What a strange list. Many books I'd never expect to be listed, others I'd expect to be listed are missing. So I looked up the background and indeed it's based on strange methodology, citing wikipedia: "Starting from a preliminary list of 200 titles created by bookshops and journalists, 17,000 French participants responded to the question, "Which books have stuck in your mind?" (Quels livres sont restés dans votre mémoire?"
> I find this other list more deserving of this title
How is a list spanning over the last 40 centuries deserving of the tile "Books of the Century by Le Monde"?
Why would the "Epic of Gilgamesh" or the "Book of Job" be on a list of 20th century books?
> ... it starts with one of my favorite.
From that same Wikipedia page: “The books selected by this process and listed here are not ranked or categorized in any way;”
What would be interesting is to cross reference this list with an Anglophone one and pull out the writers that are big in France but almost unknown amongst the public in America. Céline is definitely one such example, I think.
I personally think that the lifetime of the author is a bit odd, since it reduces the rewards towards those who are old or infirm. I agree the length is way too long though.
Remember that Disney was a major factor in lobbying for the longer copyright terms, and their 1959 film Sleeping Beauty was made 80 years after Tchaikovsky's ballet (a major source for the Film's soundtrack).
If we thus take 79 years as our measuring stick (And I still think that's a bit too long) 18 more books from the list would be in the public domain.
Maybe if we take 25 as a typical beginning of career and 80 as a typical date of death for someone who lives to 25 we could settle on 55 years? That would leave only 13 items on the list as still under copyright, and I believe that includes all works by living authors too.
The Stranger at #1 sort of tells me everything I need to know about the list. It's a fine book, and I ended up liking it a lot more when I went back and re-read it in French many years later, but #1 of the 20th century. Yeah, not even close.
I know this is primarily a Francophone list, but not having Toni Morrison or Cormac McCarthy or so many of the great Latin American authors on it makes me wonder how much makes it into French via translation.
Cormac McCarthy is decently translated (for having read him in both English and French) and is well known.
But for the average French litterati, American literature harks back to Hemingway, Steinbeck, Salinger, Burroughs, Capote, Nabokov and so on much before McCarthy.
Toni Morrison isn't well known here yet, if only because her writing is embedded with Afro-American reality which is off-phase with Europe culture. For the same reason you'd hardly hear about Ralph Ellison in France if you're not in circles aware of post-colonial African diaspora writing.
To the same token, French authors who make it across the Atlantic aren't always the most valued here.
I know it's subjective, but personally I think Nausea by Sartre is the much better "The Stranger", and it always saddens me a bit to see Camus so high up on every list while missing Sartre.
Standard Ebooks doesn’t produce graphic novels, so Asterix, Tintin, etc. are excluded. And although SE does produce collections of short works like essays and poetry, it does so in a way that doesn’t usually map one‐to‐one to existing published collections, which is probably why essays and poems have been excluded from this list.
The reading ease algorithm we use is the Flesh-Kincaid algorithm, which works pretty well for regular prose books but clearly fails very badly on avant-garde prose like Ulysses or As I Lay Dying.
It's a decent list of what readers in France think of as the books to read from the 20th c., in that it holds value. Including to myself, a French citizen with odd tastes.
The general debate on what's the objective list doesn't hold weight, and I'd rather see what each corner of the world values.
I'm surprised to see Brave New World amongst these. The idea it presents is indeed powerful and influential, but for such a smart guy it comes across stilted and craftless. Try reading it now and it just doesn't hold up to more nuanced fiction.
About IP. It's 70 years after the death of the author in France, so Camus (car crash in 1960) books will be PD in 2030.
There is an exception for people who lost live from war (+30 years), so 2044 is the year the elevate to PD for "Le petit prince".
I don't understand that right is attached to local legislation. Like you will have access to these book before we do because of the local legislation of USA? That is a bit crazy.
Kinda ironic that standardebooks.org refuses non-English books but will happily promote a French ranking... I mean none of those books are actually available on standardebooks.org - at least not in their original French version.
Kafka at number 3? Meh. It was incredibly dull and tiresome IMHO. I understand it's supposed to be written like a fever dream but to what end? It was simply tedious and difficult to follow.
Then again I also hated the episode of The Sopranos which has an extremely long dream sequence.
> Starting from a preliminary list of 200 titles created by bookshops and journalists, 17,000 French participants responded to the question, "Which books have stuck in your mind?" (Quels livres sont restés dans votre mémoire?) As Le Monde journalist Josyane Savigneau aptly clarified in her article, the list is not meant to encompass the 100 most distinguished French literary works of the 20th century, but rather to reflect the emotional connections of the French populace.[1]
Limiting the poll to 200 books (if I'm understanding it right... the cited le monde page is paywalled), selected by the elite French-literati, who then polled sub-elite French-literati, is a questionable basis for a list of "books of the century", even in France. Numbers of votes for each book would've been nice, to see how unanimous the top selections were.
8/100, in any language, are from the last third of the century (after 1967). Of those, 4 are well-known in North America (Styron, Eco, Rushdie, Solzhenitsyn). Of those, only two, Styron and Rushdie, are originally in English.
The most recent -en- works prior to those two were Kerouac in 1957 and then Nabokov and Tolkien in 1955.
Given the chronological bias, and few postwar -en- works probably due to distribution and translation challenges, it's pointless to mention all of the American and even British classics they left out from later in the 20th century. English-language books from the 80s and 90s, particularly science fiction, might have barely reached mainstream French consciousness in 1999.
Two other lists I know of address the same topic. Modern Library put together in 1999 a list of the 100 best novels and 100 best non-fiction books [1]. (The best novel was Ulysses.) Time Magazine published in 2005 a list of the best 100 English-language novels published since 1923. [2]
34 comments
[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 55.4 ms ] threadMakes more sense like that.
If only because it's less french oriented, but also maybe because it starts with one of my favorite.
How is a list spanning over the last 40 centuries deserving of the tile "Books of the Century by Le Monde"? Why would the "Epic of Gilgamesh" or the "Book of Job" be on a list of 20th century books?
> ... it starts with one of my favorite.
From that same Wikipedia page: “The books selected by this process and listed here are not ranked or categorized in any way;”
The list is sorted by authors' name.
I'm not sure I saw any living authors there. I see no reason why copyright should extend beyond the lifetime of the author.
(Author of Midnight’s children)
Remember that Disney was a major factor in lobbying for the longer copyright terms, and their 1959 film Sleeping Beauty was made 80 years after Tchaikovsky's ballet (a major source for the Film's soundtrack).
If we thus take 79 years as our measuring stick (And I still think that's a bit too long) 18 more books from the list would be in the public domain.
I know this is primarily a Francophone list, but not having Toni Morrison or Cormac McCarthy or so many of the great Latin American authors on it makes me wonder how much makes it into French via translation.
To the same token, French authors who make it across the Atlantic aren't always the most valued here.
Don't want to know what difficult is
If not then it's like being forced to untangle the mind of a twisted person. Finally a job for the LLM's that we can all be thankful for outsourcing.
The general debate on what's the objective list doesn't hold weight, and I'd rather see what each corner of the world values.
I don't understand that right is attached to local legislation. Like you will have access to these book before we do because of the local legislation of USA? That is a bit crazy.
The Wonderful Adventures of Nils by Selma Lagerlöf
what wonderful surprises, i thought these amazing books were forgotten and lost
Then again I also hated the episode of The Sopranos which has an extremely long dream sequence.
But very Eurocentric.
Where are Kalidas , Mahfouz , Soyinka or the Mahabharata?
Limiting the poll to 200 books (if I'm understanding it right... the cited le monde page is paywalled), selected by the elite French-literati, who then polled sub-elite French-literati, is a questionable basis for a list of "books of the century", even in France. Numbers of votes for each book would've been nice, to see how unanimous the top selections were.
8/100, in any language, are from the last third of the century (after 1967). Of those, 4 are well-known in North America (Styron, Eco, Rushdie, Solzhenitsyn). Of those, only two, Styron and Rushdie, are originally in English.
The most recent -en- works prior to those two were Kerouac in 1957 and then Nabokov and Tolkien in 1955.
Given the chronological bias, and few postwar -en- works probably due to distribution and translation challenges, it's pointless to mention all of the American and even British classics they left out from later in the 20th century. English-language books from the 80s and 90s, particularly science fiction, might have barely reached mainstream French consciousness in 1999.1. https://sites.prh.com/modern-library-top-100?ref=PRHDCE40587....
2. https://entertainment.time.com/2005/10/16/all-time-100-novel...