The best novels of Eros and Thanatos: desire mixed with doom

James Baldwin’s classic story of erotic doom and betrayal came to me far too late; it’s the sort of book you wish you’d read sooner and then plan to read again.

The novel articulates the real pain of unrequited erotic love—doomed erotic love—narrated by a person accused of not loving enough.

At the opening, we learn that Giovanni is to be executed, and the story unravels the desperate entanglement of two men in Paris in mid-century.

The love in this novel, while passionate, is never far from its opening sense of doom; love is mixed with hate and terror: “this was but one tiny aspect of the dreadful human tangle occurring everywhere, without end, forever.” 

Of the classics of doomed and tumultuous romance that inspired me—including Wuthering Heights, Romeo and Juliet, and Anna Karenina—Madame Bovary resonates most.

A woman almost infected by the ruinous romances in the novels she reads, she throws her life away for a man entirely unworthy of this kind of sacrifice. What is life for without the threat of ruin?

Emma Bovary doesn’t know, but the reader does know that it will end badly. 

When I was puzzling through how on earth to write about unreasonable desire, I found many of my unformed thoughts reflected in recent Nobel-prize winner Annie Ernaux’s very short Simple Passion.

Ernaux’s narrator records in detail her affair with a man that seemed to possess her for a while, and believes she “could even accept the thought of dying providing [she] had lived this passion through to the very end.”

She becomes, she believes, acquainted with what people are “capable of; in other words, anything.”

It is a passion told dispassionately, and a rare record of what erotic obsession feels like from the perspective of someone who has survived it.

It is also a record of a woman’s desire, which feels, to me, revolutionary. 

Naga’s beautiful, poetic prose is pervaded with an overwhelming sense that things will end very badly.

An Arab-American woman meets a “boy from Shobrakheit,” and the two begin a damaged, damaging romance in a book that’s been described as a “postcolonial novel for the twenty-first century.”

Desire mixes up with more complicated feelings, such as pity and resentment, feelings that stem from their cultural and class differences, and their relationship, told in alternating points-of-view, is soon touched with a threat of violence—and then more than a threat—of violence. 

Bluets is a work of fragmentary nonfiction so overwrought, and so filled with tears and heartbreak, that I return to it for solace whenever I’m wrought with such feelings.

It begins with the claim that the narrator has fallen in love with the color blue.

She writes of different encounters with the color’s pigments and presentations, as well as Joni Mitchell’s Blue, the biology of color, philosophy of perception, and more like this, all while she is blue: lonely, heartbroken, sad.

Bluets is beautiful, intelligent, heartbreaking, consoling; it is not afraid of to weep.

Just like Nelson describes wishing to ingest the color blue, not knowing what else to do with its beauty and the longing it produces in her, I sometimes wish I could ingest this book.