10 Membranes

Literary Lists

Over the holidays I visited Italy and as is my want read books around the country, one of which was Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose. A great book on so many levels its pointless to discuss here. Reading about the novel I cam across this list of the top 100 twentieth century novels - as voted for my the readers of Le Monde, which immediately put in mind of various English language versions such as those by Time, the BBC and the Telegraph amongst many others. And ye Gods does the difference, or differance if you are Jacques Derrida, jump out. One would expect a certain amount of linguistic bias but firstly it springs to mind how completely myopic English speakers are, and then how fairly myopic French speakers are. Myopic mainly because they consider the best English writer to be Aldous Huxley. There is much to say on the English entries in the Le Monde list, not least to note the American bias and the acceptance of Irish writing, but also the curious English selections. Orwell at least seems to rate fairly consistently. At first I was taken back by Camus’ The Stranger grabbing the top spot but on reflection this is the perfect novel to epitomise the twentieth century, short, existential, clever, whiffs of (post) colonial angst, emotional degradation, cool, harsh and knowing. Not only is the Le Monde list haut lettres but in contrast to the English list it’s extremely philosophical: impossible to imagine that the equivalents or even the originals of Sartre, Barthes and Foucault would make it into the top 50 in the Anglo-Saxon world, although I think their inclusion is more than just. Not a full like for like comparison but a constructive exercise in comparable national literary sensibility.