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Best books of 20th century according to the French
Posted by Lale on 28/8/2001, 14:34:42
According to a survey in France, these are the best 50 books of the 20th century. Not all of them are fiction.
The titles that are in French either haven't been translated to English or have kept the original French title.
There are some interesting books in here that we might consider for our reading group's future choices.
From the list below, I counted 19 books that I own and 11 that I have actually read. I am sure your numbers
1. The Stranger - Albert Camus (1942)
2. In Search of Lost Time - Marcel Proust (from 1913 to 1927)
3. The Trial - Franz Kafka (written in 1914, published in 1925)
4. Little Prince - Antoine de Saint-Exupery (1943)
5. Man's Fate - Andre Malraux (1933)
6. Journey to the End of the Night Louis-Ferdinand Celine (1932)
7. Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck (1939)
8. Fow Whom the Bell Tolls - Ernest Hemingway (1940)
9. Wanderer - Henri Alain-Fournier (1913)
10. L'ECUME DES JOURS - Boris Vian (1947)
11. The Second Sex - Simone de Beauvoir (1940)
12. Waiting for Godot - Samuel Beckett (1953)
13. Being and Nothingness - Jean-Paul Sartre (1943)
14. The Name of the Rose - Umberto Eco (1981)
15. The Gulag Archipelago - Alexandre Solzhenitsyn (1873)
16. PAROLES - Jacques Prevert (1946)
17. ALCOOLS - Guillaume Apollinaire (1913)
18. The Blue Lotus (The Adventures of Tintin) - Herge (1936)
19. Diary of a Young Girl - Anne Frank
20. TRISTES TROPIQUES - Claude Levi-Strauss (1955)
21. Brave New World - Aldous Huxley (1932)
22. 1984 - George Orwell (1948)
23. ASTERIX LE GAULOIS - Goscinny et Uderzo (1959)
24. The Bald Soprano - Eugene Ionesco (1954)
25. Three Contributions to the Theory of Sex - Sigmund Freud (1905)
26. L'OEUVRE AU NOIR - Marguerite Yourcenar (1968)
27. Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov (1958)
28. Ulysses - James Joyce (1922)
29. The Tartar Steppe - Dino Buzzati (1940)
30. The Counterfeiters - Andre Gide (1925)
31. Horseman on the Roof - Jean Giono (1951)
32. BELLE DU SEIGNEUR - Albert Cohen (1968)
33. Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez (1967)
34. The Sound and the Fury - William Faulkner (1929)
35. THERESE DESQUEYROUX - François Mauriac (1927)
36. Zazie in the Metro - Raymond Queneau (1959)
37. LA CONFUSION DES SENTIMENTS - Stephan Zweig (1926)
38. Gone with the Wind- Margarett Mitchell - (1936)
39. Lady Chatterley's Lover - David-Herbert Lawrence (1928)
40. The Magic Mountain - Thomas Mann (1924)
41. BONJOUR TRISTESSE - Francoise SAGAN (1993)
42. LE SILENCE DE LA MER - Vercors
43. Life: A User's Manual -Georges Perec (1978)
44. The Hound of the Baskervilles - Arthur Conan Doyle (1902)
45. Under the Satan's Sun - Georges Bernanos (1926)
46. The Great Gatsby - Francis Scott Fitzgerald (1967)
47. The Joke - Milan Kundera (1967)
48. Contempt - Alberto Moravia (1954)
49. The Murder of Roger Ackroyd - Agatha Christie (1926)
50. Nadja - Andre Breton (1928)
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Posted by Michael Sympson on 2/9/2001, 0:51:41, in reply to "Best books of 20th century according to the French"
First I went through the list by nationality; I read aloud, and my girlfriend giggled away - the French really think
they are the cream on the cake, donÕt they? Then I read the name of Agatha Christy - purely by accident.
Gotta be kidding. Or maybe you got into the wrong list ...?
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Posted by Michael Sympson on 2/9/2001, 19:13:08, in reply to "Best books of 20th century according to the French"
after a second look and a nightÕs sleep - Ôtis still ridiculous listing - what criteria could possibly bring all
these names together in one and the same category?
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Posted by Lale on 3/9/2001, 0:05:25, in reply to "Re: Best books of 20th century according to the French"
We (me and hubby) think that the people surveyed were
1. given a list to choose from
2. could pick only one work for each author.
They all know Camus' L'etranger by heart. They read it in school. The same goes for most of the other books.
Familiarity makes it easy to choose, I suppose. I personally think that it is a great book too, so I am not
Agatha Christie, Asterix and Tintin are totally out of place. But a lot of good books are in there too. I would
have picked The Stranger, The Trial, Journey to the End of the Night Louis, The Name of the Rose, Nineteen
Eighty-four, Hundred Years of Solitude and The Great Gatsby.
Which books would be on your list of best books of the 20th century?
About the French thinking they are the cream on the cake: I can be convinced to agree with them, but then
again, I might be biased, I am addicted to their food and wine.
Since we have been talking about the Nobel prizes recently; I understand that it is no mesure, and I am aware
of the politics and the limitations, but I still think this might be a good place to state this: The French have
received it 12 times, Americans 9 times (and that?s counting Joseph Brodsky as well), Germans 8, English 7
(excluding four Irish: Seamus Heaney, Beckett, Yeats and Shaw), Italians 6 and so on.
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Re: Best books of 20th century according to the French
Posted by Lale on 3/9/2001, 2:53:12, in reply to "Re: Best books of 20th century according to the French"
I just checked the web site where I have found this list
(http://www.paris-premiere.fr/50livres/accueil5041.shtml), it says "les 50 livres du si.cle, élus par un coll.ge de
6000 lecteurs", i.e. "50 books of the century, chosen by 6000 readers".
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Posted by Michael Sympson on 3/9/2001, 6:54:20, in reply to "Re: Best books of 20th century according to the French"
My list would probably change every other week. The book I read and like is my favorite ... till I like an other
one. And the books I like most and forever are unfortunately not of this century - top of the list would be a
ladyÕs diary, the ÒPillowbookÓ by Sei Shonagon (Japanese, 10th century). So I would turn the other way and
rather make a list of books which absolutely NOT belong in a listing of good reads. But I am not a snob. Aunt
Agatha is just a plain bad writer, Chandler on the other hand, has his moments, even though they are not great
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Posted by Michael Sympson on 3/9/2001, 7:24:19, in reply to "Re: Best books of 20th century according to the French"
6000 readers? That is 3 times the required number for a ÒrepresentativeÓ poll. Alright - moving on ... .
: (http://www.paris-premiere.fr/50livres/accueil5041.shtml),
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Posted by Lale on 4/9/2001, 22:39:35, in reply to "Re: Best books of 20th century according to the French"
We should remember this when we come to compiling a Japanese list.
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Posted by Michael Sympson on 4/9/2001, 23:17:18, in reply to "Re: Best books of 20th century according to the French"
You should find some expert on Spanish and Latin-American literature. I really missed this on your page.
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Posted by Lale on 5/9/2001, 2:11:12, in reply to "Re: Best books of 20th century according to the French"
Yes, absolutely. We'll have a Spanish language page. We have a contributor (besides the rest of us here) who
is from Mexico, Guillermo, and he promised to help out. I am almost done with the Irish list. Then I will start
working on Spanish language and Italian.
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