Six depressing novels that can lift you out of depression

Rabih Alameddine is the author of the novels The Wrong End of the Telescope; Angel of History; An Unnecessary Woman; The Hakawati; I, the Divine; Koolaids; the story collection, The Perv; and one work of nonfiction, Comforting Myths. He has won the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction and was a finalist for the National Book Award. He received the Dos Passos Prize in 2019 and a Lannan Award in 2021.

Alameddine's new novel is The True True Story of Raja the Gullible (and His Mother).

At Lit Hub Alameddine tagged six "depressing novels that can lift you out of depression." One title on the list:

Bohumil Hrabal, Michael Henry Heim (Trans.), Too Loud a Solitude

Why it’s depressing:
Let’s start with the fact that the book is about a man, Haňťa, who has spent his life compacting wastepaper for recycling in a cellar. Is that not enough? He attempts to rescue banned books that are about to be destroyed. His life’s ambition is to buy the hydraulic press he uses to crush the paper, which he never achieves, of course. And when The Brigade of Socialist Workers replace him with apathetic paper crushers, he lies down in his press, holding a book by Novalis of all people, and crushes himself.

Why it will lift you out of your depression:
Because it’s fucking brilliant, of course. Haňťa is trying to survive a totalitarian dictatorship that disdains and prosecutes the arts (sound familiar?), yet he doesn’t merely survive, he transcends. The world might see him as a peon, but he sees himself as an artist. He considers every bundle of papers he creates a work of art. He wraps each bale with reproductions of paintings and places a rare book at the center of it. He dreams of the world seeing his bales the way he does. Dreams are an act of resistance.

Read about the other novels on the list at Lit Hub.

--Marshal Zeringue