Books that deal with sickness/isolation

"The Diving Bell and the Butterfly" comes to mind - it's a memoir. I found it very inspiring in 1999. I can think of more - non-fiction? Fiction? Self help?

Hunger by Knut Hamsun has a lot of the qualities you cited.

Has anyone here read Nausea by Sartre? My bare understanding is that it also might fit this category, even though the main character's nausea is more figurative than literal.

Notes From Underground
Jean Cocteau's Opium
McCarthy's The Road
all of Kafka and Beckett

I've had this on my wishlist for a while now. But I don't know if it's actually any good.

Rick Moody "The Black Veil". but this is also memoirish. A beautiful chronicle of depression. I was already "into" his books when i read it, so I loved it. Very honest, and literary.
But do you only want fiction reccomendations? if so, I'll think about those.

solzhenitsyn's cancer ward? i have not read it, but i believe this is the theme.

I was thinking about you and your illness yesterday, Ronan, because I was reading a study in the Journal of Sociology of Health and Illness (or something) about how people in Britain who have children with disabilities are creating their own narrative to counter that of prevailing Western "heroic" medicine, which is a narrative that involves winning and losing against disease or disability. Basically the study said that people got fed up with doctors always thinking of chronic conditions or illnesses as things that could either be cured, and were therefore worth dealing with, or not cured, in which case they weren't really interested, and I was reminded of people I know, like you, who have long-term largely unexplained illnesses that they need to learn to cope with and work into their day to day life.
Sadly the article kind of lapsed into a lot of wank talk about open-book narratives and whole-of-life stories, and jargon that I couldn't really understand, but some of it was interesting.

Anyway, if you want an incredibly grim book about illness and isolation, I recommend the most unpleasant book I've ever read, Johnny Got His Gun by Dalton Trumbo. It is about a soldier rebuilding himself after a frightening war injury, and learning to live with his situation (but of course it's really about the black list, probably.)

xpost I almost put that one in my Amazon *basket* yesterday!

Kenzaburo Oe's A Personal Matter.

Thanks for these, it was fiction I was looking for. Will order some of these now.

I read Paul Auster's "Music of Chance" and though I know some people here didn't like it I did enjoy it in the context of what I asked about on this thread.

Thanks for the advice and thoughts Trish, I am ok really, just helps to think about it!

thomas bernhard's "concrete"
elias canetti "auto de fe"

On the Australian tip, both Praise and 1988 by Andrew McGahan address these issues. Having said that a lot of Australian literature is about isolation. Perhaps Merry Go Round in the Sea by Randolph Stow.

The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann
The Plague by Albert Camus
Illness as Metaphor by Susan Sontag (non-fiction)

For plain old alientation: Play it as It Lays by Joan Didion

For depression, with irritating triumphal arc: Darkness Visible by William Styron (memoir)

For some reason, I want to recommend The Man Without Qualities by Robert Musil (maybe somewhat similar to Oblomov?)