One of the colleges here is offering a course on the five saddest books ever written. If you believe it, they are:
Ethan Frome by Edith Wharton
The Awkward Age by Henry James
The Good Soldier by Ford Madox Ford
To The North by Elizabeth Bowen
The End of the Affair by Graham Greene
Perhaps it’s supposed to be the five saddest books written in English. It seems a shame to leave out the Russians and the South Americans, who are probably better at sad than English speakers.
I’d want to leave the Ford and the Greene on the list but I’d need to make space for Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude and Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin. Probably The Masterpiece by Emile Zola.
But I’ll change my mind a hundred times before bedtime.
Edit: http://johnbakersblog.co.uk/saddest-books-revisited/
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Pingback on May 30th, 2006 at 4:55 pm
[...] John Baker has a post on the saddest books. I’ve read some devastatingly sad books, and I’d say that Ethan Frome is definitely on my list of saddest books. In retrospect, it may not have been the best book to read in 6th grade. _______ [...]
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Pingback on Mar 15th, 2007 at 8:27 am
[...] in May of 2006, I posted about a college here which was offering a course on the five saddest books ever [...]
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May 27th, 2006 at 1:54 am
just a few that come to mind…
Sophies Choice
The Diary of Anne Frank
The Gulag Archipelago
The Biography of Mary Lincoln
May 27th, 2006 at 3:44 pm
Alessandro Baricco’s ‘Silk’ sticks in my mind as evoking sadness in a rather beautiful way.
But probably one of the saddest books ever likely to be written is Jean-Dominique Bauby’s ‘The Diving Bell & the Butterfly’, which he dictated by signalling with his left eyelid, unable to move any other part of his body.
May 28th, 2006 at 9:06 am
I would say Emile Zola’s ‘Le Reve’(sorry no circumflex - don’t know how to do that.)
{You mean like this: Le Rêve (The Dream) - Smug JB.
Good choice, as would be several other titles by the same author}
May 31st, 2006 at 9:03 am
Hmmm. Show off!
(JB says: And for my next trick . . .)
May 31st, 2006 at 9:24 pm
A Fine Balance, by Rohinton Mistry: sad from beginning to end, with a touch of pathetic.
May 31st, 2006 at 9:31 pm
Cyrano de Bergerac is the book I’ve shed the most tears over I think (as a play does it still count?). A tale of two cities comes pretty close though.
Jun 1st, 2006 at 1:18 am
I agree with Catherine that A Fine Balance is a moving and very sad book. .
Another very, very sad book is The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold. NO other story has ever made me spontaneously sob.
Wicked Witch of Publishing
Jun 1st, 2006 at 5:14 pm
Like Lynne, I loved the first half of Lovely Bones. I found it very moving. I thought the second half was weak, though– as if the author had got stuck.
Jun 1st, 2006 at 8:17 pm
OK, seems like I’ve got some more reading to do.
For my part, the saddest book I’ve read in recent months is The Story of Lucy Gault by William Trevor. It is a short novel with a distinctive intonation. Reads like a dirge. Quite beautiful.
Jun 6th, 2006 at 3:21 pm
Wharton’s Ethan is sad. Kesey’s Sometimes a Great Notion is sadder. Steinbeck’s Grapes is saddest.
Nov 6th, 2006 at 10:50 pm
Paula by Isabel Allende. I bawled my eyes out from the very first page, for quite a while.
jb says: Thanks, Ruth, This is not a book I know, but maybe I’ll search it out now, or next time I need a cry.
Dec 4th, 2006 at 6:41 pm
Blood of the Lamb, by Peter deVries….Devastatingly sad, and all the more so because he was a great comic writer. (I believe it is based on the true story of the death of his own child).
I keep it on my bookshelf like a bottle of cyanide.
jb says: I love the metaphor. Keep ‘em coming, guys. I’m gonna have the best collection of sad books in the world.
Dec 7th, 2006 at 2:02 pm
Just finished reading Cormac McCarthy’s ‘The Road’, his latest. I don’t know if sad is the word, but it’s overwhelming in its intensity of feeling and place.
jb says: Hi Richard, Thanks for that. It would be nice to see another novel from Richard Madelin. Any hope there?
Dec 7th, 2006 at 3:10 pm
Yes, just finishing one now. Hope to put the final touches before 2007. Thank you for asking.
jb says: Keep us posted.
Jan 3rd, 2007 at 6:51 am
Anything by W. G. Sebald. I was so depressed for weeks after reading The Rings of Saturn. With him, there is the sensation of both floating on his gorgeous prose and turning ever inward so that the soul is no longer housed inside the body but peering curiously at you from the outside.
jb says: Thanks for this. I think I’ll have to put all these suggestions together and make up a new post.
Jan 17th, 2007 at 5:21 pm
To be honest, the saddest book I have ever read would most likely be Childhood’s End. Sure yes, it probably isn’t THE saddest book ever written; but it still is pretty depressing since, well you know, it’s about the end of the world.
jb says: This is another one for me to catch up on. The novel was first published in 1953 by Arthur C. Clarke, fifteen years before he published 2001: A Space Odyssey.
Mar 4th, 2007 at 12:18 pm
Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator
Mar 5th, 2007 at 8:39 pm
Andrei Makine’s ‘A life’s music’ had me shedding a tear or three through an often wan smile. No jokes in any of his books but this journey, both both literal and metaphorical through the tragedy of twentieth century Russia makes the saddest of music. There’s a kind of redemption in there too, of course. Shortish but movingly epic. His ‘The woman who waited’ can break a heart too.
jb says: Hi Dave, good to see you here again, especially on this thread. I don’t know the books, but I shall soon.
Mar 13th, 2007 at 6:39 am
I just read Ethan Frome, and it was a very sad story but somehow did not draw from me the kind of sadness I love from a book. It drew empathy, and I felt for Ethan, but mostly I felt quite set up to feel something and then the words never came to do so. Perhaps I breezed through it too quickly, though, as I was slightly crunched for time… or perhaps upon rereading it, I will let Wharton’s words wash over me better, take them more slowly.
But, a book that had me sobbing was Native Son. It took a good 400 or however many pages, but oh boy was it worth it. In just those last three pages, as his family said their goodbyes and Bigger spoke with his lawyer, very suddenly his ignorance threw me into utter sadness. I felt terrible because he thought he knew his own tragedy, but he had no idea, and that was his tragedy. I cried all through finishing the last three or so pages, and the only book before that which caused such a reaction was Of Mice and Men, which I read much younger.
I’m still looking to bawl my eyes out at the words of a book, since reading Native son. I’m worried that words perhaps have lost some of their ability to do that, with me? Any recommendations from this list which are truly just terribly sad?
jb says: Thanks for this, Brendan. My own favourite would have to be The Story of Lucy Gault. But I’ll collate this list in the next couple of days and make a fresh post to include all the suggestions.
May 5th, 2007 at 4:08 am
What about The Year of Magical Thinking, by Joan Didion?
I thought that was wonderful but devastating. It describes her grief over the death of her husband. It might be a comforting book to read if you’d recently lost someone, but it’s also extremely sad.
jb says: OK, it’s on the list.
Jul 4th, 2007 at 5:12 am
How about Les Miserables? I was crying so hard at the last page that I had to go back and reread the last chapter to finish the cry.
jb says: I’ve added it to the list.
Jul 20th, 2007 at 3:17 pm
For me I’d have to pick “The Thorn Birds” by Colleen McCullough. I think it’s such a beautifully written book! There is one point in the book at the beginning where Frank and his sister Meggie are being described and he cries, and the way the author described it was incredible, I have to admit I had a few tears!
jb says: OK, Dalma, it’s on the list.
Aug 17th, 2007 at 4:47 pm
Ethan Frome is a sad and beautiful story. Please come to fromemusical.blogspot.com and follow my company’s struggle to produce our stage version of the novella.
Aug 19th, 2007 at 9:26 am
The ‘children’s’ book “Bridge to Terabithia”, heck even the movie brought back some seriously throat tightening memories. I was emotionally scarred by that book as a child and i’d say it was probably the first encounter i’d ever had with the concept of death. I cried on and off for hours after reading it as the loss seemed so incredibly personal and unacceptable. There’s just something fearfully sad about the concept of children having to deal with death. Definitely a book that will stay in my collection though and one that I will read again and again throughout the years.
Aug 24th, 2007 at 1:58 am
I know it sounds childish, but “The Giving Tree” makes me cry more than any other book.
Sep 6th, 2007 at 8:58 am
I’m surprised no one has mentioned “The White Hotel” by D M Thomas. That is so sad it should come with a health warning. Perhaps the most powerfully emotional book ever written.
Hardy’s “Tess of the D’Urbervilles” is pretty bloody sad too.
Nov 29th, 2007 at 9:20 pm
American Pastoral by Phillip Roth. 400 pages of regret, frustration, and despair.
Mar 12th, 2008 at 10:09 am
I hope that someone will try “Flowers for Algernon” by Daniel Keyes.I lived despondencily for about 2 weeks since i read the book.
May 15th, 2008 at 3:01 am
Summer - Edith Wharton (sadder than Ethan Frome but less famous)
The Madness of a Seduced Woman - Susan Fromberg Schaeffer
Villette - Charlotte Bronte
Young adult “animal” novels - lots, including Where the Red Fern Grows - Wilson Rawls
May 15th, 2008 at 10:27 pm
Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck