Great literature about the human condition

[kublacant]

I’m not sure how else to word it. I have had some bereavement recently close family and further afield and it has really made me contemplate life ((and death)

I am sure greater minds than mine have grappled with this!

does anyone know any great literature deals with life/human condition? I’m thinking they are probably German or Russian!

I am an avid reader, so it’s natural for me to turn to books at these sorts of times. Fiction only.

Another vote for Middlemarch. An extraordinary novel.

South Riding, Winifred Holtby.

I haven’t heard of Jane Smiley, I’ll definitely look her up thank you!

Jane Smiley has written many books and I really like that she dips into different genres. My top three would be:

• The All True Travels And Adventures of Lidie Newton (1850s USA, a feminist Huckleberry Finn in some ways)
• Duplicate Keys (1980s New York, murder mystery + mediation on friendship)
• A Thousand Acres (mid West USA farming, take on King Lear).

Also recommend Huckleberry Finn itself.

I Will Never See the World Again by Ahmet Altan
Six Stories by Stefan Zweig
The Years by Annie Ernaux
The Return by Hisham Matar

I would also add Hitler, Stalin, Mum and Dad by Daniel Finkelstein, which is very good on the randomness and luck involved in life.

Thinking in terms of books that made me really reflect on what it means to be a person -

Bel Canto by Anne Patchett
All the light we cannot see by Anthony Doerr
North Woods by Daniel Mason

Elizabeth Gaskell - North and South
Some lovely reflections on that topic. I just read it and wish I had read it much sooner

Sorry, I've just spotted that you said fiction only, so I'll reduce my list to Six Stories by Stefan Zweig!

Life and Fate By Vasily Grossman.

Honestly it's wonderful, heartbreaking and fantastic.

The story of how it was published is pretty mad too.

Kazuo Ishiguro was who came to my mind first as well.

I also agree with Middlemarch. I read it as a teen and want to reread it now I’m a fair bit older!

Another vote for Life and Fate.

If you've got a lot of time on your hands, you could read In Search of Lost Time by Proust.

Which is absolutely glorious!

Agreeing with the suggestions of Zweig and Annie Ernaux and Zola, but would suggest Stendhal’s Education sentimentale rather than anything by Balzac. Olga Tokarczuk, Magda Zsabo, Jenny Erpenbeck for some more contemporary European fiction. Have you read Woolf? Maybe start with Mrs Dalloway or To the Lighthouse? Joyce’s Ulysses which is humane and wise.

And to go off-piste entirely, Miriam Toews’ All My Puny Sorrows (Canadian, 2014) which is a brilliantly wise, funny, sad novel about life, death, family, inheritance, suicide.

I'm going to recommend 3 that are quite short but pack the same punches - IMHO - as the long classics.

A Whole Life by Robert Seethaler - just 160 pages.
Stoner by John Williams. Amazon says it's 320 pp but it honestly felt shorter. Lovely, lovely book.
Academy Street by Mary Costello. Under 200 pp.
Dammit I just thought of another one and then forgot it. I'll come back later when I remember.
Other writers to look at - Anne Enright, Karl Ove Knausgaard, Richard Powers.
Special shout out to Iris Murdoch. I adored her for years and years (last century) and have read almost everything she wrote, much of it more than once. I don't know that she's aged well. I find her hard to get into now. Maybe that's me though, because essentially I'm done with her?

Oh I've remembered - William Maxwell, They Came Like Swallows. Also under 200 pp. 🙂

@PondGhost Magda Szabo, brilliant suggestion! Especially The Door and Iza's Ballad. Two books I love the very bones of.

And thinking of Eastern Europeans, and segueing into poetry - because why not? - Wislawa Szymborska.
I'm just going to keep thinking of more and more. Think I'll be back to this thread later! 😂

William Maxwell is an excellent shout, though I’d recommend The Chateau, which is about the first American holidaymakers starting to come back to France after WW2.

Anne Enright is brilliant — start with The Gathering or The Green Road.

I read Murdoch obsessively in my teens, but when I pick up any of her novels now, they seem like philosophical treatises thinly disguised as fiction, even The Sea, the Sea, which I’ve taught to undergraduates a few times.

@PondGhost Good God, are you me? 😂

Second the Stone Diaries. Read it last year and it sat with me for days afterwards. Fantastic. In fact this has reminded me that I bought other Carol Shields books off the back of it and haven’t read them yet.

She’s wonderful, isn’t she??? When I first read The Door, I kept phoning people to tell them how good it was.

Great shout, I love her writing

Buddenbrooks
Cancer Ward
And surprisingly ...Chesil Beach...find myself re reading and thinking about this one and how choices affect us
Crime and Punishment
Chekhov Plays

Gilead by Marilynne Robinson

‘Dombey &Son’ might meet your requirements re bereavement.

Also off the wall but …Ursula leGuin makes one think deeply about what it is to be human, by looking at different versions of humanity across the Universe. ‘Always Coming Home’ is my go to book in times of trouble and questioning.
🕊

No, but we could start a Former Fans of Murdoch club? Where we would sit around gloomily thumbing tattered copies of The Unicorn and saying ‘I used to love this!’

I’ve never reread TU since my teens, and suspect I’d just keeping wanting to shout, ‘Hannah, just leave!’ throughout.

Long Island is a wonderful, deceptively simple read about The Human Condition.
I also enjoyed Jonathan Franzen's Freedom but then felt a bit cheated when I found he wrote it quite young (it was about middle aged people amongst other things)

Also read Death of a Salesman by Arthur Miller...theatre can be free!

I was re reading bits of Dombey and Son in floods of tears the other day.