16 Books About Existential Crisis, Gentlest to Heaviest

Siddhartha is a young brahmin in the time of the Buddha who cannot accept a truth that has been handed to him rather than found. He leaves home for the forest ascetics, meets Gotama and politely declines to follow him, then goes the other way entirely into trade, money and a courtesan's rooms, before ending up as a ferryman beside a river. Hesse wrote it in German in the early twenties and it reads like a fable, short chapters and plain sentences. The idea underneath is simple and hard to accept: nobody can hand you the answer, because wisdom does not travel through language.

Nora Seed loses her job, her cat and her last reason on the same day, and wakes in a library between life and death where every volume holds a version of her life that went differently. She tries them one at a time: the Olympic swimmer, the rock star, the glaciologist, the wife who stayed. Haig writes plainly and moves fast, and the real subject is regret rather than physics. The library is a device rather than a puzzle, so anyone hoping for a serious theory of parallel lives will find the thinking thin, and the emotional beat still lands.

Ove is fifty nine, recently widowed, recently pushed out of the job he gave his life to, and he has worked out exactly how and when he intends to die. Every attempt gets interrupted, usually by the pregnant Iranian neighbour who has moved in across the road and needs help with a car. Backman writes him first as an insufferable man with rules about everything, then shows you slowly where each rule came from. It is sentimental and it knows that about itself. The comedy is precise, and the grief underneath never gets softened for your comfort.

Agastya Sen is twenty four, English speaking, Delhi raised, and sent for district training to Madna, a town with heat, mosquitoes and no visible reason to be awake in it. He smokes, lies to everyone about his life, skips appointments, reads Marcus Aurelius on the floor of a rented room, and drifts. Chatterjee published this in 1988 and it reads like something written last year, because the condition it describes is now standard issue: a young man with a good job, no faith in the job, and no idea what he would rather be doing instead.

Keiko Furukura is thirty six and has worked at the same Tokyo convenience store since university, learning how to pass as a person by copying her colleagues' speech, clothes and opinions. She is content. Her family and friends treat that contentment as a fault to be corrected, and the pressure to marry and get a proper career eventually pushes her into an arrangement with a genuinely awful man. Murata writes short, dry and slightly alien, and the joke turns over as you read: the strange one is not Keiko, it is a society that cannot allow a person to be happy in the wrong shape.

Viktor Frankl was a Viennese psychiatrist deported to the camps, and the first half of this book is his account of what he watched people do there, told without melodrama and without asking for your sympathy. The second half sets out logotherapy, his argument that the search for meaning is the central human drive, and that meaning arrives through work, through love, and through the stance you take towards suffering you cannot avoid. It first appeared in German in 1946. His claim is not that suffering is good. It is that a person who has a why can carry almost any how.

Toru Watanabe's best friend kills himself at seventeen with no explanation, and the novel follows Toru through university in Tokyo while two women pull him in opposite directions: Naoko, who is coming apart quietly in a sanatorium in the hills, and Midori, who is loud, funny and present. Murakami wrote this as straight realism, with none of his usual talking cats or parallel worlds, and the result is a book about how a young death rearranges everybody it leaves behind. The mood is autumn, rain, cheap student rooms and long train journeys.

Harry Haller is fifty, living alone in rented rooms, contemptuous of the comfortable world he cannot leave, and seriously planning to cut his throat on his next birthday. A stranger hands him a small book that describes his condition exactly. Then he meets Hermine, who teaches him to dance, and eventually walks into a Magic Theatre where his personality is dismantled in front of him. Hesse wrote it during his own middle aged collapse and it shows. The first half is the sharpest description of self loathing I have read, and the second half goes surreal in a way that splits readers down the middle.

Gregor Samsa wakes one morning changed into a large insect. What follows is not horror but administration: his own anxiety about the sales trip, his manager arriving to ask why he is late, his family working out where to keep him and who will now earn. Kafka never explains the change and never needs to, since the comedy and the horror both live in everyone's reaction to it. As a description of what it feels like to stop being useful to the people who depend on your income, nothing has beaten it in over a century. It runs about sixty pages.

Tomas is a surgeon and a compulsive adulterer, Tereza is the woman who arrives with a heavy suitcase and stays, Sabina paints and leaves everybody, Franz is the man who takes her seriously. Around them Soviet tanks roll into Prague and the country shuts. Kundera keeps interrupting his own novel to argue with you about weight and lightness, and about whether a choice you cannot repeat can be judged at all. The philosophy and the plot share a bed, which is either the pleasure of this book or the irritation of it, and I have felt both on different readings.

Meursault gets a telegram about his mother's death, attends the funeral without visible grief, goes swimming the next day, starts seeing a woman, and later shoots a man on a hot beach in Algiers. The second half is his trial, where the prosecution builds its case less on the killing than on his refusal to perform sorrow. Camus writes in short flat sentences that make you complicit in the flatness, which is the trick of the thing. It is a novel about a man who will not lie about what he feels, inside a society that requires the lie.

William Stoner leaves a Missouri farm for the state university to study agriculture, sits through a compulsory literature class, and quietly changes direction for good. The rest is one life: a marriage that goes cold within months, a daughter he loses to that coldness, a departmental feud that costs him everything he cares about at work, and one affair that turns out to be the happiest thing that ever happens to him. Williams tells it in calm unhurried prose with no irony anywhere. The novel was ignored when it came out and found its readers decades later.

Camus starts with the one question he thinks matters, which is whether a person should go on living in a universe that offers no reason to, and then spends the essay closing every convenient exit. Suicide he treats as a surrender to the problem rather than a solution to it. Religion and the philosophies that smuggle meaning back in he calls a leap. What he proposes instead is holding the contradiction open: keep asking, get no answer, and live anyway with more attention rather than less. The last pages take the man condemned to roll a rock uphill forever and ask you to picture him satisfied.

The narrator is forty, bitter, out of the civil service and living in a rented corner, and the first half is him arguing with a reader he has invented specifically so he can insult them. He attacks the idea that people act in their own interest, insisting that a man will choose harm just to prove he is free to. The second half is a memory: a humiliating dinner with old schoolmates, then a night with a young woman called Liza in which he is offered kindness and sets about destroying it. Written in 1864, and modern self sabotage has not improved on it.

Esther Greenwood has the summer everybody wanted: a prize internship at a women's magazine in New York, a hotel room, free clothes, parties she does not enjoy. She is also going numb, and Plath tracks the process from the inside with unnerving calm, through the return home, the sleeplessness, the collapse, the hospital, and the electroconvulsive therapy that follows. It came out in 1963 under a pseudonym, weeks before Plath died, which colours the way everyone reads it. The writing is funnier and sharper than its reputation suggests, and that is part of what makes the descent so hard to watch.

Yozo grows up unable to feel what other people seem to feel, so he becomes a clown instead, making his classmates laugh so that nobody looks at him too closely. The notebooks carry him through art school, alcohol, morphine, a run of women, an attempted double suicide he survives, and the steady dismantling of whatever he was. Dazai published it in 1948, shortly before he died, and in Japan it is treated as something close to a confession. It is short, calm and completely free of self pity, which is exactly what makes it as bad as it is.