100 books like The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea

Is there a madder moment of madness in all of literature than that of The Driver’s Seat’s protagonist Lise?

A firecracker of a novel (most editions come in under one hundred pages of breakneck-speed story), and yet a whole firework display of literary techniques (most startlingly a third chapter opening prolepsis – flashforward – to the suicidally-invited murder of Lise). It’s the technique itself that is the star. Is this satire, parody, comedy? Can comedy be so dark?

Spark noted both that this book was an existential ‘whydunnit?’ without feeling the need to provide us with anything so simplistic as a ‘why’, and also that it was her favourite of all her novels. There is no reason on Earth why it shouldn’t also be one of your favourites.

This book is an obvious choice perhaps, but one that can't be omitted. The tragicomic frustration of the surveyor who can't complete the job he's been sent to do no matter how hard he tries is massively influential for a number of very good reasons. Also, the way that the castle is both a literal place and a potent metaphor is crucial—as ever in Kafka, it's never just a metaphor, just as it's never just a dream, but rather a dream or a metaphor that also develops out of and into a very concrete situation. This is crucial writing advice for anyone interested in working with dreamlike or surreal elements.

There are several Beckett books that belong on my list, as Beckett I think is one of the great authors about vagrants and castoffs, but Molloy is ground zero for me in terms of my relation to Beckett's work. The strangeness of Molloy's solitary relation to the world, and to the room he's confined in, was a big influence on my books as well.

The Famished Road is often categorized as a novel of “magical realism” although the author rejects this categorization. Okri’s tale follows Azaro, a spirit child in Okri’s native Nigeria as he watches the post-colonial state transform with the acceleration of global technology. While Okri weaves the spiritual and physical realms into his narrative, the juxtaposition of the spiritual and physical realms for Okri is a cornerstone of traditional African religion (and is therefore not seen as “unrealistic”). More accurately, The Famished Road resembles Fyodr Doestoevsky’s Notes from Underground: a classic philosophical novel. In The Famished Road, Okri argues that there is no salvation on Earth—even for the spiritual realm that resides alongside us. Azaro sees the people of his village being exploited by politicians and foreign actors and there is nothing he—as a transdimensional creature—can do about it. Transforming Doestoevsky’s cynicism into something even more all-encompassing or… show more.

Thanks to its love/hate relationship with Western individualism, Japanese literature boasts the most sophisticated examples of the Nietzschean novel. This book's simple story about school bullying is really a philosophical meditation on friendship, courage, and meaning. 

The bully shares the contradictions of the stereotypical “overman,” declaring his right to immorality and feigning indifference while seeking others’ approval. His victim, in turn, mirrors “slave morality,” nursing bitterness rather than finding his own path. 

However, this predictable setup is upended by Kojima, a schoolgirl who takes defiant pride in her outcast status. Exploding the simplistic dichotomies of pop-Nietzsche, Kojima combines the inner strength of the “ascetic,” the compassion of the “slave,” and the courageous self-affirmation of the “noble” in a nuanced, critical Nietzscheanism that’s truer to Nietzsche in spirit than perhaps any other novel.

This book is a quiet, understated masterpiece about quiet, understated lives and a critical counterpoint to Soseki’s earlier I Am a Cat. That novel was a cruelly comic parody of Nietzscheanism, its arrogant feline narrator portraying his owner, a small-town schoolteacher, as embodying everything wrong with miserable, mediocre, insignificant humanity. 

This book is more ambiguous and sympathetic, portraying a similarly humble, childless couple. Initially, we feel contempt for their uneventful, indecisive, dispassionate lives. But their troubled past reveals, beneath their failings, a deep undercurrent of authentic courage and love.

They may even achieve something like Nietzsche’s “love of fate,” hinted in the title’s reference to the gate between past and future, where Zarathustra wills the “eternal recurrence” of every detail of his existence, whether joyful or painful, exciting or dreary, beautiful or ugly.  

Like Kōbō Abe’s The Woman in the Dunes, this graphic novel fuses Camus’s Sisyphus with Nietzsche’s “eternal recurrence” as a test of character: would you live your life over again for eternity?

Sukezo fails the test miserably. He’s a talented cartoonist, but it doesn’t pay the bills, so he shuffles through half-hearted money-making schemes (including an aptly Sisyphean rock-selling venture), succeeding only at making himself, his wife, and his young child miserable and increasingly hateful towards themselves and each other. 

Sukezo becomes the bad Nietzsche of popular misconception. If only success and esteem count, better to be nothing at all: a pseudo-Buddhism of disappointed, not transcended, ego. He could be beautifully and happily useless, like Zhuangzi’s tree that’s never cut down. But mistaking power for talent, he cuts himself down instead.

The most charming and subtly Nietzschean of Dazai’s usually bleak novels, this book plants readers directly inside the mind of a young girl over the course of a day. Some compare her to Catcher in the Rye’s Holden, a child pretending to be a grown-up. But schoolgirl’s a true contradiction: too childish and too mature, naive and wise, Holden’s little sister mixed with Mrs. Dalloway. 

Holden is a “bad Nietzsche,” overcoming internal strife with protective cynicism, but schoolgirl’s a bundle of possibilities: Nietzsche’s “undersouls” battle to control her identity, veering between “becoming what she is” or expected to be and “decadence.” 

She’s confusing, endearing, and heartbreaking because everything’s still possible. She could as easily become Holden, a dutiful daughter, or a Dazai double-suicide, and any passing experience might decide that fate. 

Nietzsche studies are a cottage industry unto themselves. There are thousands of monographs, anthologies, and papers, which are conveniently searchable at the Weimarer Nietzsche-Bibliographie. My “five best books” are not necessarily the interpretations I personally consider by some measure the ‘best’, in the sense of being the most ‘correct’. They are instead the ones I find most helpful for a reader to interpret Nietzsche in a responsible, well-informed way for themselves. 

R. J. Hollingdale is a great starting point for a novice. He was that rare combination of translator, biographer, and philosopher—and as such, his work is approachable for any intellectually curious reader. It was first published in 1965, at a time when one really did have to argue for Nietzsche’s place as a canonical philosopher rather than just a brilliant writer, bombastic iconoclast, or politically-dangerous driver of the pre-war German Zeitgeist. Even if somewhat dated, his book… show more.

I was gifted this book recently and it is the gift that keeps on giving.

I am an avid walker and the way the author interspersed poignant life stories with his own on walking was lovingly poetic. This quote “the walker is king, and the earth is his domain” is the one that defines the entire message of the book. I’ve been on many pilgrimages in life and witnessed many a transformation but none like the ones these philosophers uncover.

It was a joy to read the profound messages in staying present while walking as exercise. Grab a friend and enjoy walking together as you put one foot in front of the other and have meaningful conversation.