Best Books by Country

[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

[Amoxcalli]

Eminescu -Luceafarul

Mircea Eliade-Istoria religiilor

Eugen Ionescu -his plays

Mihail Sadoveanu

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)