Great literature about the human condition

I don’t think Anna Karenina was mentioned. Kept me awake until I finished it (many years ago now).

Crime and Punishment does fit the bill perfectly though. Compelling read.

The Bee Sting
Demon Copperhead

So he did! I was clearly paying lots of attention in that module 😄

Life After Life has been mentioned a couple of times but the book that really scratched that existential itch for me was the companion piece A God in Ruins which blew me away for...(too spoiler to mention) reasons. I still think about that book years later

Recent novels I've really enjoyed which might fit the bill are Claire Lombardo's The Most Fun We Ever Had and Nathan Hill's Wellness - which is a joy on Audible, if you're so inclined.

Here One Moment, Liane Moriarty is a bit quirky but I found it very emotionally satisfying.

Oh I just came back to the thread to say Douglas Coupland and saw you had beaten me to it.
I really liked All Families are Psychotic which was weird, wacky, dysfunctional and all the rest but so very heart-warming and life-affirming with it.

Primo Levi - If This Is A Man + The Truce
Slyvia Plath- The Bell Jar
Quite a bit of Yeats poetry
I know it's not considered "proper" literature, but I found Maeve Binchy novels to be more true to human nature than the likes of Colm Tóibín. I think she's a better writer.

So many good recommendations! I really enjoy Douglas Coupland when thinking about modern life. He’s bleak but beautiful in his consideration of what it means to be human.

Life After God
Binge
Generation X

Steinbeck

Olivia Manning
Pat Barker
Muriel Spark

Oh and I highly recommend Irène Némirovsky. All of her novels and short stories.

And some Chekhov, too!

This is a wonderful thread; I see so many favourites here. I’m also so pleased to see Middlemarch recommended so many times. The greatest novel ever written.

I will add Ethan Frome by Edith Wharton to the list. A novella that I come back to time and time again.

Ooh, good question! I'm afraid I don't know.

I thought Flaubert wrote Madame Bovary,.....Its a great story though. And I would really recommend Germinal.

Not literature but one of the most totally engrossing books I have read on "being human" is Being Human by Roger Smith. Its a historical and philosophical look at how we have come to understand being human since the enlightenment. He challenges the idea that there is one fixed irrefutable ahistoric human nature.

Do we see which novel it is? I was assuming that 'the new Kate O'Brien' was That Lady, but the setting is pre-war, isn't it, though it was filmed in 1945?

I did a module called The Human Condition at Uni. I think the novels were:

Camus La Peste (recommend)
Sartre Nausea (short, but fairly incomprehensible)
Germinal (long, recommend)
Balzac, Madame Bovary (long, recommend - loved)

You could also try:
Sagan, Bonjour Tristesse (short, recommend - loved)
Camus The Stranger (short, recommend - loved)
Les Miserables (long - never finished it!)
Kafka The Trial (short, recommend)

@VirtuousGathering I love Kate O'Brien (and she's mentioned in the film Brief Encounter as a favourite from the Boots' Lending Library!).

good thread, thank you!

Is there a thread for the KL readalong - I can’t see one but maybe looking in the wrong place…

I came here to say Stoner by John Williams. Just an extraordinary book following the life of Stoner, a university professor.

It's like a conversation with friends. I don't have anyone irl to talk about books with so here and Backlisted are great for me!

Agreed - I really enjoy it.

And me! Another one who came to him via The Chateau.

Another suggestion of a great and humane but small-scale novel, OP -- Kate O'Brien's The Land of Spices (1941). Banned in Ireland for a single sentence referencing a gay relationship, it's set in a girl's convent school in early 20thc Ireland, and split between the perspectives of a pupil who grows up at the school, and the beautiful, tormented, humane English Mother Superior who becomes a form of alternative enabling mother-figure for her.

It's very good on the slightly feverish atmosphere of a boarding school and the rivalries and snobberies and good feeling among the nuns and girls (and it's a novel in which a Catholic education is a force for good and intellectual enfranchisement), and on goodness, and what makes a good life, and grief, and the tiny ways in which people who remain virtual strangers to one another can nonetheless influence one another for good.

A sort of Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, but rejigged for a Young Woman.

I would like to also recommend the Backlisted podcast which talks about lots of the books mentioned here and many more. It's really interesting and funny.

And I’m coming back immediately to recommend to @kublacant that you seek out the novels of Elizabeth Taylor, unless of course you know them already. They are small masterpieces. Very funny in places, but so true and sad and very definitely grappling with questions of the human condition.

Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont might be a bit close to the bone if you’ve recently suffered a bereavement, but she wrote many other wonderful books.