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Saddest/Most Depressing Novel You've Ever Read

  • Thread starter Deleted member 6550
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SFG75 said:
To me, her works have give you an excruciating feeling of unfairness on the part of the lead characters. You have bright, entrepreneurial folks who want to start businesses and thrive, yet, they are mocked by the incompetent government knaves and even their own relatives for being "greedy." She does for fiction, what Milton Friedman did for economics(and non-fiction in that area subsequently) She doesn't get a lot of good press from lit professors, guess where their bias is?:D
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I felt like there was unfairness for all the characters except the men she (sonja if i remember her name correctly) is with and sonja's role was to disconnect. that to survive the unfairness of life she didn't even deal with it, she just ignored it. I guess my problem was that it felt like sonja would have been like that even if they were still under the tsarist system and that bothered me. but I could have read it wrong and it was my first ayn rand book so maybe I just wasn't use to the tone of her books.

as for lit teachers' bias: revolutionary p.o.v. isn't really there thing in my experience. lol
 
Sophie's Choice by William Styron,Birdsong by Sebastian Faulks&The Ghost Road by Pat Barker. You could say they all have varying degrees of sadness and the WW1 trenches and WW2 concentration camps are obviously depressing as story settings. That said,there are one or two uplifting moments too!:)
 
I found Roots, by Alex Haley to be a sad read. The Lovely Bones definitely had me in tears almost from the first page! But, I am easy to cry at books, which is odd for a man I suppose. I don't know. I cried at the end of The Lord of the Rings, at the parting of friends. I cried several times during the Harry Potter books, not least during both Order of the Phoenix and Deathly Hallows.

So, I guess what I'm saying is that its your state of mind and ability to empathize with characters which will make a book a tear-jerker or not. Even the "saddest" books, if you're a cold hearted bastard, could leave you dry as gin.
 
Hmmm, The Demon by Hubert Selby Jnr, is a very dark and depressing (and quite frightening) read. I also found After You'd Gone and The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox (both by Maggie O'Farrell) quite depressing. I'm sure there's loads more, but those are the main ones that come to mind.
 
I have to agree The demon by selby his a killer.it bring you down slowly.

but desagree with ember with those two

A Fine Balance by Rohinton Mistry.

Birds Without Wings by Louis de berniers

Unless you find a good book depressing,and you expect a happy ending all the time.
 
Flor said:
I think of sad and depressing as two different states of mind, sadness being more temporary and thus more easily influenced by reading. Let's see, The Remains of the Day is exquisitely sad,
p
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I totally agree. Sadness has a sweetness to it - bittersweet mayby. Depression is a dark, cold hole. I second "Remains of the Day". The most moving yet sad book I've read. "My Sisters Keeper" would be in there too.
 
What about E.M.Cioran,with "a short history of decay" and "the trouble of being born" or even "on the heights of despair" -beach books all of them-you are sure to paint your life bright pink.
 
I think my favourite melancholic story is “The Ballad of the Sad Café”. Actually, I have that in a collection with some other stories by Carson McCullers including one called Wunderkind (sp?) which I found even more so, but maybe that was just a teeny bit of empathy with the main character. Anyway, definitely not a book to mix with maudlin music – might just push you over the edge.:D
 
"The Lovely Bones"
"Messange in a Bottle" (Yes, it's sad, but Sparks gets me everytime)
"Le Petit Prince"
 
Sad books:
A fine balance by Rohinton Mistry
Grendel by John Gardner
The Unconsoled by Kazuo Ishiguro

A fine balance was particularly depressing.
 
Two of you find a find balance by mistry very depressing,i have to admit it is a bit-the evil are not punished and no one is get out of there misery-but still it id not depressed me in the sense that it's not getting at you hte the demon or johnny got his gun does.
SOLZHENITSYN is a good one to, like "the first circle",or "gulag archipelago"
about life it the gulag.
 
I would have to cast one of my votes for Nabokov's The Defense. Luzhin was a sad and depressing character throughout the book, but the ending was very sudden and unexpected. I really got into the book and the ending just slams it home to you as he unbolts the window and jumps out.
 
Well, I'm a very sentimental reader, so I get quite sad bout a lot of things I read. However, French literature always tends to be really tragic, you'd be set with pretty much anything. (joking, lol). I read a lot of Dumas and other French authors, and Dumas rarely has happy endings but his books are amazing!
 
American Pastoral by Philip Roth just ahead of The Road by McCarthy and We by Zamiatin.

This book disturbed me most because I read it right after becoming a father of a baby girl and that is what the book centers around. The story shows how there are worse things in the world than death.

The other two are bleak as well. One because of the consequences of some kind of horrific disaster and the other because of oppressive government sapping all joy out of life.
 
It is "..." by Mirze Ibrahimov. If you google him, you can find. Talking about the impression that Persians made on Azerbaijanians.
 
extremely loud and incredibly close by jonathan safran foer is not dark and depressing - but it's a major tear-jerker. About a little boy dealing with his fathers death on 9/11.
 
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