wreier commented on…
The Radcliffe Publishing Course's "100 Best Novels of the 20th Century"
This is just one person's humble opinion, but... — 2 years ago
...do you really think Dashiell Hammett and Ayn Rand are better than Samuel Beckett? The truth now! And shouldn’t you have called this the best novels written in English? Otherwise where’s Proust and Kafka and Celine and Heinrich Böll and Tagore and Borges and Gabriel Garcia Marquez and I.B. Singer and Rilke (though I’m not sure whether to call “The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge” a novel) and Boris Vian and Solzhenitsyn and Mahfouz and probably five or six hundred or a thousand other non-Anglophone writers whose sandals Updike and Rand and Heller aren’t fit to hold even in translation? (I know, there’s Things Fall Apart…)
Please fix this before someone is seriously misled.
Comments
ggchickapee
Portland
Hmmmmmmm . . .
I think if you want the list “fixed” you have to take it up with Radcliffe Publishing. :)
Slushmier
Denver
About the English thing
This list was a reponse to the Modern Library list, which was limited to books that were in English by the board that created that list. I can only assume that the the Radcliffe list used the same requirements, and that the lack of Kafka, Camus, Marquez, Allende, etc isn’t an oversight, but just part of the requirements of the list. Also, I do think Things Fall Apart was originally writen in English, which is why it could be on the list.
wreier