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.:yesnod:

[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. :)

[alansnq]

Since it is a list to be completed, I have some sugestions:

Argentina
Fictions, Jorge Luis Borges
Hopscotch, Julio Cortázar
Artificial Respiration, Ricardo Piglia
Seven Madmen, Roberto Arlt

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

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

Italy
One, No one and One Hundred Thousand, Luigi Pirandello
If on a Winter's Night a Traveler, Italo Calvino

Japan
The House of the Sleeping Beauties, Ysunari Kawabata
Dance Dance Dance, Haruki Murakami
Basho's Haiku, Matsuo Basho
The Key, Junichiro Tanizaki

[Amoxcalli]

Oh! Thank you very much, that's not a bad list at all. I've added them. :)

Out of curiosity, what did you think of Hopscotch? I've heard about it and the concept looks extremely intriguing, but I haven't had the change to pick it up yet. Recommended?

[jadrianne]

Eminescu -Luceafarul

Mircea Eliade-Istoria religiilor

Eugen Ionescu -his plays

Mihail Sadoveanu

:blush:

[Amoxcalli]

Eminescu -Luceafarul

Mircea Eliade-Istoria religiilor

Eugen Ionescu -his plays

Mihail Sadoveanu

:blush:

I'm guessing Romania, am I correct? ;)

[stlukesguild]

Italy- (not counting Rome... which is another tradition and another language altogether)

Guido Cavalcanti- Sonnets
Dante Alighieri- Vita Nuova (the Comedia is already there)
Boccaccio- The Decameron
Petrarch- Canzonieri (Sonnets)
Tasso- Jerusalem Delivered
Machiavelli- The Prince, The Mandrake
Ludovico Ariosto- Orlando Furioso
Matteo Maria Boiardo- Orlando Innamorato
Vasari- The Lives of the Artists
Carlo Goldini- The Servant of Two Masters
Michelangelo Buonarotti- Poems
Baldassare Castiglione- The Courtier
Giambattista Vico- Principi di Scienza Nuova d'intorno alla Comune Natura delle Nazioni
Alessandro Manzoni- The Betrothed
Giacomo Leopardi- Poems
Ugo Foscolo- Of Tombs, Last Letters of Jacopo Ortis
Giosuè Carducci- Poems
Gabriele d'Annunzio- Poems, Francesca da Rimini
Italo Svevo- The Confessions of Zeno
Luigi Pirandello- Sic Characters in Search of an Author
Salvador Quasimodo- Poems
Cesare Pavese- Poems
Dino Campana- Orphic Songs
Umberto Saba- Poems
Eugenio Montale- Cuttlefish Bones, The Occasions, The Storm
Primo Levi- If This is a Man
Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa- The Leopard
Italo Calvino- Invisible Cities, Baron in the Trees, Cosmicomics
Tomaso Landolfi- Fictions
Umberto Eco- The Name of the Rose

Any one of these works is worthy of recognition and serious contemplation alongside the greatest literature of any other country. This is but a single example... a single national tradition... of what is out there beyond the "best of..." lists that limit most national traditions to one or two books. And by no way is this list approaching the all-inclusive... and recognize that I am limited to what is available in translation into English.

[mal4mac]

Many writers, besides Conrad, don't fit comfortably under these country headings. And you can't classify them easily by "country of birth" because countries change. Also, imagine if someone is born in India but in a few days moves to England. Classifying them as Indian would be pretty stupid. Examples:

Kafka - "He was born to middle-class German-speaking Jewish parents in Prague, Bohemia, now part of the Czech Republic, in what was then the Austro-Hungarian Empire."

Joyce - Bloom classifies him under "Great Britain and Ireland". The "Irish question" makes any separate classification very problematic, and "United Kingdom" is oxymoronic :)

Camus - he was born in Algeria.

Süskind has spent much of his adult life in France. Having just seen the film "Perfume" I would have guessed he was French. (Great film, by the way!)

Is "Arabian Empire" a valid category? Shouldn't Camus and Lawrence be under that heading? :)

Nabakov - Russian/American

[mortalterror]

Makes more sense to do it by language.
Ancient Greek
1.Homer- Iliad 2.Aeschylus- Orestea 3.Sophocles- Theban Plays 4.Euripides- Bachae 5.Aristophanes- Lysistrata 6.Hesiod- Works and Days 7.Apollonius of Rhodes- Argonautika 8.Sappho- Poems 9.Callimachus- Poems 10.Anacreon- Poems
Latin
1.Virgil- Aeneid 2.Ovid- Metamorphoses 3.Horace- Odes 4.Seneca- Thyestes 5.Petronius- Satyricon 6.Catullus- Poems 7.Statius- Thebaid 8.Apuleius- The Golden *** 9.Lucan- Pharsalia 10.Juvenal- Satires
English
1.Shakespeare- Hamlet 2.Milton- Paradise Lost 3.Chaucer- Canterbury Tales 4.Spenser- Faery Queen 5.Dickens- Tale of Two Cities 6.Wordsworth- Poems 7.Eliot- The Wasteland 8.Melville- Moby Dick 9.Shelley- Poems 10.Hemingway- The Old Man and the Sea
French
1.Baudelaire- Flowers of Evil 2.Flaubert-Madame Bovary 3.Hugo- Les Miserables 4.Racine- Phaedra 5.Moliere- Tartuffe 6.Balzac- Pere Goriot 7.Rabelais- Gargantua and Pantagruel 8.Proust- In Search of Lost Time 9.Maupassant- Short Stories 10.Dumas- The Three Musketeers
Russian
1.Tolstoy- War and Peace 2.Dostoyevski- The Brothers Karamazov 3.Pushkin- Eugene Onegin 4.Chekov- Uncle Vanya 5.Turgenev- Fathers and Sons 6.Goncharov- Oblomov 7.Lermontov- A Hero For Our Times 8.Gogol- Dead Souls 9.Bulgakov- The Master and Marguerita 10.Pasternak- Dr. Zhivago
Italian
1.Dante- Divine Comedy 2.Tasso- Jerusalem Delivered 3.Petrarch- Canzoniere 4.Boccaccio- Decameron 5.Leopardi- Cantos 6.Ariosto- Orlando Furioso 7.Manzoni- The Bethrothed 8.Calvino- If On a Winters Night a Traveler 9.Foscolo- Last Letters of Jocopo Ortis 10.Boiardo- Orlando In Love
German
1.Gothe- Faust 2.Kafka- Metamorphoses 3.Holderlin- Poems 4.Rilke- Sonnets to Orpheus 5.Mann- Death in Venice 6.Brecht- Threepenny Opera 7.Hesse- Steppenwolf 8.Buchner- Danton's Death 9.Hoffman- Short Stories 10.Schiller- William Tell
Farsi
1.Firdawsi- Shahnameh 2.Rumi- Masnavi 3.Hafiz- Divan 4.Nezami- Layla and Majnun 5.Sa'di- Rose Garden 5.Khayyam- Rubaiyat 6.Attar- Conference of the Birds 7.Jami- Yusuf and Zulaykha
Sanskrit
1.Vyasa- Mahabharata 2.Valmiki- Ramayana 3.Kalidasa- Sakuntala and the Ring of Recollection 4.Jayadeva- Gita Govinda 5.Anonymous- Panchatantra 6.Bhartrhari- Śatakatraya
Chinese
1.Xueqin- Dream of the Red Chamber 2.Cheng'en- Journey to the West 3.Guanzhong- Romance of the Three Kingdoms 4.Various- Complete Tang Poems 5.Various- Classic of Poetry 6.Su Shi- Poems 7.Anonymous- Plum in the Golden Vase 8.Jinzi- The Scholars 9.Shifu- Romance of the Western Chamber 10.Nai'an-Water Margin
Japanese
1.Shikibu- Tale of Genji 2.Various- Manyoshu 3.Basho- Poems 4.Mishima- The Temple of the Golden Pavilion 5.Soseki- Kokoro 6.Murakami- A Wild Sheep Chase 7.Shonagon- The Pillow Book 8.Kenko- Essays in Idleness 9.Anonymous- Tale of the Heike 10.Akutagawa- Rashomon
Spanish
1.Cervantes- Don Quixote 2.Calderon- Life is a Dream 3.Neruda- Poems 4.De Vega- Fuente Ovejuna 5.St John of the Cross- Poems 6.Marquez- 100 Years of Solitude 7.Anonymous- Lazarillo de Tormes 8.Gongora- Poems 9.Rojas- Celestina 10.Borges- Short stories
Portugese
1.Camoes- Lusiads 2.Pessoa- A Little Larger than the Entire Universe
Scandinavian
1.Ibsen- The Doll House 2.Strindberg- Miss Julie 3.Various- Kalavala 4.Hamsun- Hunger 5.Anderson- Short Stories 6.Dinesen- Out of Africa

[stlukesguild]

My own library is largely organized according to language as this allows us to avoid problems of writers like Dante who was not technically "Italian" but rather Florentine... Italy not existing as a real political entity, as well a Kafka, the Czech Jew writing in German. However it leaves other unanswered questions. Where, for example, do we place those writers who composed major works in more than one language: Sir Francis Bacon, John Milton... or more recently Vladimir Nabokov and Samuel Beckett? It also leaves open the problem of the writers of the Western Hemisphere and those of Asia or Africa who write in an adopted European language. We can justify counting Kafka and perhaps even Celan as German considering the shifting borders of Europe... but are we ready to count Pablo Neruda, Octavio Paz, and J.L. Borges as Spanish, Machado de Assis as Portuguese, and Whitman, Emerson, Falukner, and Anne Carson as English?

[TheFifthElement]

I'd suggest the addition of:

Japan
Beauty and Sadness - Yasunari Kawabata
Snow Country - Yasunari Kawabata
The Woman in the Dunes - Kobo Abe
and I'd second the nomination of Rashomon by Akutagawa


Iceland
Independent People - Halldor Laxness
World Light - Halldor Laxness

Norway
Hunger - Knut Hamsun

Portugal
The Cave - Jose Saramago

France
Nausea - Jean Paul Sartre
The Woman Destroyed - Simone de Beauvoir

United Kingdom
The Collector - John Fowles
Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell

South Africa
Disgrace - J M Coetzee (well, am currently reading and it's pretty good so far :) )

[jadrianne]

Romanian;I got carried away so to speak and I wrote in Romanian .

I was amazed to find out that there are people from the other side of the globe that have heard about Eminescu. Tears in my eyes !

[JBI]

Italy- (not counting Rome... which is another tradition and another language altogether)

Guido Cavalcanti- Sonnets
Dante Alighieri- Vita Nuova (the Comedia is already there)
Boccaccio- The Decameron
Petrarch- Canzonieri (Sonnets)
Tasso- Jerusalem Delivered
Machiavelli- The Prince, The Mandrake
Ludovico Ariosto- Orlando Furioso
Matteo Maria Boiardo- Orlando Innamorato
Vasari- The Lives of the Artists
Carlo Goldini- The Servant of Two Masters
Michelangelo Buonarotti- Poems
Baldassare Castiglione- The Courtier
Giambattista Vico- Principi di Scienza Nuova d'intorno alla Comune Natura delle Nazioni
Alessandro Manzoni- The Betrothed
Giacomo Leopardi- Poems
Ugo Foscolo- Of Tombs, Last Letters of Jacopo Ortis
Giosuè Carducci- Poems
Gabriele d'Annunzio- Poems, Francesca da Rimini
Italo Svevo- The Confessions of Zeno
Luigi Pirandello- Sic Characters in Search of an Author
Salvador Quasimodo- Poems
Cesare Pavese- Poems
Dino Campana- Orphic Songs
Umberto Saba- Poems
Eugenio Montale- Cuttlefish Bones, The Occasions, The Storm
Primo Levi- If This is a Man
Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa- The Leopard
Italo Calvino- Invisible Cities, Baron in the Trees, Cosmicomics
Tomaso Landolfi- Fictions
Umberto Eco- The Name of the Rose

Any one of these works is worthy of recognition and serious contemplation alongside the greatest literature of any other country. This is but a single example... a single national tradition... of what is out there beyond the "best of..." lists that limit most national traditions to one or two books. And by no way is this list approaching the all-inclusive... and recognize that I am limited to what is available in translation into English.
It's an interesting list, but it doesn't reflect the standard reading one would get of British literature, and the trajectory of development, as it neglects much of what comes in between Boccaccio and Leopardi, and Leopardi to Ungaretti (who was left out) and then also contemporary stuff. In truth, that's the real problem - there is a tradition there as large as the English (As in England) or American. The hard part is negotiating it within a context of itself, or within a context of a larger frame (Western literature, lyric poetry, Romantic literature, or whatever category one chooses). The actual point from which one approaches then dictates much of what belongs on such a list, in the sense that a line like "Quant'e bella giovanezza," is proverbial, but how many outside of Italy will a) know it, and b) know it to be the work of Lorenzo di Medici? The poem is central, but he wasn't on your list.

[Babyguile]

George Elliot anyone?

I mean really...

[Ashbe Maeur]

I also don't agree with half the list. Though I don't think I'll take the time to go through my own list at this time.

I think 1984 belongs there, as well with Brave New World. The Kite Runner is very good, but it can't be the only piece of readworthy literature out of Afghanistan, besides A Thousand Splended Suns.

And Of Mice and Men for Steinbeck? It's a good book and all, but completely not his best.

[Taliesin]

Makes more sense to do it by language.

Scandinavian
1.Ibsen- The Doll House 2.Strindberg- Miss Julie 3.Various- Kalavala 4.Hamsun- Hunger 5.Anderson- Short Stories 6.Dinesen- Out of Africa

Just nitpicking, but Scandinavian is not a language -though you might consider Danish and Swedish as one language and even include Norwegian if you have imagination, Finnish and Karelian are just absolutely not related to any Indoeuropean language so Kalevala wouldn't just belong to this group.

[kilted exile]

Joyce - Bloom classifies him under "Great Britain and Ireland". The "Irish question" makes any separate classification very problematic, and "United Kingdom" is oxymoronic :)

Bloom can classify him however he likes but it doesnt make it correct. Irish culture and literature is a seperate and distinct entity seperate from the UK (which I dont see as being too oxymoronic it is a very valid description for the combined seperate kingdoms of Scotland, England, Wales and Northern Ireland currently ruled by the one monarch). Irish literature has very little if no links to anglo-saxon writings and if it must be grouped should be grouped with Scottish (along with the welsh and cornish if they wished) as Celtic Literature. Seamus Heaney (a man born and raised in Northern ireland) is famous for saying "Be advised my passports green, no glass of ours was ever raised to toast the queen"

Joyce, however, as I learned on my trip to dublin this past summer, was one of the few writers the irish disclaimed ownership of. - Until he died that is at which point they decided to have a big festival in his honour (Bono is the latest to undergo this strange custom)

[marcolfo]

what no Mexico, allow me.

MEXICO

Juan Rulfo - Pedro Paramo, El Llano en Llamas (burning plain)
Carlos Fuentes - Aura, La region mas transparente (where the air is clear), La Muerte de Artemio Cruz (the death of Artemio Cruz)
Octavio Paz - Laberintos de la soledad (The Labyrinth of Solitude), poems

octa

[Sapphire]

Interesting to see this listed by country! I was very curious what book would be in the list to represent the Netherlands. It is always so hard to make lists like this! I wouldn't have been surprised if there wouldn't have been a book from the Netherlands in the list at all - I mean, it's just a little country in this big big world :)
I personally wouldn't put Mulisch in the top 100, but then again THE DISCOVERY OF HEAVEN (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discovery_of_heaven) is quite something. I don't know what other books might be read on an international level, but I myself was thinking Multatuli - Max Havelaar (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max_Havelaar). Or, to stay in the 20th century and to name a well known book: Anna Frank - The Diary of a Young Girl (Het Achterhuis) (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Diary_of_a_Young_Girl). But then again, there are so many books and every one of those has got something to say for itself... And even more if we add poetry... So lets just stick with Mulisch, why not? I'm sure he's OK with it :lol:

[TheFifthElement]

[color="blue"]Interesting to see this listed by country! I was very curious what book would be in the list to represent the Netherlands. It is always so hard to make lists like this! I wouldn't have been surprised if there wouldn't have been a book from the Netherlands in the list at all - I mean, it's just a little country in this big big world :)
Good thinking Sapphire. Let's add:

Rituals, and
Lost Paradise
by Cees Nooteboom.

Both excellent, excellent books.

[sixsmith]

Australia

Fiction

True History of the Kelly Gang - Peter Carey
Illywhacker - Peter Carey
My Brilliant Career -Miles Franklin
Poor Fellow, My Country - Xavier Herbert
Schindler's Ark - Thomas Keneally
An Imaginary Life - David Malouf
Complete Stories - David Malouf
The Solid Mandala - Patrick White
The Eye of the Storm - Patrick White
The Vivisector - Patrick White
Cloudstreet - Tim Winton

Poetry

Blood and Bone - Philip Hodgins
Collected Poems - AD Hope
Peripheral Light: New and Collected Poems - John Kinsella
Collected Poems - Les Murray
Once Bitten, Twice Bitten - Peter Porter
The Cost of Seriousness - Peter Porter

[Jeremydav]

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?)
One is far more exposed to Western Literature these days. As an English major, a good majority of my classes concentrate solely on British and American works. I believe it's a bit forgivable, no?

[milktea]

Japan:
Kokoro - Natsume Soseki
Kinkakuji - Yukio Mishima
Tale of Genji - Murasaki Shikibu

[TheFifthElement]

Japan:
Kokoro - Natsume Soseki



I'm reading Kokoro at the moment and it is excellent.

Also from Japan, I'd like to add A Dark Night's Passing by Naoya Shiga. Beautiful work.

[Jazz_]

Australia


I'm glad someone added Australia (and Cloudstreet) :D

[Babak Movahed]

Hmmm everything seems pretty good on this list, but let me make a slight addition

Iran:
The Blind Owl - Sadegh Hedayat
Reading Lolita in Tehran - Azar Nafisi

[JCamilo]

Oh! Thank you very much, that's not a bad list at all. I've added them. :)

Out of curiosity, what did you think of Hopscotch? I've heard about it and the concept looks extremely intriguing, but I haven't had the change to pick it up yet. Recommended?

Interesting but far from being Cortazar best work, which still his short stories, specially those about Cronopios and Famas. If anything, Dom Segundo Sombra, Martin Fierro, El Tunel de Sabato, Morel Invention are all more representative as romance of argentina tradition, at least somehow, they are not Borges.

As Uruguay goes, Onetti must bow his head to Felisberto Hernandez and Horacio Quiroga, while talking about short stories. Quiroga is very important, history wise and well, it is quite hard to really put Argentina and Uruguay apart.

As Brazil goes...

Machado is not really a guy you can pinpoint a single work. Bras Cubas, I think it is a more original work than Dom Casmuro. But my favorite Machado are his short stories. His poetic work is quite good also. The same can be said about Rosa. Sagarana, A Outra Margem do Rio, etc.

Linspector is well reggarded, but not like Mario de Andrade and his Macunaima, Graciliano Ramos and Vidas Secas, Lima Barreto and Policarpo Quaresma and the obvious founder of brazilian novel tradition, Jose de Alencar. And Drummond is great poet, but jumping to him is ignoring all works of Castro Alves (Navio Negreiro) and Goncalves Dias (I-Juca Pirama) (and minor, but relevant poets from before the independence like Claudio Manoel da Costa) and people who wrote alongside him like Vincius de Moraes, Manoel Bandeira or Cecilia Meireles.

[Pecksie]

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



Onetti has wonderful novels ('Corpse Collector', 'Let the Wind Speak', 'The Shipyard').

'The Truce' is about the best thing Benedetti wrote. The work of his last years is essentially negligible.

I would add (as a starting-point and in no way a complete list) the following authors, some at least of which have been translated into English:

FICTION: Horacio Quiroga, Jules Supervielle, Felisberto Hernández, Anderssen Banchero, Carlos Martínez Moreno, Francisco Espínola, Armonía Somers, Tomás de Mattos, Antonio Larreta.

POETRY: Comte de Lautréamont (Isidore Ducasse), Julio Herrera y Reissig, Líber Falco, Idea Vilariño, Pedro Piccatto, Marosa di Giorgio.

DRAMA: Florencio Sánchez, Ernesto Herrera.

[Dogbrick]

Australia

I agree with Sixsmith (and Jazz)....especially about Cloudstreet by Tim Winton and Schindlers Ark by Thomas Keneally (later filmed as Schindlers List)

but I would add:

Marcus Clarke: For The Term Of His Natural Life
Thomas Keneally: The Chant of Jimmy Blacksmith
AB Facey: A Fortunate Life
Nam Le: The Boat
John Marsden: Tomorrow When The War Began

[ktr]

Moby-Dick, Merving

wat

[pooteeweet]

nice list :)

[WuWei]

The italian list is depressingly dry. It skips six centuries of literary history, at least a couple of which of outstanding quality. TWO books by Umberto Eco are honestly quite a lot, considering that Boccaccio and Ariosto have none.

If Latin classics are included (which they should not), limiting them to Ovid is at least brutal.

Even if we merely stick to literary relevance and influence, there is absolutely no ignoring Petrarca, Boccaccio, Machiavelli, Ariosto.