Recommendations
Books Like À vau-l'eau by J.-K. Huysmans
Books for readers who love the comedy of systematic thwarting and the petty clerk as philosophical figure
À vau-l'eau (1882) is pure Schopenhauerian comedy — Folantin cannot find a decent meal and the world will not give him one. These 8 books share its documentary precision, its minimal anti-hero, and its philosophical comedy of ordinary existence's systematic insufficiency.
- 1Buy on Amazon
À rebours
by J.-K. Huysmans
The escape from Folantin's condition — where Folantin cannot find a decent meal, Des Esseintes constructs a total artificial world; both diagnose the same problem and choose opposite responses
- 2
Buy on AmazonBartleby the Scrivener
by Herman Melville
The American philosophical anti-hero who simply declines — Bartleby's 'I would prefer not to' is the logical conclusion of Folantin's daily failure to obtain what he needs from a system that will not provide it
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Notes from Underground
by Fyodor Dostoevsky
The Russian petty official who has thought too much — the Underground Man's paralysis and Folantin's futility are the same condition, expressed in different national styles
- 4
Buy on AmazonBouvard et Pécuchet
by Gustave Flaubert
The encyclopedic comedy of systematic failure running parallel to Folantin — two clerks who fail at everything knowledge promises, with the same documentary exhaustiveness and bleak comedy
- 5
Buy on AmazonThe Trial
by Franz Kafka
Kafka extends Folantin's predicament into the metaphysical — the system that will not give Folantin a decent meal becomes the system that cannot tell Josef K. what he is accused of
- 6
Buy on AmazonMurphy
by Samuel Beckett
Beckett's first novel — Murphy trying to get by in London with minimal means and maximum philosophical detachment; the beckett anti-hero as Folantin evolved through thirty more years of failed escapes
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Oblomov
by Ivan Goncharov
The Russian aristocrat who simply stops engaging with a world that cannot meet his needs — Oblomov's refusal and Folantin's daily effort are the same passivity expressed as two different national temperaments
- 8
Buy on AmazonThe Stranger
by Albert Camus
Meursault's indifference to the ordinary mechanisms of life — eating, working, relating — as the Existentialist version of Folantin's failure; both register the inadequacy of ordinary existence without sentimentalizing it
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