The books that change us most are not always the ones that offer answers. Sometimes, they simply ask a question we have become remarkably skilled at avoiding. What if nobody remembers us? What remains when society disappears? Can ordinary people participate in terrible acts while still believing themselves decent? Literature allows us to approach such questions without demanding immediate answers. The following five books, several of them overlooked beside more famous literary classics, do precisely that.
1. The Faster I Walk, The Smaller I Am by Kjersti Annesdatter Skomsvold – The question: What if nobody remembers that you existed?
Mathea Martinsen has spent most of her life avoiding other people. Now elderly and increasingly conscious of death, she begins wondering whether she might disappear without leaving any meaningful trace behind. Skomsvold’s Norwegian debut, first published in 2009, turns an apparently eccentric protagonist into a moving examination of loneliness and our desire to matter. OBNB Mathea does not dream of greatness. She simply wants evidence that she occupied some space in another person’s world.
It raises an uncomfortable possibility: perhaps being forgotten frightens us almost as much as dying.
2. A Meal In Winter by Hubert Mingarelli – The question: How ordinary can evil look?
Three German soldiers leave their camp in occupied Poland to hunt down a Jewish man. They capture one, take shelter in an abandoned house and begin preparing a meal. Mingarelli strips away the distance through which historical evil is often viewed. His soldiers have fears, friendships and consciences. They are also participating in murder. As their sympathies begin to fracture, the novel forces readers to confront the difference between feeling uncomfortable about wrongdoing and refusing to participate in it. Decency, the book suggests, means very little without action.
3. The Wall by Marlen Haushofer – The question: Who are you when nobody else is watching?
An unnamed woman staying in the Austrian mountains discovers an invisible wall separating her from the outside world. Beyond it, human life appears to have stopped. Inside, she must survive alongside a dog, cat and cow. First published in 1963, Haushofer’s dystopian novel gradually removes almost everything by which people ordinarily define themselves: profession, reputation, social expectations and other people’s judgement. What remains is startlingly elemental. Food. Animals. Weather. Work. Memory. ‘The Wall’ asks whether identity exists independently of the people who recognise it.
4. The Unpassing by Chia-Chia Lin – The question: What happens when the life you were promised never arrives?
Ten-year-old Gavin, the son of Taiwanese immigrants living outside Anchorage, survives meningitis. His younger sister does not. The death destabilises a family already struggling financially and emotionally in a country that has not delivered the security they imagined. Lin uses grief, immigration and Alaska’s unforgiving landscape to interrogate the mythology of the American dream. Its uncomfortable insight extends beyond immigration: sometimes effort does not produce reward, and suffering refuses to become a useful lesson.
5. The Woman Who Borrowed Memories by Tove Jansson – The question: How much of yourself can another person take from you?
Jansson is famous for the Moomins, but her adult stories inhabit considerably darker psychological territory. This collection brings together 26 stories concerned with solitude, ageing, creativity, obsession and human relationships. Its title story examines disturbing psychological transference between two women, while elsewhere artists, loners and families confront the unstable boundaries between themselves and others.
These five books offer no convenient formula for living better. That may be precisely what makes them life-changing. The most important books do not always tell us what to do with our lives. Sometimes they make it impossible to continue asking ourselves the easy questions.