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| Illustration by: MissABeet |
This post about heartbreak fiction is such a treat for me that I have been saving it up for a few days. It’s like the moment when you are presented with the best box of chocolates ever, and you realise that you can’t just systematically munch your way through all of them: you might need to be a little bit selective. So you wait for a bit, while you decide.
But let’s make a decision and start with the deluxe, dark, handcrafted, liqueur centred classic: ‘Wuthering Heights.’ This novel by Emily Bronte has heart fragments scattered all over it. It’s essentially the story of two kids, Cathy and Heathcliff, growing up together, wild and reckless so that their souls knit together and they can’t tell where one begins and the other ends. And then there is a betrayal: Heathcliff hears Cathy telling her nurse that it would ‘degrade’ her to marry Heathcliff now. He storms off, in a Byronic fit of passion, before he can hear her declare that “…he’s more myself than I am,” and “I am Heathcliffe.” He feels betrayed; she feels torn and tempted by the better, more elegant existence that posh Edgar Linton can offer. He later returns embittered and cruel, to ask her how she could ‘betray her soul.’ Like all Gothic fiction, it is wild and stormy, both inside their heads and on the moors. Nothing is restrained or moderate. Heartbreak is loud and messy here. Read it by a log fire, with a storm raging outside and try not to scream when the trees bend in the wind and tap, tap, tap at your window . . .
Next up, let’s choose a more modern flavour, with a sumptuously gooey centre: ‘The Fault In Our Stars.’ It’s heartbreakingly tragic before the story even gets on the road, because our protagonists are ill enough to already know they have no future. I don’t want to spoil this one for anyone who hasn’t read it already, or seen the film, but the ending is tragic in a different way from the one you might have been expecting. If it isn’t heartbreaking enough to be inhabiting the mind of someone who knows death is lurking sooner rather than later, and to race with her to grab at the only little bit of happiness she can, then what happens at the end will just finish you off. Despite the witty dialogue, this book is just seeping sadness, and every page is loaded with a sense of heartbreak.
For my next treat, I’m going to choose one of those chocolates that often gets left in the box, because no one is quite sure what it actually is. But if you pick it, you’ll be looking for it again in the next layer, feeling smug that you’ve found one no one else is looking for. Niall Williams is an Irish writer. He wrote ‘Four Letters of Love’ in 1997, but it is timeless in feel. It is also one of the most strikingly dramatic, melancholy accounts of love-sickness I have ever read. Nicholas Coughlan is literally sick with love. Reading his letters, and then knowing that they won’t be read is almost unbearable, as is the moment when you find out that this suffocating sadness has been passed down through the generations. I want you to read it, so I won’t say too much.
What’s next? ‘The Book Thief’ is about a lot of heartbreakingly tragic things, but nestling at the centre, like a hidden hazelnut is a love story that just never had a chance. There is so much serious heart ache in here, like the opening tragedy, and the burning books, or the bomb raids, or the Jews being marched through the streets. You have to look really carefully for the romance in all this outrage. But it is there, almost from the start, and it seems somehow fitting that this little love story should be almost suffocated by so much violence and cruelty. I’ll give you a clue: the real heartbreaker is in Part 10, ‘The Ribcage Planes.’ Read it carefully, follow little Rudy and Liesel right from the start, and it will break your heart when you already thought it was done.
Captain Corelli’s Mandolin: a soft centre, with a citrus filling. The romance in this novel is about waiting: waiting for someone to love you, and then waiting for them to come back to you. Like, ‘The Book Thief’ the love story can seem buried at times, under the weighty happenings in the novel, but it is always there, like a leit- motif in the music played by the eponymous mandolin. The heartbreaker moment is about wasted time and wasted years.
But my final heartbreaker choice is not a romance. It’s the funny looking chocolate that doesn’t fit the box. It’s not even the romantic bit of the book. It’s Rue in ‘The Hunger Games.’ And because I can’t believe there is anyone left who hasn’t either read it, or seen the film, and still wants to, I won’t worry too much about spoilers. Sometimes, when you are reading a good book, it is hard to believe that the really good characters will end badly. Looking back on it, she had to really, because she is that ‘Mockingbird’ character, like Tom Robinson, and Boo Radley, the innocent one who it is a sin to kill (read more about Mockingbird figures in my blog post 'Why Rue Had to Die'). And the Capitol games makers are nothing if not sinful. But the callous, casual extinction of someone good and fragile and vulnerable is shocking to the reader and highlights the brutality of everyone else. And maybe that’s at the heart of all fictional heartbreaker moments….how easy it is to stamp out love. Read them all, weep—and then do it differently.
It was so hard to choose. What is your favourite bit of heartbreak fiction?
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