I have prepared a list of books with introverted characters who deeply connect to the landscape of their inner feelings and thoughts. I hope you will find this list of use and interest.
1 I Who Have Never Known Men by Jacqueline Harpman
“I discovered physical solitude, something so ordinary for all the others, but which I had never experienced. It immediately appealed to me.”
I Who Have Never Known Men is notable for its introspective, philosophical and thought-provoking exploration of human nature under extreme circumstances in a dystopian setting. The book raises philosophical questions about solitude, freedom, self-discovery, human condition, identity, womanhood, female body, intimacy, euthanasia, individualism, suffering, aging, degenerative illnesses, the attitude of resignation towards life and the attitude of constant curiosity and independent thinking, the concept of humanity as the need for understanding, and the consequences of isolation. The narrative centres around forty women including the youngest one who narrates the story. The women were kept in the underground bunker. Among these women there is our nameless narrator who never had known any other life than the one in the bunker as she has been imprisoned for as long as she could remembered. Her lived experience was stripped to the existential fundamentals. Her nature is introspective. Due to the inexplicable events the guards in the bunker left immediately once the sirens started wailing and doors to bunker opened. This new reality for the narrator was something unfamiliar, different to what she had known. She found out that she enjoyed the physical solitude and does not like the human touch. She also learnt “she did not need company. She had the feeling that she’d enjoy being on her own.” Her desire for solitude and independence was strong and unique among the women. The introverted nameless narrator represents the independent thinking and choosing her own path to follow, regardless of how less travelled that path would be. Solitary existence did not mean something depressing but rather it allowed her to pave her own path to the existence that seeks answers and knowledge about the world. FULL REVIEW
2 An Unnecessary Woman by Rabih Alameddine
An Unnecessary Woman by Rabih Alemaddine tells a story of an introverted 72-year-old woman, Aaliya who lives in Beirut. She is a recluse who lives her life through literature. It is a portrayal of an older woman who looks back at her life and tries to determine whether her life was meaningful, whether her life was ‘necessary’. This tale is a confession of an introvert, a love letter to literature. This book is full of reflections on loneliness, disconnection, treatment of the outsiders by the society. We travel with Aaliya across the present and the past, through the history of her family, her failed marriage. The complex and rich history of Lebanon provides a background for this story. An Unnecessary Woman is full of the nuanced musings, inner monologues on life of a woman who has decided to defy social norms to live in accordance with her true herself. The portrayal of the solitude, and its importance in every introvert’s life is shown beautifully throughout the entire story. “I prefer slow conversations where words are counted like pearls, conversations with many pauses, pauses replacing words.” FULL REVIEW
3 Grey Bees by Andrey Kurkov
Grey Bees by the great Ukrainian writer, Andrey Kurkov has become one of my all-time favourite books and its protagonist, one of the most beautiful solitary and intorverted characters I have encountered in literature,Sergey Sergeyich is someone I would love to set off on a journey with across free, independent Ukraine one day. I cannot express how much I love this book. If you want to learn more about Ukraine, as well as to better understand the cultural and ethnic diversity of this land, including Crimean Tatars, I would highly recommend you get a copy of this novel. The novel centres on a 49-year-old Sergey Sergeyich, a beekeeper, a retired mine safety inspector and one of two inhabitants of Little Starhorodivka, the village in Grey Zone of Donbas. He is one of the greatest introvert characters, a beautiful, solitary, and sensitive soul, living in accordance with the surrounding natural world and its changing seasons. The novel explores the life of ‘an ordinary’ person caught amid the terror of war, the consequences of the military activities,and political repressions on the individual life, small communities, families, and ethnic minorities. The novel captures the life of a sensitive, warm-hearted every-man, Sergey Sergeyich, in a small corner of the world, drowned in a sea of confusion of our superficial reality, being so much in opposition to the order of the natural world he wants to live in accordance with. Sergeyich always seems to stay on the peripheries of the community and observes it from the distance. The reader looks at the life of those living in Grey Zones of the war-torn Donbas as well as occupied Crimea through Sergeyich’s emphatic eyes. In the village where he lives and then throughout his journey from Donbas to Crimea, he is frequently faced with many moral dilemmas in terms of the importance of his values that he must address. FULL REVIEW
4 Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine by Gail Honeyman
“If someone asks you how you are, you are meant to say FINE. You are not meant to say that you cried yourself to sleep last night because you hadn’t spoken to another person for two consecutive days. FINE is what you say. “ Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine constitutes a meditation about isolation and loneliness among young people in the modern world. Gail Honeyman said somewhere that what inspired her to write this book was reading an article about the experience of one young woman who said that she did not speak to anyone from the time she left work on Friday evening until she was back at work on Monday morning. This book will resonate with anyone who has experienced loneliness or feeling of being isolated or abandoned in their lives, while loneliness does not necessarily mean something negative. This is a story about people who are introverts and the narrative treats them as ‘equal’ to the socially accepted extroverts in the Western world. This book is a soul-soothing gift from its author which can contribute to some normalisation of loneliness, aloneness and being an introvert as a way of life. One has to remember that often we can live with others, be surrounded by many people, but still feel lonely and isolated. FULL REVIEW
5 Autumn Rounds by Jacques Poulin
Autumn Rounds by the Canadian writer, Jacques Poulin is a gentle, tender, luminous and deeply meditative novel exploring the meaning of solitude, literature in our life, human connections, growing old and finding love at mature age. It is also an ode to the natural beauty of the Quebec landscapes and their power to heal physical and emotional wounds. Writing is subtle and delicate to reflect the inner life of the main protagonist, the Driver and people he encounters during his journey. Poulin’s prose conveys soothing melancholy in which characters in his book find the air of comfort. Autumn Rounds tells a story of a gentle middle-aged man referred to as the Driver who runs a mobile library travelling around Quebec along the north bank St Lawrence River visiting little towns and villages lending his books to the readers with their unique tastes for great literature. He is a sensitive character, with firm convictions and empathy for his fellow human beings as well as animals. During his rounds, the Driver meets a variety of readers, some of them are damaged people, or going through a heartbreak or depression, experiencing sleepless nights, with unique interests in the literary works of art. Ultimately this is a quiet and gentle read with a sensitive character, the Driver at its centre with many ruminations on ordinary life and daily tasks and activities making one’s existence a bit less painful. I love the idea of a sensitive and thoughtful male character. FULL REVIEW
6 The Teacher by Michal Ben Naftali
The Teacher tells a story of a woman, Elsa Weiss, born in 1917, a Holocaust survivor from Eastern Europe who after WWII ends up living in Israel working as a high school teacher until she commits suicide in 1982 at the age of 65. It is a story shared by many Holocaust survivors – I read that the author of the book based Elsa’s life on the person she knew in her real life. It is a story of a survivor whose name is not recorded in any history book, nor in any journal nor memoir; a story of those whose life faded from the living memory, of those with no photos of their faces preserved for the future generations; of those who were busy surviving in a new country, busy assimilating, existing, moving forward; of those who are invisible to others; of those without possessive determiners on their grave’s inscription: they are no one’s mother, father, sister or bother; of those who do not wish to be remembered. The Teacher is an intense exploration of trauma, survivor’s guilt, loneliness, finding one’s place in the world, learning how to exist or rather just how to survive, the memory and how we perceive and remember people in our life. Elsa Weiss is an enigma, her life is an enigma – she left no trace of her life for others to explore. Elsa Weiss felt abandoned through her entire adult life with an overwhelming sense of orphanhood, living in fear of forgetting her loved ones. FULL REVIEW
7 Madonna in a Fur Coat by Sabahattin Ali
‘When we walked side by side, did I not feel his humanity most profoundly? Only now did I begin to understand why it was not always through words that people sought each other out and came to understand each other.’ In ‘Madonna in a Fur Coat’, Ali portrays the deepest corners of the human soul. Ali’s writing offers probably one of the best description of a sensitive man, deeply emphatic soul. ‘Madonna in a Fur Coat’ is a pure definition of ‘melancholy’ and yearning for missed opportunities in life. We follow the life of Raif during the 1920s and 1930s while he lives in Berlin, Istanbul and Ankara. While in Berlin, he meets a Jewish woman, Maria and they become the loves of each other’s lives. Their love, at times, appears to be more platonic, than romantic; marred by the complexity of their respective backgrounds, social norms, and by the struggles caused by the mundanes of life. It is a bond of two delicate souls – outsiders, although very different in many respects. As time passes, Raif lives a solitary existence in some sense despite the fact having a family of his own; he keeps himself to himself. In the later part of his life he is alone even though surrounded by people. It’s a story about living in a prejudiced society which rewards certain egoistic behavioural patterns, and humiliates the ones who do not conform to its norms and want to live according to their own values of compassion, equality and kindness. Ali’s words on solitude have the ability to penetrate readers’ soul in the most exquisite manner. Ali was a magician of words; he added a sprinkle of stardust to the seemingly mundane story and created a profoundly moving tale of the most basic human emotions: love and solitude. This book is a real gift to the human thought.
8 Fresh Water For Flowers by Valerie Perrin
Fresh Water for Flowers is a moving tribute to the resilience of human spirit This book hugs YOU, offers comfort and numerous moments of tenderness, as well as it evokes the spirit of profound emotions filled with many wonderful references to the French music and literature. Fresh Water For Flowers is a tale about difficult love, mature love, grief, loneliness, god, death, the absence of those whom we love, relationship between people and their animal companions. There are many insightful observations about relationships between parents and their adult children, also about finding love at the later stage in life. This tale evolves around a small graveyard in a small French town, Bourgogne. We meet an array of interesting, nuanced characters, including our main protagonist, Violette. The story of Violette’s life is slowly revealed to us through her own words or through the interconnectedness with the lives of other people: Violette’s difficult childhood, being born with nothing, her tragic marriage to Philippe, her daughter, her life working as a bartender, then as a level crossing keeper and finally her life as a cemetery caretaker. At some point Violette says that others speak about her life as though she did not exist, as though she was a problem to be solved, not a person; as though she was absent from her own story. Throughout her life she was often diminished by others, degraded, mistreated, and looked down upon. Violette has become one of my favourite characters. Despite multiple tragedies and hardships in her life, she remained extremely sensitive, delicate, thoughtful, non-judgmental in her relationships with others. Violette is a great observer of human fragility and relationships with enormous empathy towards those she encounters. Fresh Water For Flowers by Valérie Perrin will provide a reader with many moments of comfort, bliss, and a real reading delight. This is one of these rare books which soothes one’s soul. FULL REVIEW
9 Whereabouts by Jhumpa Lahiri
“Solitude: it’s become my trade. (…) It’s a condition I try to perfect”.
Written in forty-six short vignettes, Whereabouts portrays daily wanderings and inner workings of the narrator’s mind who is a solitary introverted unnamed woman in her mid -40s working as a teacher and living in the unnamed city in Italy. Whereabouts is an exploration of urban solitude, alienation, loneliness, growing old, with the narrator’s beautiful ruminations on the meaning of living a solitary life, inspired by the locations of daily errands. The narrator is a very sensitive and astute observer of other people’s words, emotions, and gestures. At the restaurant, she eats alone with other people also eating alone. At the doctor’s office, she notices a woman, who appears to be twenty years older than her, also waiting alone, with no husband, no companion to support her which makes the narrator reflect on her own future in a few decades from now on. Throughout the pages of Whereabouts, the narrator attempts to locate her own place in the world, she is in the quest of an identity as well as emotional home where her body and soul can sense they belong. This book exudes some sort of yearning for a new attachment without a burden of geographical and cultural frontiers which makes Whereabouts is truly universal in terms of the protagonist’s depicted emotions and thoughts. That presence of aloneness on the pages of Whereabouts is very soothing for the reader. In my view, Whereabouts is a profoundly life-affirming book about tranquility that solitary existence might offer in the similar way how our narrator experiences it – someone who lives a peaceful life, with no family of her own, deeply aware of her loneliness, but not burden by it. FULL REVIEW
10 The Lost Shore by Anna Langfus
The Lost Shore [Les Bagages de Sable] has at its centre a Polish-Jewish refugee woman called Maria, a Holocaust survivor, who tries to build her life again in France after her entire family had been exterminated during the Holocaust (similarly to author’s own experience). Langfus explores the subject of the suffering of a singular woman, a survivor who tries to learn to live but she is unable to. The Lost Shore depicts internal struggles to overcome memories of loss, cruelty, death and at the same time the impossibility to portray the past in order to live again. Maria must deal with a lot of indifference from people including her own extended family who wants her not to mention her experiences during the Shoah. At some point, Maria meets a much older man who initially seems to care for her well-being. Maria exists in the world inhabited by the ghosts of the past and finds impossible to relate with others or rather others are unable to relate to her pain. She also questions the true meaning of her relationship with the older man and if it is only her youth that was attractive to this man and not her as an individual. Maria asks herself if she were an older woman, would she receive the same level of attention? In the end, an old man becomes ill, and his estranged wife comes back. Maria is asked to leave, and she is yet again alone in this world in a state of continuous numbness and no hope. Langfus’ writing is lucid and delicate, multi-dimensional with layers of unsurpassed depth and profound emotional maturity. FULL REVIEW
11 Quartet in Autumn by Barbara Pym
This is a story of four single people in their 60s: Marcia, Letty, Edwin and Norman who have worked together for several years in an office in Central London doing unspecified clerical work. They don’t socialise together out of work, they don’t have any close relatives, they live alone and lead what one could define as a rather quiet life. Romantic love has never been a part of their lives. Despite their advanced age, two of them still live in rented single rooms. It is a thought-provoking character study which portrays an emotional baggage of four characters as they grow old facing isolation and loneliness. FULL REVIEW
12 The Sundays of Jean Dezert by Jean de La Ville de Mirmont
In The Sundays of Jean Dezert, Mirmont outlines a map of his times and shows the nuances of one singular life of an alienated, lost soul in the urban crowd who comes to terms with the banality of own existence.The Sundays of Jean Dezert is a tale of urban solitude, alienation,and mundanes of prosaic life. Jean Dézert is a civil servant, an office worker employed by the Ministry of Welfare. We follow his life on the eve of the Great War (World War I) as he strolls through the city of Paris in quest for the meaning of life, something deeper and larger than his own existence. Even though The Sundays of Jean Dezert was written over 100 years ago, many contemporary readers will be able to recognize themselves in the life of Everyman, Jean Dezert. The feelings of no purpose, resignation, total alienation are well known to many of us.Jean Dezert has a so-called good job and leads a fairly comfortable life in the eyes of many, but this life does not provide him with the emotional equilibrium nor heals his feelings of emptiness. Although his job does not define him, he perceives himself as a servant of nothingness, of empty existence. His occupation pushes him further into depths of depression and resignation. Jean “has never once gone on a long journey in his dreams.” The Sundays of Jean Dezert offers a rather pessimistic outlook on modern life. Jean remains a passenger in the prose of his life. Jean Dezert is a complex, nuanced character still very relatable 100 years after Mirmont wrote this book. It is a short book that one can read in one day. FULL REVIEW
