[throwforfeds]

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.

[zwaps]

Honestly, American lists are the same. Every decent English speaking author, plus some selections of other languages.

Any national worlds book list, and this explicitly includes US and UK lists, are heavily skewed and I mean ridiculously so

[lo_zamoyski]

This is one of the criticisms[0] of at least some Great Books curricula. The skew tends too strongly towards the Anglo-American and the “canon” is too rigidly held.

[0] https://theimaginativeconservative.org/2023/05/great-books-e...

[throwforfeds]

Oh for sure, agreed. These lists do well to drive traffic and sell things, but I never put much weight in them.

[Bayart]

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.

[mmooss]

It's interesting Nabakov is thought of as American. Yes, an American citizen beginning age ~46 (in 1945) but born in Russia, wrote in multiple languages, lived much of life in Europe.

[Bayart]

I write him down as American because that's his elective nation, although he's quintessentially European.

After all you might not chose where you live, but how you live and where you die can be up to you. And as far as I can I try to respect what people chose for themselves.

[fmajid]

Yep, I had never heard of Derrida until I read a mention of him in an American Physics journal of all places.

[LucasOe]

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.