Favourite books from your country (or in your language)

[Florestan]

Oh boy! You might have never heard about these names...

Here are some classics of the Romanian literature which Florestan endorses

Poems

Vasile Alecsandri  - Poems

Mihai Eminescu -Poems

George Coșbuc - Poems

Dramas

Ion Luca Caragiale - The Lost Letter

Ion Luca Caragiale - Mr. Leonida Faces the Reaction

Ion Luca Caragiale - A Stormy Night

Novels

Camil Petrescu - The Last Night of Love, the First Night of War

George Calinescu - Otilia´s Enigma

Mateiu I. Caragiale  - The Old Court Libertines  (very approximate English translation)

If interested, please ask me more.

[Brian]

- Gustave Flaubert, L'éducation sentimentale (Sentimental Education), 1869

Many American and English authors are frustrated with the absence of a great translation for this book. I have often wanted to read it, but my French is not good, and when I read reviews of the different translations, I grow frustrated seeing that they are all controversial in some way.

[Gurn Blanston]

Oh boy! You might have never heard about these names...

Here are some classics of the Romanian literature which Florestan endorses

Novels

Camil Petrescu - The Last Night of Love, the First Night of War

George Calinescu - Otilia´s Enigma

Mateiu I. Caragiale  - The Old Court Libertines  (very approximate English translation)

If interested, please ask me more.

I wonder if these exist also in English translations. The titles are intriguing. 

[Karl Henning]

Well, I feel that I've let the thread down by not adding notes . . . .

John Barth, The Sot-Weed Factor
T. Coraghessan Boyle, Water Music
T. Coraghessan Boyle, World's End
Don De Lillo, White Noise
Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Blithedale Romance
Washington Irving, Tales of a Traveller
Herman Melville, Moby-Dick, or The Whale
Robert Sheckley, Dramocles: An Inter-Galactic Soap Opera
John Kennedy Toole, A Confederacy of Dunces
Mark Twain, Life on the Mississippi

John Barth, The Sot-Weed Factor
I am not sure which I read first, Tom Jones or The Sot-Weed Factor;  I became aware of them both at roughly the same time.  And in fact, I became aware of this book through a brief quote used to head a chapter in Water Music.  Like Tom Jones, a wonderful, rollicking, headlong enchanting scold of a book.  Apparently takes a genuine poem published in 1708 as its point of departure.

T. Coraghessan Boyle, Water Music
Another flat-out fun novel spun from the odd historical fact, is this idyll on Mungo Park's search for the Niger.  The title (not surprisingly) caught my eye, but (in rather the Wodehouse manner) you could scarcely open it to a page which would not draw you in tight.  I don't think I know anyone else who has read this book;  yet it is a book which I half-feel everyone ought to read.

T. Coraghessan Boyle, World's End
If Water Music is great fun, only it does not end particularly well for the protagonist, World's End is a cumulative tragedy, told comically.  Part of my fondness for this book must stem from the setting, which is a part of world largely familiar to me.  There's a little "Legend of Sleepy Hollow," a little Knickerbocker's History of New York, and a little Dark Shadows in this one.  If anyone else reads this, I should be curious to learn if he or she thinks as well of it as do I.

Don De Lillo, White Noise
In a way which does not (I think) leave the reader feeling that he has been bamboozled, this is a book which starts out as a carefree pop-culture riff, and which morphs into a preventable self-inflicted tragedy.  I suppose that is the thing about tragedy – which, I guess, means that I find this book well made.  I go back and re-read it partly remembering how funny so much of it is . . . so you could call this book one of my periodic rituals.

Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Blithedale Romance
There is an idyllic, "easy" pace to this story of the fictional cousin to an actual experiment in communal living from Hawthorne's day.  I think it caught me by surprise, the first I read this, how Hawthorne reserves the sharpest moral reproaches for the narrator.

Washington Irving, Tales of a Traveller
Even when I read "Rip van Winkle" and "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow" as a boy, I adored Irving's style even more than the content of the stories.  The Tales of a Traveller I read for the first time as part of my intellectual nourishment while I languished in Oklahoma one ill-favored school year, and I found it wonderful both that the author by his style was already "a friend," and yet here were all these wonderful stories which were completely new to me.

Herman Melville, Moby-Dick, or The Whale
At the UVa bookstore in Charlottesville, I chanced upon the Norton Critical Edition of this.  It had been part of my obligatory reading in high school, but it was a number of obligatory books which, while my classmates sweated through, I somehow managed to shuffle through the class without actually reading . . . or without much reading.  Finding the book in Virginia, I found myself curious to read it, and I just inhaled the book.  It remains a book not for everyone (an excellent friend of mine, a fellow musician, tried reading it and could not endure it), but I am a huge fan.

Robert Sheckley, Dramocles: An Inter-Galactic Soap Opera
An old schoolmate, who must just have found a stack of this title at the Forbidden Planet shop in downtown Manhattan (no idea if it's still there), gave this to me one Christmas.  Sheckley was writing science-fiction as a flimsy guise for humor decades before there was any Douglas Adams (not that the Adams books are not great fun, and his own creation).  I re-read this at wide enough intervals, that I forget how the whole thing gets solved at the end.  I have found many short stories of Sheckley's which are as good and as witty as Dramocles, but none of the novels which I've read has come close.

John Kennedy Toole, A Confederacy of Dunces
My eleventh-grade English teacher recommended this, I read it, I remember liking it a great deal – and it's been years, I should re-read it.

Mark Twain, Life on the Mississippi
Part yarn, part travelogue, part "processed autobiography," this book means Buffalo to me.  Although the autobiography I am currently reading promises to have me re-thinking the matter, all these long years my feeling has been, if I could only save one Twain work from Cosmic Zapping, this would be that work.

Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass
This was another Norton Critical Edition which I bought in the UVa bookstore in Charlottesville, but I left it largely unread – until I took it with my to Tallinn (and then St Petersburg) where it served me as a sort of devotional volume of American letters.  Even the flaws of some of the sprawling poems are nearly virtues in my eyes.  Fond memories of reading Song of Myself aloud to a small group of expatriate English-speakers in Estonia.

[Karl Henning]

Did you read Underworld ? I think it might be the greatest masterpiece of these last 20 or 30 years.

I've not read that one, thanks for the rec!

[Karl Henning]

Do you know The Scarlet Letter, Karl, and if so, what do you think of it? (I haven't read it myself)

I do, indeed;  I like it very well . . . it is apt to come across a little as a Morality Tale (well done, mind you).  There something of an "it's complicated" vibe to The Blithedale Romance which I find endearing.

[Florestan]

I wonder if these exist also in English translations. The titles are intriguing. 

I don´t think so. But please get me in touch with a publishing house interested in them. I oblige to translate them into English. 

[Cosi bel do]

Many American and English authors are frustrated with the absence of a great translation for this book. I have often wanted to read it, but my French is not good, and when I read reviews of the different translations, I grow frustrated seeing that they are all controversial in some way.

That's a real shame then

[Florestan]

Many American and English authors are frustrated with the absence of a great translation for this book. I have often wanted to read it, but my French is not good, and when I read reviews of the different translations, I grow frustrated seeing that they are all controversial in some way.

There is a very good Romanian translation, but then again all the French classics have been translated into Romanian before 1950´s- 

Think about it: after 1950 one could have been thrown in prison for reading Cioran or Eliade... 

[North Star]

I do, indeed;  I like it very well . . . it is apt to come across a little as a Morality Tale (well done, mind you).  There something of an "it's complicated" vibe to The Blithedale Romance which I find endearing.

Most interesting. I've read Walden but nothing else that is at all related.

Well, I feel that I've let the thread down by not adding notes . . . .

John Barth, The Sot-Weed Factor
I am not sure which I read first, Tom Jones or The Sot-Weed Factor;  I became aware of them both at roughly the same time.  And in fact, I became aware of this book through a brief quote used to head a chapter in Water Music.  Like Tom Jones, a wonderful, rollicking, headlong enchanting scold of a book.  Apparently takes a genuine poem published in 1708 as its point of departure.

T. Coraghessan Boyle, Water Music
Another flat-out fun novel spun from the odd historical fact, is this idyll on Mungo Park’s search for the Niger.  The title (not surprisingly) caught my eye, but (in rather the Wodehouse manner) you could scarcely open it to a page which would not draw you in tight.  I don’t think I know anyone else who has read this book;  yet it is a book which I half-feel everyone ought to read.

T. Coraghessan Boyle, World's End
If Water Music is great fun, only it does not end particularly well for the protagonist, World's End is a cumulative tragedy, told comically.  Part of my fondness for this book must stem from the setting, which is a part of world largely familiar to me.  There’s a little “Legend of Sleepy Hollow,” a little Knickerbocker’s History of New York, and a little Dark Shadows in this one.  If anyone else reads this, I should be curious to learn if he or she thinks as well of it as do I.

Don De Lillo, White Noise
In a way which does not (I think) leave the reader feeling that he has been bamboozled, this is a book which starts out as a carefree pop-culture riff, and which morphs into a preventable self-inflicted tragedy.  I suppose that is the thing about tragedy – which, I guess, means that I find this book well made.  I go back and re-read it partly remembering how funny so much of it is . . . so you could call this book one of my periodic rituals.

Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Blithedale Romance
There is an idyllic, “easy” pace to this story of the fictional cousin to an actual experiment in communal living from Hawthorne’s day.  I think it caught me by surprise, the first I read this, how Hawthorne reserves the sharpest moral reproaches for the narrator.

Washington Irving, Tales of a Traveller
Even when I read “Rip van Winkle” and “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” as a boy, I adored Irving’s style even more than the content of the stories.  The Tales of a Traveller I read for the first time as part of my intellectual nourishment while I languished in Oklahoma one ill-favored school year, and I found it wonderful both that the author by his style was already “a friend,” and yet here were all these wonderful stories which were completely new to me.

Herman Melville, Moby-Dick, or The Whale
At the UVa bookstore in Charlottesville, I chanced upon the Norton Critical Edition of this.  It had been part of my obligatory reading in high school, but it was a number of obligatory books which, while my classmates sweated through, I somehow managed to shuffle through the class without actually reading . . . or without much reading.  Finding the book in Virginia, I found myself curious to read it, and I just inhaled the book.  It remains a book not for everyone (an excellent friend of mine, a fellow musician, tried reading it and could not endure it), but I am a huge fan.

Robert Sheckley, Dramocles: An Inter-Galactic Soap Opera
An old schoolmate, who must just have found a stack of this title at the Forbidden Planet shop in downtown Manhattan (no idea if it’s still there), gave this to me one Christmas.  Sheckley was writing science-fiction as a flimsy guise for humor decades before there was any Douglas Adams (not that the Adams books are not great fun, and his own creation).  I re-read this at wide enough intervals, that I forget how the whole thing gets solved at the end.  I have found many short stories of Sheckley’s which are as good and as witty as Dramocles, but none of the novels which I’ve read has come close.

John Kennedy Toole, A Confederacy of Dunces
My eleventh-grade English teacher recommended this, I read it, I remember liking it a great deal – and it’s been years, I should re-read it.

Mark Twain, Life on the Mississippi
Part yarn, part travelogue, part “processed autobiography,” this book means Buffalo to me.  Although the autobiography I am currently reading promises to have me re-thinking the matter, all these long years my feeling has been, if I could only save one Twain work from Cosmic Zapping, this would be that work.

Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass
This was another Norton Critical Edition which I bought in the UVa bookstore in Charlottesville, but I left it largely unread – until I took it with my to Tallinn (and then St Petersburg) where it served me as a sort of devotional volume of American letters.  Even the flaws of some of the sprawling poems are nearly virtues in my eyes.  Fond memories of reading Song of Myself aloud to a small group of expatriate English-speakers in Estonia.

Most interesting. I've read a dozen or so (shorter) poems of Whitman, great poet for sure, albeit he's no Dickinson. Not that he should be..

[vandermolen]

Crime and Punishment hahaha. Actually it is my favourite novel but I am British so can't include it.

Most works by George Orwell, especially 1984 and Animal Farm but also his collected Letters, essays and Journalism.

Dylan Thomas 'Under Milk Wood' (can't ignore that today)

Evelyn Waugh 'Decline and Fall'

Many World War One poets, especially Siegdfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen

Conan Doyle 'Adventures of Sherlock Holmes' etc

Dickens 'A Tale of Two Cities', 'Great Expectations', 'David Copperfield'

Shakespeare 'The Tempest', 'King Lear'

Williams and Searle 'The Compleet [sic] Molesworth'

[Karl Henning]

Crime and Punishment hahaha. Actually it is my favourite novel but I am British so can't include it.

Love it, meself.

[Gurn Blanston]

Crime and Punishment hahaha. Actually it is my favourite novel but I am British so can't include it.

Most works by George Orwell, especially 1984 and Animal Farm but also his collected Letters, essays and Journalism.

Dylan Thomas 'Under Milk Wood' (can't ignore that today)

Evelyn Waugh 'Decline and Fall'

Many World War One poets, especially Siegdfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen

Conan Doyle 'Adventures of Sherlock Holmes' etc

Dickens 'A Tale of Two Cities', 'Great Expectations', 'David Copperfield'

Shakespeare 'The Tempest', 'King Lear'

Williams and Searle 'The Compleet [sic] Molesworth'

Nice list, you have a lot to choose from. Many of my favorites are Brits (unlike with music), but I'm like you and the Russian....

[Ken B]

Decameron

Now I have to convince you Bocaccio was a Canadian writing in English. Fortunately most of you are Americans; you guys will believe anything about Canada.

[Ken B]

Well, I feel that I've let the thread down by not adding notes . . . .

John Barth, The Sot-Weed Factor
I am not sure which I read first, Tom Jones or The Sot-Weed Factor;  I became aware of them both at roughly the same time.  And in fact, I became aware of this book through a brief quote used to head a chapter in Water Music.  Like Tom Jones, a wonderful, rollicking, headlong enchanting scold of a book.  Apparently takes a genuine poem published in 1708 as its point of departure.

T. Coraghessan Boyle, Water Music
Another flat-out fun novel spun from the odd historical fact, is this idyll on Mungo Park's search for the Niger.  The title (not surprisingly) caught my eye, but (in rather the Wodehouse manner) you could scarcely open it to a page which would not draw you in tight.  I don't think I know anyone else who has read this book;  yet it is a book which I half-feel everyone ought to read.

T. Coraghessan Boyle, World's End
If Water Music is great fun, only it does not end particularly well for the protagonist, World's End is a cumulative tragedy, told comically.  Part of my fondness for this book must stem from the setting, which is a part of world largely familiar to me.  There's a little "Legend of Sleepy Hollow," a little Knickerbocker's History of New York, and a little Dark Shadows in this one.  If anyone else reads this, I should be curious to learn if he or she thinks as well of it as do I.

Don De Lillo, White Noise
In a way which does not (I think) leave the reader feeling that he has been bamboozled, this is a book which starts out as a carefree pop-culture riff, and which morphs into a preventable self-inflicted tragedy.  I suppose that is the thing about tragedy – which, I guess, means that I find this book well made.  I go back and re-read it partly remembering how funny so much of it is . . . so you could call this book one of my periodic rituals.

Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Blithedale Romance
There is an idyllic, "easy" pace to this story of the fictional cousin to an actual experiment in communal living from Hawthorne's day.  I think it caught me by surprise, the first I read this, how Hawthorne reserves the sharpest moral reproaches for the narrator.

Washington Irving, Tales of a Traveller
Even when I read "Rip van Winkle" and "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow" as a boy, I adored Irving's style even more than the content of the stories.  The Tales of a Traveller I read for the first time as part of my intellectual nourishment while I languished in Oklahoma one ill-favored school year, and I found it wonderful both that the author by his style was already "a friend," and yet here were all these wonderful stories which were completely new to me.

Herman Melville, Moby-Dick, or The Whale
At the UVa bookstore in Charlottesville, I chanced upon the Norton Critical Edition of this.  It had been part of my obligatory reading in high school, but it was a number of obligatory books which, while my classmates sweated through, I somehow managed to shuffle through the class without actually reading . . . or without much reading.  Finding the book in Virginia, I found myself curious to read it, and I just inhaled the book.  It remains a book not for everyone (an excellent friend of mine, a fellow musician, tried reading it and could not endure it), but I am a huge fan.

Robert Sheckley, Dramocles: An Inter-Galactic Soap Opera
An old schoolmate, who must just have found a stack of this title at the Forbidden Planet shop in downtown Manhattan (no idea if it's still there), gave this to me one Christmas.  Sheckley was writing science-fiction as a flimsy guise for humor decades before there was any Douglas Adams (not that the Adams books are not great fun, and his own creation).  I re-read this at wide enough intervals, that I forget how the whole thing gets solved at the end.  I have found many short stories of Sheckley's which are as good and as witty as Dramocles, but none of the novels which I've read has come close.

John Kennedy Toole, A Confederacy of Dunces
My eleventh-grade English teacher recommended this, I read it, I remember liking it a great deal – and it's been years, I should re-read it.

Mark Twain, Life on the Mississippi
Part yarn, part travelogue, part "processed autobiography," this book means Buffalo to me.  Although the autobiography I am currently reading promises to have me re-thinking the matter, all these long years my feeling has been, if I could only save one Twain work from Cosmic Zapping, this would be that work.

Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass
This was another Norton Critical Edition which I bought in the UVa bookstore in Charlottesville, but I left it largely unread – until I took it with my to Tallinn (and then St Petersburg) where it served me as a sort of devotional volume of American letters.  Even the flaws of some of the sprawling poems are nearly virtues in my eyes.  Fond memories of reading Song of Myself aloud to a small group of expatriate English-speakers in Estonia.

I knew we both liked Sot-Weed. I'm pleased you liked Water Music. I liked a lot of TCB, especiially Budding Propects.

[DaveF]

Dylan Thomas 'Under Milk Wood' (can't ignore that today)
'The Compleet [sic] Molesworth'

Coo ur gosh looks like we need a Molesworth thred here which (gramer) I would hav included xcept I limited myself to welsh lit chiz.  That other weed r s tomas is also joly good and anyone who sa otherwise I will uterly tuough up ect.

[Marc]

My favourite Dutch writer (by far) is Simon Vestdijk (1898-1971). To me, he's the J.S. Bach of Dutch literature. He was very productive in all genres, except drama. He did write one libretto for an opera, though: the unfinished Merlijn of Willem Pijper.
During his lifetime, some of his novels were translated (a.o. in English and French) and he was nominated for the Nobel Prize for a period of almost 20 years, but he wasn't a politically interesting figure. Nowadays he's almost forgotten, even in his own country. To me, even his 'worst' novels are better than today's best selling Dutch authors, but hey, that's just my opinion.

Vestdijk also translated a.o. Emily Dickinson, Herman Merville, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Egar Allen Poe, Paul Verlaine and Georges Simenon.

http://search.credoreference.com/content/topic/vestdijk_simon_1898_1971

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simon_Vestdijk

My favourite novels by Vestdijk are:

De nadagen van Pilatus (The latter days of Pilate), about the former governor of Judea, retired in Rome, falling in love with a certain Mary of Magdala , and haunted by the ghost of Jesus.

De koperen tuin (The copper garden AKA The garden where the brass band played), about a boy who dances with an older girl to her father's brass band music in 'the copper garden', falls in love with her and from that moment on a tragic love story develops.

De kellner en de levenden (The waiter and the living), probably Vestdijk's best novel, an allegory for the Final Judgment.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_kellner_en_de_levenden

[Linus]

De nadagen van Pilatus (The latter days of Pilate), about the former governor of Judea, retired in Rome, falling in love with a certain Mary of Magdala, and haunted by the ghost of Jesus.

[...]

De kellner en de levenden (The waiter and the living), probably Vestdijk's best novel, an allegory for the Final Judgment.

Thanks for these recommendations, Marc, I love religious allegories!

Hopefully I can find good translations of these.

[Linus]

SWEDEN

Hjalmar Söderberg - Doctor Glas



Sweden is "culturally challenged" to say the least, but I think this book can compete internationally (almost).

Söderberg was always excellent at pinpointing feelings of loss, disgust and anguish in dealing with destiny, love and death.

Doctor Glas is his best and quite a quick read. It's thematically dark, but very "light on its feet" in style. It's brutally honest about the horrors of life, but is written beautifully, as though beauty justifies it all.

[Cosi bel do]

My favourite Dutch writer (by far) is Simon Vestdijk (1898-1971). To me, he's the J.S. Bach of Dutch literature. He was very productive in all genres, except drama. He did write one libretto for an opera, though: the unfinished Merlijn of Willem Pijper.
During his lifetime, some of his novels were translated (a.o. in English and French) and he was nominated for the Nobel Prize for a period of almost 20 years, but he wasn't a politically interesting figure. Nowadays he's almost forgotten, even in his own country. To me, even his 'worst' novels are better than today's best selling Dutch authors, but hey, that's just my opinion.

Vestdijk also translated a.o. Emily Dickinson, Herman Merville, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Egar Allen Poe, Paul Verlaine and Georges Simenon.

http://search.credoreference.com/content/topic/vestdijk_simon_1898_1971

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simon_Vestdijk

My favourite novels by Vestdijk are:

De nadagen van Pilatus (The latter days of Pilate), about the former governor of Judea, retired in Rome, falling in love with a certain Mary of Magdala , and haunted by the ghost of Jesus.

De koperen tuin (The copper garden AKA The garden where the brass band played), about a boy who dances with an older girl to her father's brass band music in 'the copper garden', falls in love with her and from that moment on a tragic love story develops.

De kellner en de levenden (The waiter and the living), probably Vestdijk's best novel, an allegory for the Final Judgment.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_kellner_en_de_levenden

Great, thanks, never heard of him
There is a French translation of De koperen tuin apparently (Le jardin de cuivre). But I don't think any of the other titles in French correspond to De nadagen van Pilatus and De kellner en de levenden, unfortunately. I see Les voyageurs (The Travellers), L'île au rhum (The Rhum Island) and Un fou chasse l'autre (A mad man chases the other).
Well I'll start with Le jardin de cuivre then...