Novels Where Love Doesn't Work Out

The Remains of the Day

In the queue!

Never read Ishiguro, thanks!

Hunger is phenomenal indeed but you should really check out his later work. His mature prose is miles ahead of hunger, and he keeps the proto-modernist approach to characters and their relations in a much more lyrical way.

Will do. Hunger had actually just been recommended to me by one of my professors just before I finished my undergrad. I'd never heard of Hamsun before that.

As a bonus, a lot of his best work revolves around unrequited love and lonely, socially challenged men.

Happy reading user

Lolita

Good to know. Thanks bud!

never change Veeky Forums

Bump fellas. Y'all got anything else for me?

Have you tried Lolita?

>Hunger is phenomenal indeed but you should really check out his later work.

really? Which books specifically? I gave Pan a try and I couldn't stand it, assumed Hamsun was a one hit wonder.

Growth of the Soil
It's his mature work that is significantly different than hunger/pan/mysteries/victoria
And it's just as good, if not better.

I love Pan so I probably can't help you out there.
I concurr that most of his work is very different from Hunger, but I actually like it a lot more

The Idiot

"By Grand Central Station I Stopped and Wept" is v good.

Also, "Our Lady of the Flowers"

Sat down and wept rather

Thanks! I've only read The Brothers K, but I do have a copy of The Idiot somwhere...

Added them both! Thanks.

In appreciation of everyone giving me these recs, please have this poem that I love quite dearly.

"Feeling Fucked Up," by Etheridge Knight

Lord she’s gone done left me done packed / up and split
and I with no way to make her
come back and everywhere the world is bare
bright bone white crystal sand glistens
dope death dead dying and jiving drove
her away made her take her laughter and her smiles
and her softness and her midnight sighs—

Fuck Coltrane and music and clouds drifting in the sky
fuck the sea and trees and the sky and birds
and alligators and all the animals that roam the earth
fuck marx and mao fuck fidel and nkrumah and
democracy and communism fuck smack and pot
and red ripe tomatoes fuck joseph fuck mary fuck
god jesus and all the disciples fuck fanon nixon
and malcolm fuck the revolution fuck freedom fuck
the whole muthafucking thing
all i want now is my woman back
so my soul can sing

The Sorrows Of Young Werther

Well, in a certain sense I'd say "Madame Bovary". It's not the failure of love on itself but more one person's failure to understand love's implications. It all turns around her naivety about love and relationships and degenerate slowly.

... But honestly, what good novels don't talk about that? I was trying to mentally list some books and all of them had at least some relation with it. Unless you are looking for something more specific, the love disillusion and the impossibility of communication between men and women are quite abused themes nowadays

I'm just looking for novels/plays/poems/memoirs whatever where the inadequacy or failure of love is the central concern.

I've read Madame Bovary, and that'd be close to what I'm looking for, but still not quite on point. I'm looking for things dealing more concretely with the degeneration and failure of relationships.

Holy shit I love this poem and was futilely trying to describe it to my gf thanks op:))

To clarify, Madame Bovary was a more broad critique of the failure of bourgeois values to appropriately orient our passions in a way that provides fulfillment, and how the easy and cheap sentimentalisms by which we attempt to fill that gap cause the collapse of that particular person through the repeated failure of passionate affairs to produce love.

I'm looking for things that deal more directly with love achieved and unsustainable or inadequate and its subsequent failure.

Love wins

No problem bud. It's one of my very favorites.

Here's a lovely essay on his poetry:

aprweb.org/poems/feeling-fucked-up-the-architecture-of-anger

Ok. Mmh, I don't know what's the general opinion here of Kundera. I personally never red The unbearable lightness of being for years, only because it's well known to be red by pseuds. Also personal experience. The title itself seems attract them like honey. But well, last year I gave it a try and I actually found it very enjoyable (inb4 pseud).
If you want, is about the different approaches that people have with life (and love), and how these approaches tend to be incompatibles in a relationship. That, and some insights of the love-mythology that the characters built in their fantasies, with some amusing examples of how the "semantic" of their respective feelings differs greatly. Anyway it's a really short book

love doesn't exist
only vidya, adderall, nicotine, masturbation, depression, and oxytocin

Yes, got it now. I also recently red Asylum from McGrath. To be honest it was nice and all, but sometime seemed a little off, personally. But it seems to be more on point on what you ask here.

Anyway it narrates of – surprise – an asylum, in which occurs an affair between one patient and the wife of a psychologist. All the story it's narrated from the point of view of another psychologist who was the one who supervised the first patient. Naturally the relationship between the two degenerate

Ok, awesome, I appreciate your recs!

>Stoner by Williams
fuck off with this book already. there's not a single insightful thing in it. it's the same archetypical broad strokes fucktard bullshit of the sadcucked unfulfilled academic. kill yourself.

Everything by Houllebecq

Love works though, you'll not be able to shield yourself from it, and you know it. Don't become a bitter monster

don't forget alcohol to help you forget how wretched it is to exist

>being this much of a pleb

are you upset nobody cares about your visual novel threads?

Oh, I believe in love in the general sense, I'm just done attempting to deal with romantic love in particular. I need these books as a constant reminder so the next time I forget and start pursuing or dating someone, they will quickly bring me back to my senses and I can GTFO quickly.

my goddamn diary desu

Came here to make this god damn shitpost only to find it done before bed. So I put forth the notion that my post itself is an example you seek OP. I love shitposting for attention so by not replying I AM satisfying you but by replying I won't be. Either way I win, and your thread is better for MY presence.
Please reply. Also Frankenstein

>Bad marriage
>Miserable husband
>Abusive wife
>Fear of divorce because of how cruelly men are treated
>Doesn't want to lose his livelihood
>Doesn't sleep in his own bed anymore
>Is essentially an alcoholic
>Considers suicide
>Pretty rough ending

I've got a book that can red-pill you into staying away from relationships, OP. It's a book I've written however so it'll be shilling. An older fellow had already read it, someone who has been through a few divorces, and while he points out that not all divorces are alike he says my book brought back memories of one of his worst ones. Commends me for being able to portray such a situation even though I'm still fairly young (only in my 20s), never been married, and thus never divorced.

Can provide a link if anyone is interested. There's another book that has a somewhat romance-like aspect to it with a blurry ending.

>Man soon to graduate College
>Girl just starting
>He enjoys hanging out with his buddy, going to pubs, and drinking
>She has crippling social anxiety and a pretty fucked-up past
>He accidentally scares the bejesus out of her when they first met
>Tries to make it up to her
>Ends up wanting to try and help her with her crippling anxiety
>Relationship develops
>For fucked-up reasons she has a rape fetish
>Probably not what you think
>He dislikes treating her like that for his own personal reasons
>Treats her like it anyways because they can't really be 'together' any other way
>So in the process of helping her, he must do things he quite dislikes

Can provide a link to this one as well. Both are on Kindle Unlimited, and both are only $0.99 USD for the eBook. Both are also less than $8.99 USD each for the paperback.

The Bible

See?

spring torrents

what we talk about when we talk about love is a good short story that demonstrates that the idea love is a human concept that can only take place in instances of personal endeavor against tragedy and violence

Catcher in the Rye. Holden didn't manage to stay with Phoebe