Best novels about loss, regret

[Connemara]

I find this particular genre of fiction fascinating and emotionally draining (which is what literature at its best often is). I'd like suggestions please. Two I've read this summer that fit this mold are Andre Aciman's Call Me By Your Name and Per Petterson's Out Stealing Horses. The former is beautiful, haunting, tragic, heartfelt; the latter is a quieter book and not as powerful, but worth a read nonetheless.

 

[King Francis]

Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time

Yukio Mishima, the Sea of Fertility tetralogy (beginning with Spring Snow)

Exquisite, revelatory, and exhausting, those should occupy you for a good long while.

 

[darkoak]

Kazuo Ishiguro, The Remains of the Day.

 

[w.mj]

Doctor Faustus by Thomas Mann

"...to thy poor soul, my friend, my Fatherland!"

The best work from one of the century's greatest writers. Spiritual destruction, national pathos, and ultimate salvation all rolled into a Nietzschean bundle of postmodernity. If you've neither read a single piece of philosophy nor learned an iota of history, the character of Zeitblom alone makes the novel among the finest written. But if you have studied those things...

Get the John Woods translation as the H.T. Porter-Lowe is rather poor.

A small confession: if the title of this thread had been simply "Best Novels," my answer would have been the same.

 

[TheIdler]

I just finished Everyman, by Philip Roth, which was pretty good. But the first thing I thought of when I saw your thread title was Brideshead Revisted, by Evelyn Waugh. Atonement, by Ian McEwan, is also excellent.

Originally Posted by King Francis

Yukio Mishima, the Sea of Fertility tetralogy (beginning with Spring Snow)

+1

 

[aportnoy]

Flaubert "Sentimental Education"

Bronte "Wuthering Heights"

 

[johnapril]

Skip the novels and read the short stories of Raymond Carver and Andre Dubus.

 

[zupermaus]

Kitchen by Banana Yoshimoto - a young woman contemplates love, life and death after the death of her boyfriend in a car accident.

the Diving Bell and the Butterfly, a book written by a paralysed stroke victim whose nurse found he could communicate through his eyeblinks (Jean-Michel Bauby).

 

[kwilkinson]

Eternally Unrequited: The Connemara Saga

 

[Brad]

Anna Karenina.

 

[Go Surface]

I remember reading Flowers for Algernon as a kid. Different kind of 'loss.'

 

[Dedalus]

Where the Red Fern Grows

 

[Go Surface]

Originally Posted by Dedalus

Where the Red Fern Grows

+100. I was trying to remember this one for the life of me, but couldn't think of the title.

 

[w.mj]

I think it's pretty funny that among responses including Tolstoy, Proust, and McEwan, the answer that received the first affirmation was "Where the Red Fern Grows."

I realize that must sound condescending, but I only mean that it's interesting how things read early in life are often more profound than things read later. That tendency also makes more important things like school curriculum.

 

[DocHolliday]

"The Sun Also Rises." That last sentence ...