What is the most bleak, nihilistic, melancholy book you have

No Longer Human by Dazai Osamu is a terrific novel and real soul-crusher. You should check it out.

>>4990442
I heard Nausea by Jean-Paul Sartre actually makes you nauseous, or at least very depressed. One guy said he stopped reading halfway through because he didn't want to have his mood ruined by the book.

I haven't read it though, so this probably is a shitty recommendation.

The best I've found, in terms of nonfiction, has been Ligotti's The Conspiracy Against the Human Race, and Cioran's On the Heights of Despair.

However, I find myself wanting something harder than these. Ligotti's prose is too clinical and analytical. Cioran is too adolescent "omg le despair". I want something that will destroy me.

>>4990471
I want something like this too. But maybe what destroys one isn't what destroys another person, idk.
I tried many writers, including Cioran and what France has made of most depressing. I haven't tried Flaubert yet, but it's on my list and I'll start as soon as I'm done with Kafka. I have good hope Madame Bovary will make me cry like a baby.

>>4990484
For me it goes even beyond depression. Depression is a temporary condition, an emotional state. I want something that challenges my permanent conception of the world, dismantles it.

I didn't mention Bernhard because the OP specifically asked for nonfiction, but I've found Bernhard's novels to be about as pessimistic and misanthropic as you can get. And yet they are also strangely life-affirming.

>>4990460
>One guy said he stopped reading halfway through because he didn't want to have his mood ruined by the book.
what a fucking pleb

>>4990540
I guess just out of curiosity, what are some fiction you may recommend? I had the notion that anything fictional wouldn't really move me.

>I need that little extra push to off myself

Stephen King has some pretty spooky stuff.

>>4990540
>Depression is a temporary condition
no

depression is a personality trait

Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

spoiler alert: earth is destroyed.

I read it as a youth during the summer. Cried at the beach

>>4990598
>Implying personality traits are not temporary conditions

>>4990540
>my permanent conception of the world, dismantles it
But you create your own meaning - so are you dismantling your current meaning only to build a new one? Are you deconstructing your meaning in order to insanify yourself or fall upon your own blade?

Or do you take a voyeurs pleasing in watching an author demolish the meaning others have created for themselves? Like the gangly whip who hides behind the tree and watches a bully take lunch money from the nip twins and fondles his anus throughout?

>>4990607
they are permanent conditions.

philistine

>>4990558
please leave.

>>4990598
Depression is never permanent. I suffer from clinical depression but still I have days where I'm better, days where I'm worse. And it's not all bad living in a first world country.

Melancholy and depression are very different feelings though.

While melancholy is often a fertile soil for creativity and introspection, depression is utterly debilitating.

>>4990612
>thinking anything is permanent

How could anyone possibly believe this?

>>4990640
Precisely why looking for "depressing" literature is counter-productive. Better to find something that makes you see the world in a way that allows you to overcome depression and melancholy. Even though it's counter-intuitive, nihilism and pessimism help one live one's life. It's easier not to get hung up on the little things when life is malignantly useless and meaningless.

>>4990540
I never said it wouldn't go further than depression. This is where the truth lies.

steppenwolf

>>4990652
>It's easier not to get hung up on the little things when life is malignantly useless and meaningless.
This.

>>4990680
Thats not depressing, its supposed to be uplifting and teaching self-diagnosed steppenwolfs how to live a life.

> stirner. logical, sharp. destruction of ideas behind the feelings, not melancholy at all.
>notes from underground. fiction, autotorture guy. pretty destructive ideas. too literarian.
>kierkegaard fear and trembling. people from false believers to too desperate of believe to properly believe. it was shocked me long ago, but i think is bullshit now.
i didnt read much but this three were the marked me more. anyway, is important what you actually believe to choose what can make you trembling inside.

Dostoevsky's works are full of misery
1984 is pretty depressing, it hasn't aged well though as it's lost it's contemporary social relevance to some degree following the Cold War (or maybe it has, it depends on your outlook)
Frankenstein also doesn't end well
you might also try existentialist literature (google is your friend) [Waiting for Godot or Nausea]

>>4990471
On the heights of despair was written by Cioran in his 20s that's why is juvenile. Try his later stuff. Also try Journey at the end of the night.

Chekhov's short stories.

>>4990540
Thats not what depression is you fucking asshat. Thats what attention seeking normals call depression

I've heard Journey to the End of the Night is soul crushing. Anyone read it?

http://public.wsu.edu/~campbelld/crane/black.htm

Fernando Pessoa's "Book of Disquiet"

There won't even be a you to be sad.

>>4990452
Agree.

Hunger by Knut Hamsun it's worthy to read as well, but reading No Longer Human I felt bad not only psychologically but also physically

>no-one mentions Zapffe

stay pleb, /lit/

Non-fiction? Try Peter Sotos. You'll never look at the human race the same again. Start with Selfish little.

>>4990471
>Ligotti's The Conspiracy Against the Human Race
I second this. Was so absurdly nihilistic that by the end I was almost laughing. 'MALIGNANTLY USELESS'

An Imaginary Life by David Malouf is pretty soul crushing, though it is beautiful

Also I would say Brief Interviews With Hideous Men destroyed me when I read it last week

>>4990460
Nausea doesn't end in a bleak way really (Sartre seems to fall in line with the whole Nietzschean aesthetic affirmation of life) and it's whole "boohoo I exist" crisis is a really laughable when read after a better existential analytic like Heidegger's.

I'd go with The Woman in the Dunes by Abe. Very strange, unsettling novel.

>>4990471
Where do you get your hands on Cioran's book? I've been trying for ages to get a Kindle version of that, can't find it anywhere.

>>4991991
My personal favorite was the "potato peeler" piece.

OP, it's not bleak in a philosophical sense but Hogg by Robert Delany made me physically sick, and I am not squeamish in the least. It also depressed and fucked over my mind for a few days, could not feel happy. It raped me, that ugly piece of literature.

File: 51Jm30PcjDL._SY344_BO1,204,203,200_[1].jpg (23KB, 247x346px) Image search: [Google]

23KB, 247x346px

Written in exile and started in the bleakest years of WWII a few years after one his closest friends and intellectual peers killed himself while running from the Nazis. Definitely Adorno at his most pessimistic and only that much more devastating because you get the sense Adorno is a half-hidden optimist who really believes humanity is capable of better.

"I love the great despisers, because they are the great adorers, and arrows of longing for the other shore."

>>4992061
>Where do you get your hands on Cioran's book?

I found a .txt in #bookz then converted it to .mobi. The formatting is a bit shitty, but its readable.

Here you go anon: https://filetea.me/t1sn0y5Wl12T6qFfJNEw8Uiew

>>4992107
Thank you so much man. I plowed through hours looking for it months back. Went through almost 15 pages of results in Google looking for an e-version, unreal.

>>4992112
No problem. I just wish I could find his other stuff for Kindle. All I've been able to track down is a PDF of The Trouble With Being Born, which is unconvertible and unreadable on anything but a computer screen.

>>4992135
I had that PDF too. I've tracked down a couple PDFs of his work, each one uglier than the last. Seems he's one of those authors you've got to get in physical copy.

>>4992142
Yeah, I plan on buying a few of his works when I get the chance to. His writing is the kind that you can keep returning to compulsively and merits owning a physical copy.

>>4991232
Not particularly. He has a crappy time of it but I wouldn't say soul crushing.. spirit crushing maybe

>>4990442
The Russian existentialists are pretty depressing, when you take the circumstances in which the wrote, into account.

>>4990471
I find Conspiracy to be quite funny in many places. In a cynical, sardonic way, of course. Ligotti's black humor is indeed "clinical and analytical", but that is why it works. I think a lot of people miss that it is supposed to be both light-hearted and metaphysically heavy at the same time.
But I guess you're just looking for stoking the fire of masochism, so I'd say Dostoevsky in a bad translation since it's miserable to read and he always brings it back to uplifting positivism at the end. That or the Twilight saga.

Most realist russian literature is full le sad frog face mode.
They're really depressing.

>>4990442
anything by Solzhenitsyn

>>4991232
it was soul crushing to me

>>4991232
I love it, it's one of my favorite books, but I never really understood the "despairity" hype it gets. Maybe I'm just an edge master but i thought it was pretty tame.
I'd still reccommend it, though, as I said, it is one of my favorites

>>4993623
It drags in places, especially when he's in America, but the last 10 pages or so when his friend Robinson get shot is some of the best stuff ever written.

The Road is pretty bleak, in both circumstances and in theory, until the end. But even then, it's not a kind world. I'm not sure if it qualifies since the father's love for his son is one of the driving forces of the novel, but eh, it made me sad.

Ernest Becker - Denial of Death

>>4990471
I know what you're looking for, I haven't found it myself.
Albert Caraco is more extreme but it's not what you're looking for.

Two books that made me feel more terrible than the ones you mentioned are Malaparte's La Pelle and The red laugh.
Again it's not really what you're looking for but for a brief moment I felt and thought more with these than any Cioran.

(If you speak French I was recommended Jerome by Martinet as the most depressing book, unfortunately I have to wait for a translation)