human!
The Time Traveller's Wife was so depressing I couldn't finish it.
I second that.
Another bleak one for me was Whatever (Extension du domaine de la lutte in the original French) by Michel Houellebecq. Never dared to read anything by him again...
"Where mind meets matter, both should woo!"Currently reading:
* Paradise Lost by John Milton
I encourage you to read Atomised (The elementary particles), from Houellebecq, which is a pointing and astonishing book. There is an old thread about the author, if you want more opinions...I second that
Another bleak one for me was Whatever (Extension du domaine de la lutte in the original French) by Michel Houellebecq. Never dared to read anything by him again...
...As a moth mistakes a bulb
for the moon, and goes to hell...
-Tom Waits-
The gulag Archipelago by Solzhenitsyn... Hard times by Dickens
Yes, I definitely wouldn't ask a friend who felt depressed to read this one. It would be the end of him or her.
I haven't been able to find the thread, if you could give me the link?
Indeed, Silas, and when you think that Álvaro de Campos is an heteronym of the most widely read poet in Portugal (Fernando Pessoa), you start wondering what effect this poem may have in our demographics...!
Er, all Jacqueline Wilson books make me want to slit my wrists, frankly.
But. I get your meaning! I'd have to say...well, most of the Holocaust accounts I read when I was ten have made me pretty much immune to what people generally consider sad...but The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas and The Book Thief were sad....although the authors always feel they have to inject humour or that annoying thing called Hope to make readers happy, which, like, contradicts the whole sad thing...I don't know, actually; I have to read more sad books! (:
Oh, and Crime and Punishment. That was somewhat depressing- especially with the thing about "you can kill if for a reason".
Tess of the D`urbervilles - Hardy
Germinal - Zola
Nicholas Nickleby - Dickens
absolutely. and then you can always have kurozawa's ran as a mental picture.
kierkegaard's diaries are very depressing, and then saramago's blindness.... and poe's narratives of arthur gordon pym
ugh.
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