Saddest book you've ever read?

[konstantine]

What are some of the saddest books you've ever read? For me it would have to be The Road. Well not sure if it was exactly sad, but it It was definitely disturbing.

[Arbor Gold]

I was just thinking about this last night. I generally prefer...not sad, but I would say tragic books. None fits the bill better than A Fine Balance by Rohinton Mistry. I tend to describe it as "emotionally devastating but not depressing" although many disagree with me on the "not depressing" part. I find it uplifting in a way, and I read it once or twice a year when I get too caught up in the stupid little mess that I call my life.

From Publisher's Weekly:

The setting of Mistry's quietly magnificent second novel (after the acclaimed Such a Long Journey) is India in 1975-76, when Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, defying a court order calling for her resignation, declares a state of emergency and imprisons the parliamentary opposition as well as thousands of students, teachers, trade unionists and journalists. These events, along with the government's forced sterilization campaign, serve as backdrop for an intricate tale of four ordinary people struggling to survive...With great empathy and wit, the Bombay-born, Toronto-based Mistry evokes the daily heroism of India's working poor, who must cope with corruption, social anarchy and bureaucratic absurdities.

[Smeech]

I'm reading The Road right now. Looks like I'll be agreeing with you.

Others:

Sophie's Choice (not just the choice, but the entire novel)

Hyperion Cantos

Random Acts of Senseless Violence

Flowers for Algernon

[A Time for Wolves]

I haven't read A Fine Balance in years. I read it in high school and it made me get really depressed, and I didn't read it for a long time after that. It's truly a sad story, but very beautiful.

Where the Red Fern Grows was the first book that had a real emotional impact on me, so in a way it was the saddest book I've read.

[diabloblanco18]

Depends on how you mean "saddest." If we're talking about a book which is incredibly depressing throughout, then the one that comes to mind is The Forever War. Pervasive sense of exclusion and aloneness in that one. If, on the other hand, you're talking about a book that made me cry myself to sleep (usually a well-done bit of sadness/melancholy/tragedy will only get me to tear up) and can still bring me to tears if I read the ending...then I'd say At Swim, Two Boys. It was heart-wrenchingly beautiful.

[delete this account pls]

1984

[Ser Scot A Ellison]

Skybowl by Melanie Rawn, she kills everybody

Rise of Endyimon by Dan Simmons, talk about bittersweet

[Bellis]

A Fine Balance was also the first book that popped into my head. My sister called it emotionally manipulative and threw it against the proverbial wall. It was that, too, of course. I'd still recommend it without hesitation because it focused on the plight of castes/minorities that are usually ignored or portrayed as stereotypes in most Indian lit/film. I learned a lot.

[Vhagar]

Beloved is coming to mind...Anna Karenina...A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovitch...mmm, Night.

I was thinking I didn't read a lot of sad books!

[Ser Garlan the Gallant]

Over the past three days I've been spending time with Vera Brittain's Testament of Youth, her diary, and her letters.

Testament of Youth, first published in 1933, is, as the subtitle says, An Autobiographical Study of the Years 1900-1925. Her diary, on which the book is primarily based, was to be published in her lifetime but for various reasons was not until 1981, eleven years after her death. Then in 1998 selected correspondence was published.

These are the saddest and most moving, powerful things I have ever read, seen, or experienced. I am still far from finished with them; on Saturday I read large parts of Testament of Youth, and on Sunday went and got the letters and diary from the university library, going back and reading the same events originally recounted in Testament. I like the diary best, for it gives much more detail and immediacy to the most memorable events recounted in her book.

Basically her life was destroyed by the war. She was 21 in 1914 when she got to know a friend of her brother's, Roland Leighton, who, like her, was quiet and depressed and lonely. They were engaged by the summer of 1915, but he was killed that December. Then in 1917 a friend of hers and Roland's, Victor Richardson, was shot in the head and blinded. She was working as a nurse in Malta but headed back to Britain having decided, upon hearing the news (and also the news of the death of another friend, Geoffrey Thurlow), to marry him. She visited him in the hospital and they talked for several hours, and she was sure in her decision. A few days later, however, he died. The next year her brother Edward was killed as well.

In his introduction to Vera Brittain's diary selections, Alan Bishop wrote: "This is not a depressing diary." But it is. There are many "scenes" in the memoir and diary which, I think, I will never forget. This book has made me feel more pathetic than anything else I've read or experienced. Vera and those she writes about were better people than I could ever hope to be. Knowing the fate of the four boys only made the reading worse, especially Vera's romance with Roland. So pure, really. You just have to read it. Knowing his fate I couldn't help but think while reading: dammit!. Many times I choked up. Upon seeing their pictures on the back cover of her letters for the first time (you can see it on Amazon, linked above), with the four of them lined up on the top and Vera below, I just couldn't help but finally cry, recalling the scenes and knowing their eventual fate. As I mentioned above, these books make me feel pathetic and inadequate. Basically, even if I someday, somehow manage to meet someone and find happiness in that person, what would I have done to deserve it? Nothing.

These books, to me, have trivialized all fiction. First of all, I rarely read fiction, and I certainly don't read literature. I want to be an historian, and so I must spend all of my time now and for several more years reading through the literature in various fields. So if I do find half an hour here or there for fiction, I will go back and read random Arya, Tyrion, Ned, or Jaime chapters. I haven't bothered to read any new fiction because it takes too long to get into something, and since I have so little time I might as well spend it re-immersing myself in Westeros. Those four characters have stuck with me since I first read AGoT, ACoK, and ASoS back in the summer of '04. But, having read Vera Brittain, I don't think I'll be able to reread GRRM or read any other fictional work again. I mean, I'll read GRRM's next books, obviously, but it just won't have the same meaning anymore when compared with Vera Brittain and her story.

[Ser Garlan the Gallant]

double post...sorry

[Tears of Lys]

Sophie's Choice

Villette - Charlotte Bronte (starts in total despair and goes downhill from there.)

We Were the Mulvaneys - Joyce Carol Oates (Big-time tear-jerker. I read it as I was recovering from a serious operation. NOT a good choice!)

[Myshkin]

The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy

[penandink]

Ser Garlan, while your thoughts on Vera Brittain are indeed well-written and convincing, saying that it put you off reading anything else ever again . . . is not a ringing endorsement, for me. I kind of like reading.

Everyone else: Author names, please? Some of these books sound very interesting, and I'd like to look them up.

EDIT: The God of Small Things was absolutely awful. In that it fits the bill of this thread entirely too well. I was very depressed.

[Guest]

Where the Red Fern Grows was the first book that had a real emotional impact on me, so in a way it was the saddest book I've read.

Here here.

I read this and put this down in that other thread as being on of the first books I ever read, so I was also more emtionally fragile and not the cynical bastard I am today.

Thinking about this book makes me think of the scene in Stripes when Bill Murray raises his hand and says "Who cried when old Yeller died?"

And when no one reponds, he goes "Nobody cried when Old Yeller died?! I cried my eyes out."

[WarGalley]

Where the Red Fern Grows was the first book that had a real emotional impact on me, so in a way it was the saddest book I've read.

I was going to gratuitously plug The Road again in this thread till I read your post.

I named my second dog Anne after the one in the book (and would have named my first dog Dan if I hadn't already named him Rocky). She passed away last fall which makes me sad now that I'm thinking about it.

[Myshkin]

The God of Small Things was absolutely awful. In that it fits the bill of this thread entirely too well. I was very depressed.

I'm not quite sure how to interpret this. Did it depress you because you thought it was awful, or did it depress you becuase the story was so sad and beautifully written?

[add-on]

Farewell to Arms by Hemingway and All Quiet on the Western Front by Remarque were both really sad books.

For sheer melancholy, I think The Silmarillion wins out. Seems like, as a reader, you just don't get a break in that book. Every time you start to like somebody, tragedy befalls. And it's not just that characters you like die, it's that Tolkien makes it feel so inevitable.

[Tes'thesula]

Ravenheart by David Gemmell made me cry...

[H von T]

The Painted Bird by Jerzy Kasinski (sp). He also wrote Being There.

A truly depressing book about your fellow man.