Good books with unsatisfactory endings

[longers]

I've not read No Country for Old Men but aim to, just to see if it's a better ending than the fillum has.

 

[LiteratureGeek]

I've not read No Country for Old Men, but I have read The Road which is by the same author. That has an unsatisfactory ending, just doesn't fit with the rest of the story IMO.

 

[Ian H]

The Mill on the Floss. George Elliot was obviously uncertain how to finish the story, so she sweeps all her characters away in an improbable flood.

 

[Pat "5mph"]

No, see, I like the end of Captain Corelli. It would have been too easy for him to come back, like they changed it to in the film.

I don't like that ending, because it is sad, a great love story not fulfilled because of lack of communication. But I think it is a possible ending for the time and place of the story: he saw her with a child, he thought the child was hers, he wandered away in a half for 40 years .... typical man

 

[Pat "5mph"]

It seems that authors sometimes do not know how to finish their books. The book may have been brilliant up to then, but by the final chapters it's all been said and done.

My nomination is Captain Corelli's Mandolin. After the war, Captain Corelli couldn't just come striding back and marry wotsername because that would be too pat and trite. He couldn't just not turn up at all, maybe having been killed or having married another woman, because that would have been too bleak. So, guess what, he does come back but only when they're both old due to a misunderstanding on his part forty years previously. Rubbish, if you can't think of a really good ending, you might as well give it a happy ending.

Don't you remember? he came back after the war, saw her with an adopted baby, assumed the baby was hers from a marriage or a rape. He could not handle it, and went away again.

 

[mcshroom]

I'll throw in Margaret Atwood's 'The Handmaid's Tale.'

She seemed to give up on making an ending, so turned it into a symposium saying that the whole story was recordings found and basically they ran out of recordings. It really felt like a complete cop-out of an ending as if the writer either couldn't think of a way to end the book, or ran out of time before the publisher needed to print it.

 

[LiteratureGeek]

I'll throw in Margaret Atwood's 'The Handmaid's Tale.'

She seemed to give up on making an ending, so turned it into a symposium saying that the whole story was recordings found and basically they ran out of recordings. It really felt like a complete cop-out of an ending as if the writer either couldn't think of a way to end the book, or ran out of time before the publisher needed to print it.

I got a different thing from this, the historical notes (the part where you find out that it is recordings) shows that the regime has ended, and the open ending with Offred herself, is to show hope. If you didn't have these things, the book would be far too grim, IMHO it needs the hope. But I did only get this after my 2nd reading of the novel. I felt the same as you at first.

 

[Yellow Fang]

Nineteen Eighty-Four - not unsatisfactory in a way which ruins the book, still an absolutely awesome one (I'm currently working on a dissertation proposal with this as my main text) but I really really didn't WANT it to end the way it did.

I tried reading this book when I was about 15 or 16 after reading Animal Farm in English. I got about three-quarters of the way through, and I could see by the diminishing number of pages that he wasn't going to escape or join the revolution and overthrow the regime, so I gave up reading it. I sometimes think I should get a copy and just read the last quarter so I can say I've read the book. I've read several Orwell books since then. He seemed to like his bleak endings.

 

[Yellow Fang]

Another book I am not sure about the ending is Lolita. We already know what happen to Humbert and Lolita from the beginning of the book, the driving at the end is fine, some of the dialogue with Quilty is very funny, but the ending just somehow doesn't quite work for me, even though bits of it are good.

I was just thinking of Lolita too. The first part worked. The middle part worked. The last part didn't seem to make sense. I have to say I didn't really get this book.

 

[Yellow Fang]

Don't you remember? he came back after the war, saw her with an adopted baby, assumed the baby was hers from a marriage or a rape. He could not handle it, and went away again.

I remember it, but it still seemed like an ending contrived not to be unbearably bleak on the one hand or a happy-ever-after on the other. If the hero had sat down and thought about it for five minutes, he would have realised there was a possibility the baby wasn't hers. Couldn't he have made discreet enquiries? He knew her father's address. Couldn't he have written him a letter? Up to that point he had been portrayed as a proper man, not a moral coward. It seemed to me that by the last chapter the book was essentially over but that the author had painted himself into a corner as far as the ending was concerned.

 

[Pat "5mph"]

I remember it, but it still seemed like an ending contrived not to be unbearably bleak on the one hand or a happy-ever-after on the other. If the hero had sat down and thought about it for five minutes, he would have realised there was a possibility the baby wasn't hers. Couldn't he have made discreet enquiries? He knew her father's address. Couldn't he have written him a letter? Up to that point he had been portrayed as a proper man, not a moral coward. It seemed to me that by the last chapter the book was essentially over but that the author had painted himself into a corner as far as the ending was concerned.

Yes, he could have. Let's start a thread "what's a proper man" ....only kidding, I'm tired!
I's only fiction, but it could have had the same ending in real life, imo. I will try to come up with a real let me down title tomorrow.

 

[Yellow Fang]

Actually, the book with the worst ending is Umberto Eco's The Island of the Day Before. The book is quite thick, but has two or three stories running in parallel. I was only really interested in the main story, but as the pages ran out, I realised that unless Eco started concentrating on the main story instead of all the irritating digressions, there wasn't going to be a resolution. Sure enough, there wasn't.

I should have been warned. I liked The Name of The Rose, but Focault's Pendulum was another doorstop that didn't get going till the last fifty pages. I stopped reading Umberto Eco after that.

 

[Pat "5mph"]

I should have been warned. I liked The Name of The Rose, but Focault's Pendulum was another doorstop that didn't get going till the last fifty pages. I stopped reading Umberto Eco after that.

Ohhhhh, the pendulum is one of my favorite love stories ever, together with Salman Rushdie's "The ground beneath her feet".
I admit I cannot understand most of Eco's books, not even in Italian, but Il pendolo di Focault is awsome, imo.
YF, you need to let your imagination run loose when reading

 

[rollinstok]

Any of John Grishams old books... they used to be cracking reads, but the bad guys always seemed to win
His last few books have been awful, full stop. He seems to have lost his soul since he became a born again Christian.

 

[Paul J]

Andy McNab Deep Black. I even contacted the publishers to check pages weren't missing.