Ah, the irresistible lure of the list -- and novels in translation since 1900 ?
Sounds promising.
It's Jeffrey St. Clair and Alexander Cockburn who offer up their personal (and ranked) 100 Best Novels, in Translation, Since 1900 at CounterPunch. A couple of odd limitations here: they: "limited each writer to one entry" (apparently because: "otherwise, novels by Georges Simenon and Roberto Bolaño might have dominated the list") -- and they each had: "unlimited preemptory challenges to be invoked against writers we hated. Thus no: Gunter Grass or Michel Houellebecq."
There are a few slips -- misattributed languages, misspelled names ('Steig Larsson') -- and it's an odd mix of greatest-hits and very personal choices; still, one could do (much) worse.
I've read a whole lot of these (I didn't count, but probably haven't missed more than a dozen or so) -- though most of them (classics, by and large) long before I started the site, so the number under review at the complete review is considerably smaller. Those would be:
It's Jeffrey St. Clair and Alexander Cockburn who offer up their personal (and ranked) 100 Best Novels, in Translation, Since 1900 at CounterPunch. A couple of odd limitations here: they: "limited each writer to one entry" (apparently because: "otherwise, novels by Georges Simenon and Roberto Bolaño might have dominated the list") -- and they each had: "unlimited preemptory challenges to be invoked against writers we hated. Thus no: Gunter Grass or Michel Houellebecq."
There are a few slips -- misattributed languages, misspelled names ('Steig Larsson') -- and it's an odd mix of greatest-hits and very personal choices; still, one could do (much) worse.
I've read a whole lot of these (I didn't count, but probably haven't missed more than a dozen or so) -- though most of them (classics, by and large) long before I started the site, so the number under review at the complete review is considerably smaller. Those would be:
- 10. The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle by Murakami Haruki
- 15. The Death of Virgil by Hermann Broch
- 17. My Name is Red by Orhan Pamuk
- 20. The Savage Detectives by Roberto Bolaño
- 28. The Feast of the Goat by Mario Vargas Llosa
- 31. Fatelessness by Kertész Imre
- 33. Snow Country by Yasunari Kawabata
- 47. Journey by Moonlight by Szerb Antal
- 49. Bonjour Tristesse by Françoise Sagan
- 51. Life: A User's Manual by Georges Perec
- 57. The Tartar Steppe by Dino Buzatti
- 69. Pedro Páramo by Juan Rulfo
- 71. The Blind Owl by Sadegh Hedayat
- 75. The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson
- 82. The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafón
- 89. Death and the Penguin by Andrey Kurkov
- 91. The Discovery of Heaven by Harry Mulisch
- 94. Embers by Márai Sándor