Best Books by Country

[Amoxcalli]

Since Lit Net already has a Top 100 Books Ever Written and someone complained about the lack of good literature from his/her country quite recently, I thought it might be useful to compile a list of very good works of fiction, sorted by country. I've begun to categorise the contents of the LitNet Top 100 by country, but I was hoping people would suggest good novels/plays/poetry to add to the list. I wasn't sure about "Metamorphosis", so I added it to both Greece and the Czech Republic (Ovid and Kafka, respectively).

Afghanistan
The Kite Runner, Hosseini (see United States)

Arabian Empire
One Thousand and One Nights, Unknown

Argentina
Seven Madmen, Roberto Arlt
Collected Fictions, Borges
Hopscotch, Cortázar
Artificial Respiration, Piglia

Bosnia-Hercegovina
The Bridge on the Drina, Andric
The Vizier's Elephant, Andric

Brazil
Dom Casmurro, de Assis
A Rosa do Povo, de Andrade
The Hour of the Star, Lispector
Grande Sertão: Veredas, Rosa

Canada
Life of Pi, Martel

Colombia
100 Years of Solitude, Marquez
Love in the time of cholera, Marquez

Czech Republic
Amerika, Kafka
Metamorphosis, Kafka
The Trial, Kafka
The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Kundera

Egypt
The Cairo Trilogy, Mahfouz
Wedding Song, Mahfouz
Respected Sir, Mahfouz
Midaq Alley, Mahfouz

Finland
Kalevala, Unkown

France
The Stranger, Camus
The Count of Monte Cristo, Dumas
Madame Bovary, Flaubert
Les Miserables, Hugo
The Hunchback of the Notre Dame, Hugo
Essays, Montaigne
In Search of Lost Time/Remembrance of Things Past, Proust
Gargantua and Pantagruel, Rabelais
The Little Prince, de Saint-Exupéry
No Exit, Sartre
Candide, Voltaire
La Bête humaine, Zola
L'Assommoir, Zola

Germany
Faust, Goethe
The Sorrows of Young Werther, Goethe
Siddhartha, Hesse
Death in Venice, Mann
Human, All Too Human, Nietzsche
All is Quiet on the Western Front, Remarque
Perfume, Süskind

Greece
The Odyssey, Homer
The Iliad, Homer
The Republic, Plato
Oedipus Rex, Sophocles

Iceland
Edda, Snorri Sturluson.
Poetic Edda, unknown.
Völsunga saga, unknown.
Njáls saga, unknown.

Iran
Shahnahmeh, Ferdowsi

Ireland
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Joyce
Ulysses, Joyce
The Picture of Dorian Gray, Wilde

Italy
The Divine Comedy, Dante Alighieri
If on a Winter's Night a Traveler, Calvino
The Name of the Rose, Eco
Foucault's Pendulum, Eco
Metamorphosis, Ovid
One, No one and One Hundred Thousand, Pirandello

Japan
Basho's Haiku, Basho
Silence, Endo
The House of the Sleeping Beauties, Kawabata
Dance Dance Dance, Murakami
The Key, Tanizaki

Netherlands
The Discovery of Heaven, Mulisch

New Zealand
The Bone People, Hulme

Romania
Night, Wiesel

Russia
The Master and Margarita, Bulgakov (see Ukraine)
Crime and Punishment, Dostoyevsky
Brothers Karamazov, Dostoyevsky
The Idiot, Dostoyevsky
Notes from Underground, Dostoyevsky
Dead Souls, Gogol (see Ukraine)
Oblomov, Goncharov
Lolita, Nabokov (see United States)
Anna Karenina, Tolstoy
War and Peace, Tolstoy
Fathers and Sons, Turgenev

Spain
Don Quixote, Cervantes

Ukraine
The Master and Margarita, Bulgakov (see Russia)
Heart of Darkness, Conrad (see United Kingdom)
Dead Souls, Gogol (see Russia)

United Kingdom
Watership Down, Adams
Pride and Prejudice, Austen
Jane Eyre, C. Brontë
Wuthering Heights, E. Brontë
A Clockwork Orange, Burgess
Canterbury Tales, Chaucer
Heart of Darkness, Conrad (see Ukraine)
Bleak House, Dickens
Oliver Twist, Dickens
A Tale of Two Cities, Dickens
The Magus, Fowles
North and South, Gaskell
Lord of the Flies, Golding
Tess of the d'Urbervilles, Hardy
Jude the Obscure, Hardy
The Mayor of Casterbridge, Hardy
Brave New World, Huxley
Women in Love, Lawrence
If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things, McGregor
Paradise Lost, Milton
Animal Farm, Orwell
Nineteen Eighty-four, Orwell
Julius Caesar, Shakespeare
Macbeth, Shakespeare
King Lear, Shakespeare
Hamlet, Shakespeare
Frankenstein, M. Shelley
Tritram Shandy, Sterne
The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Stevenson
Dracula, Stoker
The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien
Beowulf, Unknown
Brideshead Revisited, Waugh

United States
The Good Earth, Buck
In Cold Blood, Capote
Middlesex, Eugenides
As I Lay Dying, Faulkner
The Sound and the Fury, Faulkner
The Great Gatsby, Fitzgerald
Catch-22, Heller
For Whom the Bell Tolls, Hemingway
The Sun Also Rises, Hemingway
The Old Man and the Sea, Hemingway
The Kite Runner, Hosseini (see Afghanistan)
On the Road, Kerouac
Sometimes a Great Notion, Kesey
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, Kesey
To Kill A Mockingbird, Lee
Moby-Dick, Merving
Lolita, Nabokov (see Russia)
The Catcher in the Rye, Salinger
Of Mice and Men, Steinbeck
The Grapes of Wrath, Steinbeck
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Twain
Slaughterhouse 5, Vonnegut
The House of Mirth, Wharton

Uruguay
The Truce, Benedetti
Tan triste como ella y otros cuentos, Onetti

Does anyone strongly disagree (with either the list compiled from the Lit Net Top 100, or my own suggestions)? Let me hear!

[JBI]

I don't agree with half of it, but as not to argue, I will just say, essentially none of those lists reflect the traditions or held opinions of the countries they seek to represent. I would think Eminescu, for instance, would be seen above Wiesel in Romania - I mean, they did ship him off to Auschwitz to begin with...

I am not going to comment though, I just urge anybody actually interested in reading like this to go to the library, head to the row that stocks literature from any given country, and just take a look. Or at least get a major survey book with excerpts so you can get a taste.

[aliengirl]

You have done a good work by compiling the list of Top 100 Lit Net books according to country. My suggestions for this list are:

Three Musketeers by Alexander Duma
David Copperfield by Dickens
The Guide by R.K. Narayan (India)
My Name is Red by Orhan Pamuk (Turkey)
But there are so many great works that I think it would be difficult to select any 100 books. However, I found many of my favorites in your list.

[dfloyd]

except the bottom half of the bottom 100. And Ovid is not Greek, but Roman.

[JBI]

except the bottom half of the bottom 100. And Ovid is not Greek, but Roman.

Depends how you look at it - he did write near the end of his life in his native tongue, though none of that survives.

[Amoxcalli]

except the bottom half of the bottom 100. And Ovid is not Greek, but Roman.

Oops. My bad, should've remembered though, I even translated him. Thank you.

EDIT: Reckon we should only list the very best a country has produced in terms of literature? i.e. get rid of a lot of works from the UK and US, and try to find a handful of works from near every country?

[homonym]

I think stendhal's The Red and The Black should probably be on the french list.

[stlukesguild]

I must agree with JBI... half of this list is made up of books far from being among the 100 greatest works of world literature. The list is embarrassing in its virtual lack of any non-Western writers (China? Japan? India? Persia? did they somehow disappear?) Russia on the other hand (as might be expected considering the Russian obsession on Lit-Net) as seems far over-represented... as does the United State... and perhaps Britain... especially considering considering the slim selection of German and even Italian writers... to say nothing of East-Europeans and Latin-Americans. And then there is the question of poetry: where is Blake, Keats, Baudelaire, Verlaine, Garcia-Lorca, Neruda, Holderlin, Rilke, Spenser, Pushkin, Pasternak, Miguel Hernandez, San Juan de la Cruz, Petrarch, Montale, Whitman, Dickinson, etc...

Lists such as this may he some use for the novice... introducing them to writers they may not have heard of... but for the most part they are inherently skewed and have little to offer.

I think stendhal's The Red and The Black should probably be on the french list.

And Baudelaire's Les Fleurs du Mal, the collected poetry of Verlaine, Rimbaud, Mallarme, Rousseau's Confessions, certainly something by Racine and Moliere, Victor Hugo's poetry, Maupassant's tales, etc...

[eyemaker]

. The list is embarrassing in its virtual lack of any non-Western writers (China? Japan? India? Persia? did they somehow disappear?) Russia on the other hand (as might be expected considering the Russian obsession on Lit-Net) as seems far over-represented... as does the United State... and perhaps Britain...
Lists such as this may he some use for the novice... introducing them to writers they may not have heard of... but for the most part they are inherently skewed and have little to offer.

stlukes,I agree with you poiting out the Russian Literature invasion here in Lit-Net. people here are far more exposed to a lot of Russian Literary texts thus making them aware of the richness in terms of their literature.. The list on the other hand, does not in any sense fully "reflect" the best Literature in certain countries but seems to serve as a book list for a Literary student taking up literature first hand.

[Lulim]

(...) The list is embarrassing in its virtual lack of any non-Western writers (China? Japan? India? Persia? did they somehow disappear?) Russia on the other hand (as might be expected considering the Russian obsession on Lit-Net) as seems far over-represented... as does the United State... and perhaps Britain... especially considering considering the slim selection of German and even Italian writers... to say nothing of East-Europeans and Latin-Americans. (...)

You are probably right. However, I didn't understand the purpose of the list to be complete yet but to serve as a starting point where everyone is called upon to add or to remove, respectively, and to discuss it, in order to compile a more comprehensive list. But it's up to Amoxcalli to object if I misinterpreted her/him there.

This said, I suggest to add Ivo Andric, for Bosnia-Herzegowina (or Jugoslawia).

[mal4mac]

Shouldn't Conrad also be in the Polish section? Gets around that boy...

[Lokasenna]

Ahem...

Iceland
Edda, Snorri Sturluson.
Poetic Edda, unknown.
Völsunga saga, unknown.
Njáls saga, unknown.
and possibly Egils saga, unknown.

There's another country for you!

[Amoxcalli]

You are probably right. However, I didn't understand the purpose of the list to be complete yet but to serve as a starting point where everyone is called upon to add or to remove, respectively, and to discuss it, in order to compile a more comprehensive list. But it's up to Amoxcalli to object if I misinterpreted her/him there.

This said, I suggest to add Ivo Andric, for Bosnia-Herzegowina (or Jugoslawia).

Yes, exactly, that was the idea. Thank you for your suggestion, would you mind supplying a title or two?

Basically, the idea was that we try to compile a list of some of the best and most representative works a country has produced. The list was by no means intended to be finished.

EDIT:
Made the following changes:

Additions:
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Joyce
Shahnahmeh, Ferdowsi
Death in Venice, Mann
Human, All Too Human, Nietzsche
All is Quiet on the Western Front, Remarque
The Sorrows of Young Werther, Goethe
The Discovery of Heaven, Mulisch
The Cairo Trilogy, Mahfouz
Wedding Song, Mahfouz
Respected Sir, Mahfouz
Edda, Snorri Sturluson.
Poetic Edda, unknown.
Völsunga saga, unknown.
Njáls saga, unknown.

Removals:
Invitation to a Beheading, Nabokov (see United States)
The Fountainhead, Rand (see United States)
Cat's Cradle, Vonnegut


Agree? Disagree? Opinions?

[Lulim]

Yes, exactly, that was the idea. Thank you for your suggestion, would you mind supplying a title or two? (...)

"The Bridge on the Drina", is a title by Ivo Andric, or "The Vizier's Elephant", but I haven't read the second one.

[Amoxcalli]

"The Bridge on the Drina", is a title by Ivo Andric, or "The Vizier's Elephant", but I haven't read the second one.

Added them, thank you very much.