So I just finished All Quiet on the Western Front (does nobody read this voluntarily? Three people saw me with it and asked if I was reading it for a class.) and I was thinking about how I’m affected differently by sad books than by sad movies. Not too long ago I read an old thread here that ran to several pages about depressing movies, and it put me in a nasty funk for a whole day just thinking about them! I read sad books all the time, though (although I try not to read them one after the other - sometimes that happens accidentally and I don’t sleep well for awhile. Annie Proulx, you know who you are.) I think I can really enjoy a sad book a lot better than I can enjoy a sad movie. And while the books really seem sadder to me, they rarely make me cry.
Children’s books where the animal dies are in a whole 'nother class, though. I think children’s authors really don’t like kids very much - how could you write Where the Red Fern Grows and not be a monster? Or Sounder, where they kill the dog twice?!
Anyway, what are your favorite books, examples of literary excellence, that are also heartbreakingly sad or depressing? (Short stories and novellas count too - I’m thinking of “Brokeback Mountain”.) Personally, I think somebody will probably mention A Fine Balance, which was sad and good but not a book I liked. Or, there’s Night, by Elie Weisel, which I found sad and good and I liked it, but it didn’t have the visceral effect on me that All Quiet on the Western Front just did - it didn’t personally make me sad like Flowers for Algernon did. What are your favorites?
Oh, I forgot to name my absolutle favorite - A Canticle for Leibowitz just leaves me feeling completely drained, because I just put so much of myself into it. The Sparrow by Maria Doria Russell seems like a more… sophisticated version, and while I also love it it doesn’t get under my skin quite as much.
The Dollmaker by Harriett Simpson Arnow. A hill country woman agrees to move her family to Detroit in the 1940’s, to find work. Describing the tragedies would spoil the book. It’s my favorite book, and I’ve bought extra copies for loaners. I’d like to re-read it, but I don’t think I could go through that again.
Patricia Anthony’s Flanders, which is another WWI story, but is epistolary, which I love. I highly recommend it.
I disagree about people who write animal stories hating children, though. I think kids can enjoy tragedy as much as adults, and while I wouldn’t say I loved those books as a child, they were important to me and even at the time I never wished them unread. They made me think in directions I never would have gone in on my own (What is worth dying for? How should a person deal with death? Why do bad things happen?) and that was important. Children’s literature would be poorer if it didn’t deal with real pain.
That book is a minor masterpiece, a work of haunting beauty. Don’t focus on the death of the dogs, which, really, is only a minor point to the whole. Instead, focus on the astonishingly beautiful message of the power of love.
I’ve never thought Red Fern was a “children’s book.” It’s a book about a child, and may have become a “children’s book” by dint of its designation as a classic, but I think it was written for an adult audience.
Some of my favorites:
Affinity by Sarah Waters is one of my favorite “sad books”. It’s the story of a depressed Victorian girl who falls in love with mysterious inmate in a women’s prison and decides to help her escape. It’s a book that haunted me long after I finished it. (I don’t usually like books written in the “diary” format, but this one is excellent, and honestly, probably couldn’t have been written as well in any other way.)
Year of Wonders by Geraldine Brooks is another one. A small villiage in England is ravaged by the bubonic plague.
Poison by Katheryn Harris is the story of a peasant woman undergoing trial by the Inquisition for her affair with a priest. Harris’s prose style is lyrical.
It’s divided into three narratives, each from the point of view of a different child growing up in a family in Vancouver’s Chinatown during the nineteen-thirties and -forties.
The first section is sort of light and whimsical, a tragic note enters the middle section, and the last part establishes a new standard for heart-wrenching. The first time I read it, I read it in one sitting – and I don’t remember any other book having such an effect on me. I was a fecking wreck.
I just finished Marley and Me a few minutes ago. It’s been a very long time since I’ve felt so many emotions while absorbed in a book. My chest is still heavy with the books ending, and the book has left me longing for Junior the Wonderdog, who passed away two summers ago. It’s one of the lightest, yet most touching reads I’ve experienced in ages.
I haven’t seen any of the movies/TV shows that were adapted from these (bits and pieces of Lonesome Dove, I guess) – in fact, didn’t know the first two had been adapted.
I’m going to second Yookeroo’s choice, A Prayer for Owen Meany, by John Irving, which is both heartbreaking and hilarious (sometimes simultaneously). I have shed more tears over this book than over any fiction I’ve ever read.
On the Beach by Nevil Shute. Although you are told at the beginning that all the characters in the book are going to die, you still hope for a way out when that time comes. And when it is reinforced that there is no way out, you can do nothing but read on as the characters with whom you’ve have spent the past few days leave you.
I would second Lonesome Dove and add its prequel Dead Man’s Walk- both tragic and wonderful epics.
The book I have cried the most while reading it does not end in the way you would expect a “dog book” to end- Nop’s Trials by Donald Macaig is an emotional rollercoaster for grownups. It’s the best animal related related book I’ve ever read, and also in my top 10 all time favorite book lists.