Guardian~ suggested books on themes of being alone
'Writing and reading are famously solitary acts; the loneliness of literature is expected, even embraced. But several writers have expanded solitude’s role, from a necessary condition to a central subject.
Lonely characters speak more intimately to the reader, having no ready companion in their own world. The unaccompanied character becomes an avatar for the reader: a pairing that casts the reader as an active explorer, rather than a wallflower in a richer social scene. And it is no wonder that so many books about isolation take place amid gorgeous landscapes. A lonesome character is uniquely attuned to beauty.
In my novel The Sunlit Night, a few outcasts travel to one of Earth’s loneliest latitudes: the Norwegian Arctic. A recently dumped painting student heads north to works as an apprentice to a Nordic master; the master is a reclusive descendant of the nomadic Sami reindeer hunters. These characters are seeking relief from their losses, but they’re also looking to prove that they can make it alone.'
The following list, ranging chronologically from 1847 to 2011, collects the many wise and friendless characters who have set out on such solitary journeys.
No character is closer to my heart than Jane, this stubborn, loyal, tiny girl who stares down English storms and hears urgent voices in the wind. In one of my favourite passages, Jane declares: “There is no happiness like that of being loved by your fellow creatures, and feeling that your presence is an addition to their comfort.” In order to reach that sense of fellowship, Jane must first learn what she is when she’s alone.
The hero of Hamsun’s Pan is far heartier and better equipped for the loner’s life than poor Jane: Lieutenant Thomas Glahn lives securely as a hunter in the woods, strengthened by his military training and protected by his sweet dog, Aesop. The idyllic, north Norwegian forest is a haven to him, and Glahn’s knowledge of every berry and blossom makes his life lush, in spite of his loneliness. This book is an anthem for how to live well in the wild – until love visits the lieutenant’s cabin and leaves him wanting more than his own company. Unlike self-scrutinising Jane, Thomas fails to examine his own moral centre, and the sudden onset of desire destroys his only way of being.
This impressionist masterwork illustrates loneliness via interiors: the interior monologues of characters whose needs fail to align. Again, the spectre of a distant island, a remote landscape, provokes longing. By bringing the Ramsays together, but not observing them as a group – rather, by examining each individual mind as it races against the others – Woolf portrays one of the most devastating forms of solitude: the feeling of being alone even while surrounded by loved ones.
“Any place to which you may flee will now be like the place from which you have fled,” Jack Burden learns, as he collapses at the end of a long journey, “and you might as well go back, after all, to the place where you belong.” He is experiencing “the great sleep”, a period of transformative disillusionment that comes after crisis. Following many tales of lost souls wandering through Britain’s heaths, Robert Penn Warren crafts an American story of finding one’s place in this wide country, strung together by highways. Burden is a shy, brilliant, abiding narrator who, even at his loneliest, floods the reader with insight and grace.
Salinger’s incandescent novella takes loss as its centre and constructs around it a strangely joyful world of memory and devotion. “Oh, this happiness is strong stuff,” Buddy Glass admits, as he struggles against the powerful loneliness of mourning for his brother. The most famous moments in Buddy’s reminiscences (“please accept from me this unpretentious bouquet of very early-blooming parentheses: (((())))” and “were most of your stars out?” among many others) are insistently hopeful and playful ideas in a bereft mind.
What does Hemingway do when he’s alone? He eats, he writes, he drinks, he walks, he chooses what he likes best in the world. This account of work and play in Paris teaches would-be expats, would-be writers and would-be loners how to make themselves at home, anywhere, with or without company. Hemingway’s flat, detailed litanies of how many pages he wrote per day and how many fines-à-l’eau he drank per night amount to a kind of recipe book for the self-sufficient. He presents ambition as the companion against whom all other friends and lovers must be measured.
The five-year love affair between actress Liv Ullmann and director Ingmar Bergman primarily took place in seclusion on the Baltic island of Fårö, off Sweden’s southeastern coast. The island was made famous as the setting of Bergman’s films Persona, Through a Glass Darkly and others, but the story of his life there with Ullmann went undocumented until her 1977 autobiography. Ullmann’s writing is preternaturally lucid, cutting and unadorned. With devastating insight, Ullmann reveals what comes after togetherness: an enlightened form of solitude that is rich and nourishing.
The now established author of Kavalier & Clay began his career with this rewriting of The Great Gatsby, set in 1980s Pennsylvania. Protagonist Art Bechstein questions his sexual orientation, and his alienation heightens his sensitivity to the world around him. In one of the novel’s final scenes, Art studies his ex-girlfriend with a kind of affection and understanding that comes to feel like revelation. “I was impelled now to look more closely,” Art says, pinpointing the chief virtue and gift of solitude, “to try to see the whole and its parts at the same time … the fine join of earlobe and jaw, the bone beneath her eye, and as I looked, it was no longer a profile.”
Similarly, 20 years before she became Dame Mantel, the author of Wolf Hall wrote a captivating study of adolescence. This story of girls’ education in mid-century England follows Carmel McBain through a sequence of schools and cities; in each, she is an outsider. Mantel’s virtuosic, uncompromising prose and harsh anti-sentimentality give readers a story that is ordinary at the outset and harrowing in the end, full of the vivid confessions that describe isolation at its most relentless and raw.
Mischievous, insecure and talented, Lerner’s protagonist, Adam Gordon, travels to Madrid on a fellowship. Over the course of the year he spends there, Gordon is always alone: alone when he’s in a crowded gallery, alone when he’s in bed with a rotation of Spanish women, alone in his experience of a major national catastrophe, alone in his frantic movements through the city and his own concerns. His self-awareness is a steady obstacle, barring him from any kind of unmediated union or experience, and we root for Gordon to escape himself. Even at his most detached, Gordon’s wit and observational powers make his experiences feel victorious.
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