Last weekend, I finished the second volume in Antonio Scurati’s masterful pentalogy based on the life of Mussolini. The sequel to the celebrated M. Son of the Century hasn’t been translated to English yet, it seems (I read it in German; the rough translation of the title would be M. The Providential Man) - I really hope this gets remediated soon as it is a chilling depiction of both the consolidation of power of the fascist regime (totalitarianism effected not by revolution but by the thousand cuts of legislative lawfare) and the subjugation of rebellious Libya through poison gas and concentration camps. The prose is superb. At the same time, it’s hard to imagine a non-Italian covering this topic with such bravura.

Also over the weekend, I watched the latest episode of the Life on Books podcast (check out their YouTube channel); this time, the two New Englanders discussed difficult books, and whether you should read them. Now, I don’t believe there should be any “should” with respect to reading. Reading should not be a chore, nor the next regimen in your self-improvement routine. Life is too short for any of that. But the video did touch a nerve - don’t people engage in reading global literature (or, as it’s often labelled, “translated literature”, as if it were some exotic and slightly suspicious fare like “tropical fruit”) for similar reasons as they read difficult English-language books? And why do I like to read global literature, after all? Doesn’t the ebb and flow of English new releases offer enough variety? This Substack article and its twin, the YouTube video I shot a couple of days ago, are result of these musings.

Trivial Reasons

Some reasons why I read global literature are trivial. I’ll cover them quickly.

First, my background. I’m Portuguese. I was born and raised in Luxembourg, where I learnt to speak French, German and English fluently. I studied in French-speaking Switzerland. I now live in Germany. My daily work is mostly conducted in English. I took some basic Mandarin courses a few ago. I’ve therefore always viewed literature, and culture more broadly, through a global prism.

The second point is utilitarian. Taking an interest in global culture, in global literature, gives you an edge when you work in a global context. Mentioning a work of literature you liked from the country of your colleague, or your client, is an easy way to establish rapport. With supply chains for even the simplest product spanning the globe nowadays, it’s not an advantage to be sneered at.

Literary Reasons

But global literature also shapes my personal views on Literature with a capital L overall. When I compare my personal reading preferences, my reading journey (to use a bookfluencer term) to those reflected here on Substack, on YouTube, or on other social media (and, indeed, also in traditional media, where they still cover books), I do notice different approaches to reading. Let me try to cluster them into a set of axes.

Enjoyment vs Intellectual Stimulation

Most people read primarily for enjoyment, if they read at all. There is nothing reprehensible with this whatsoever. As your career progresses, as you build a family, as you care for your kids or elderly relatives, time because an ever more precious good. Many just want to read a good book that allows them to wind down after a tiresome day. For some, that book might be the latest Nordic noir, the next instalment in a shelf-filling fantasy series, or a fast-paced thriller. For others, it could be a spicy romantasy they discovered on TikTok, or a cosy mystery set in a cat café. And there’s nothing wrong with reading any of these. On the contrary - dismissing these readers for reading what they enjoy smacks of snobbishness and elitism. Let people read A Court of Thorns and Roses or Dungeon Crawler Carl; these are the readers that allow publishers to flourish and continue to devote at least some resources to more high-brow titles (and, indeed, to translated works). At least they’re not wasting their time with Amazon Prime’s Rings of Power TV series, or with the latest Assassin’s Creed video game.

Other people see reading as an intellectual pursuit. So do I. Reading challenging books, books from other cultures, “books in translation” is immensely stimulating. I can admire a beautiful turn of phrase, or that perfect but unexpected metaphor, in the same way I sit before a Rembrandt or listen in rapture to Scriabin’s Piano Concerto (a woefully underplayed work!). Scurati’s Mussolini books not only put me into the minds of monsters like Mussolini or Rodolfo Graziani (the butcher of Libya); they also allow me to learn more about Italian fascism, colonialism, and indeed the erosion of political institutions. A work like the highly experimental The Dictionary of the Khazars by the Serbian author Milorad Pavić challenges the very concept of what a novel is. Granted, English-language literature has produced its own crop of literary masterpieces and experimental solitaires - still, it is difficult to imagine figures like Pavić or Jorge Luis Borges or Italo Calvino emerging in a purely Anglo-Saxon context.

The Familiar vs the Unexpected

There’s comfort in the familiar. The discourse on works of romantasy (as far as it crosses my path, online) circles around common tropes, world building, levels of spiciness. Quality is measured in terms of execution, not exploration beyond the genre’s conventions. Other genres, too, thrive in the shade of their towering totems - fantasy is mapped against its lodestars, Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings and George R.R. Martin’s unfinished A Song of Ice and Fire saga. Contemporary literary fiction often follows axioms set by self-similar MFA programs. There is no cabal that enforces this parochialism, no “woke” publishers tilting the scales. It’s the silent majority of readers that revels in reading works that sound familiar to books they liked. It’s capitalism in its glorious manifestation.

On the fringes live the books for the curious. Books that do something different. Authors that pioneered new ways to write. Sometimes, whole literary movements that never crossed the border. Again, Anglo-Saxon literature has created its fair share of all of these. Jane Austen basically invented the romance genre; Virginia Woolf spearheaded modernism. But global literature offers so many more gems for the literary explorer! The very beginnings of poetry, for instance, by the first author we know by name: the high priestess Enheduanna (lived c. 2300 BC in Sumerian Uruk, long before Homer), who wrote hymns to the goddess Inanna that were still admired a millennium later by the scribes of Babylon and Assyria who wrote them down on the clay tablets that survived into the present. Or the indulgent Hungarian movement of “neo-frivolism”, exemplified by the madcap novel The Pendragon Legend by Antal Szerb, a fun and highly innovative parody of both the gothic and the detective novel, with Rosicrucians thrown in for good measure; written in the early 1930s, it eschews the seriousness of modernism and prefigures the playfulness of post-modernism by several decades.

Depth vs Breadth

Intellectual stimulation and curiosity can both be satisfied by a dive into the depths of the English or Western Canon. Indeed, many are the readers that explore the classics for exactly those reasons. The most ambitious may even embark on multi-year reading plans through the Western Canon, from Homer to Hemingway. I wish them luck, of course, especially to those with very philosophy-heavy reading plans - the short but incomprehensible text by Immanuel Kant we read in secondary school (i.e. when I was 16-17 years old) has cured me of any desire to explore more philosophy.

Taking a global perspective on literature prioritises breadth over depth. Instead of dipping into one canon, my playground are all the canons. I might not have Dickens under my belt (I read part of Oliver Twist in secondary school, and disliked it with a passion that has not yet abated) but I’ve read some Eça de Queirós (the most celebrated Portuguese 19th century author). I’ve skirted around John Updike, but I’ve read the highly poetic Brazilian author Raduan Nassar’s Lavoura arcaica. Virgil’s Aeneid glowers at me from my bookshelf (“soon, soon”, I tell it) but the abridged Mahabharata lives in my memory. Broadening one’s horizon isn’t limited to classic literature, by the way. Science fiction is enriched by Liu Cixin’s pessimistic Three Body Problem, or indeed Li Hongwei’s 国王与抒情诗 (roughly The King and Lyric Poetry; it’s untranslated into English as far as I can see; I read the French translation, weirdly and inelegantly called Pékin 2050). Journalism and history shine in the works of the Belgian David van Reybrouck (Congo: The Epic Story of a People and Revolusi: Indonesia and the Birth of the Modern World). There is something eminently humbling about taking a global approach to reading. While one might conceivably be able to read a good chunk of the works that constitute the Western Canon (however it is defined; the French and the English will disagree on how many French or British authors should make the cut, for instance), such an endeavour is manifestly impossible if one considers all the literatures of the world. And somehow, that is a soothing thought.

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Continuity vs Contrast

Why do people read the Western Canon? One reason, surely, is to explore the evolution of thought, of literary movements, the giants the shoulders of which current literature stands on. There’s a thread that links Homer’s Odyssey to Dante’s Divine Comedy to Tennyson to James Joyce’s Ulysses. Herman Meville’s Moby-Dick (a stunning, electric work) has influenced Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea and Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian, and countless other works. Identifying such influences is certainly one of the great joys of exploring the Canon. Casting a wider net, however, can unveil even richer seams of influence. The influence of Homer’s epics, for instance, is manifest in Portugal’s national epic, The Lusiads by Luís Vaz de Camões, in modern Greece’s most famous author Nikos Kazantzakis’s Odyssey (a continuation of Odysseus’s travels), and in the Caribbean poet Derek Walcott’s modern epic Omeros.

Such continuity can also be found in other literatures, of course. Sayaka Murata’s recent bestseller Convenience Store Woman explores alienation from society in a similar, though much less visceral way than Osamu Dazai’s No Longer Human (maybe the bleakest novel I’ve ever read). But what global literature excels at uncovering is not continuity, but contrast. Many Western authors have looked at patriarchal systems from a female perspective, but only Khadija Mastur, an author writing in Urdu, has tackled it from the claustrophobic perspective of The Women’s Courtyard - a novel in which no scene is depicted outside such a courtyard. Whole pillars of literature follow different rules: while Western European tragedy doffs its hat to either Shakespeare or the ancient Greek dramatists, Sanskrit drama focused on moods and spiritual elevation instead of plot or morals (Kalidasa’s very poetic The Recognition of Shankuntala is considered the masterpiece of Sanskrit drama); Japanese Nō and Kabuki drama traditions follow their very own rules.

What will it mean to be well-read in the 22nd century?

My final musings look into the future. The woolly Western Canon not only reflects the influences of major Western authors upon each other. It also uncannily maps onto economic power within the West (Europe and its daughter cultures). The Greeks and Romans (and the Bible) set the foundation; following the so-called “dark ages” (with a nod to the Vikings via the Icelandic sagas), the canon starts to oscillate mostly between English, French and German literatures, reflecting the dominant powers on the continent. Golden Age Spain contributes Cervantes’s Don Quixote and, if the canoniser is generous, some of the dramatists such as Lope de Vega; the Iberian peninsula is then forgotten. Italy is remembered via Dante and some of its Renaissance authors, but it, too, gets forgotten. Greece never reappears; the Eastern European literatures are mostly ignored too. Russia is included during the height of its autocracy, the 19th century, via Tolstoy, Dostoevsky and a few others - but no earlier Russian literature is ever considered. America, finally, makes a triumphant entrance into the canon with Melville, Twain and Poe, and never leaves the stage (South America is allowed a peek - magical realism was too influential to ignore). Reading the Western Canon is thus often an exercise of reading the Great Powers.

So who will the Great Powers of the coming century be? How will this influence the canon? What will it mean to be well-read a century from now? For me, it’s clear that clinging to the Western Canon as pinnacle of literary culture won’t fly in a world where China, India, to some degree South East Asia, the Arab world and Africa are much more preeminent. The economic rise of Japan started challenging the concept decades ago. Indeed, many Japanese authors, such as Mishima, Tanizaki, Kawabata or Oe are well regarded in “the West” nowadays, while contemporary Japanese writers command large audiences, from literary darling Haruki Murakami to the recently deceased mystery-writer Keigo Higashino, trendy authors like the aforementioned Sayaka Murata, or the authors of a whole new genre of cozy mysteries involving cats, libraries, cafés, or all three of them. More recently, Korean literature has made forays into the West (Han Kang’s Nobel Prize may serve as the watershed for Korean literature’s expansion).

China and India, however, will be the nations that potentially revolutionise how we think about the Canon. Both look back to millennia of literary production that flourished largely shielded from outside influences. Both have produced scores of literary masterpieces, of which they are proud. It is easy to imagine a world where a visitor to Beijing or Delhi will not be considered “well-read” if they have no notion of the four Chinese classic novels (such as Luo Guanzhong’s Romance of the Three Kingdoms, or - my favourite novel overall, across all languages - Cao Xueqin’s Dream of the Red Chamber) or the great Indian epics (The Mahabharata and The Ramayana). Taking this idea further, the great works of Arabic, Persian and Turkish literature will certainly command more prestige.

Finally, Africa. I recently came across an anthology of African poetry (translated into French) - uniquely, it included poems originally written not only in French, English and Portuguese (the language of the most “successful” colonisers), but also poetry in Wolof, Swahili, Amharic, Somali, Kinyarwanda, Sotho, Hausa, Igbo and other African languages. Maybe, in 2126, knowledge of these poems will be a hallmark of a well-read person.

(NB: I’ve marked authors and works I’ve read and recommend in bold. Unbolded works have either not been read by me yet, or are not recommended.)

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As a companion piece to this article, here’s my video on the same subject - as usual, a more off-the-cuff take on the same issue:

One of the advantages of getting old is the ability to appreciate quiet holidays. In the past, I’d have been sprinting from monument to architectural landmark, from train to bus to obscurely named subway station, from trendy café to local specialty restaurant with menus solely in Korean. In 2026, two weeks at my parents’ vacation house in Portugal, with them, my sister and brother-in-law and their two dogs, and a collection of books I’d lugged from Germany felt like bliss itself.

And luckily my pick of holiday reads proved to be an excellent one.

W.G. Sebald - Die Ringe des Saturn (The Rings of Saturn)

Sebald seems to be more popular in the anglosphere than in Germany itself, despite him having won several literary prizes. Maybe Susan Sontag’s endorsement of his work had something to do with that. This very fact made me curious.

“The Rings of Saturn”, published in 1995, doesn’t fit neatly into any literary genre. In English, it’s sold as a novel, but in the original German, it’s labeled everything but: the subtitle calls it Eine englische Wallfahrt - “an English pilgrimage”; the back of the book attempts “ein Reisebericht” - a travelogue. Maybe it could be called a collage (the various black-and-white photos strewn through the text certainly fit the concept), or indeed a series of Wikipedia rabbit-holes - the various digressions the narrator’s tale takes during his hiking through Suffolk (from the life of Joseph Conrad to the Chinese empress dowager Cixi to various eccentrics living in Suffolk) certainly jive with the that contemporary pastime.

Ultimately, The Rings of Saturn is a book about decay, about the decline and fall - of Suffolk’s ancient manor houses, of the Qing Empire, of our own lives with all their individualities and quirks. It’s beautifully written, wistful, indulgent - and it made me want to read more Sebald!

Yu Hua - Chronicle of a Blood Merchant

Contemporary Chinese novels are sometimes criticised for their threadbare character development. I’m not sure whether that’s due to a translation issue, or a stylistic choice by many Chinese authors. Fortunately, that doesn’t hold true for Yu Hua’s incredibly moving portrayal of Xu Sanguan, the main protagonist of Chronicle of a Blood Merchant. Sometimes charming, sometimes mean, now cowardly, later brave, Xu Sanguan can be thoroughly unlikeable, just before doing an act of unspeakable tenderness. A father of three, he discovers that his eldest son is not his own. Despite the anger at his wife, he keeps the family together, and (despite some acts of petty cruelty) raises all sons equally. All around him, Chinese history unfolds: the Great Leap Forward and its madcap projects, the resulting famine that sweeps through their hometown, the Cultural Revolution. From time to time, to make ends meet, Xu Sanguan sells his blood at a local blood bank. What starts as a way to earn an extra yuan soon becomes a matter of life and death.

Yu Hua has produced one of the most poignant novels I’ve read, Chinese or not. Xu Sanguan, for all his faults, is intensely human. Caught in the maelstrom of history, his only focus, the only thing he ultimately can influence is the survival of his own family.

Racine - Iphigénie (Iphigenia)

The Odyssey was still on my mind (I read the Fitzgerald translation of Homer’s epic in early July and watched the Nolan movie right before my trip to Portugal), so I decided to dip into the part of Trojan War story that’s only briefly alluded to in the myth: Agamemnon’s sacrifice of his daughter Iphigenia in order to get good winds to sail to Troy (and yes, that scene is reminiscent of the sacrifice of Shirin to the Lord of Light by her father Stannis Baratheon in the Game of Thrones TV series - honi soit qui mal y pense).

The French tragedian Racine had to contend with his own Agamemnon, his patron Louis XIV, the Sun King. And so his Agamemnon is torn, tries to save his daughter, yet feels the pull and burden of his duty as king of the Greeks. Racine introduced a twist to the ancient story to preserve the honour of Agamemnon, and was celebrated for it (Iphigenia was one of his most popular plays at the time), but at the cost of the real tragedy he could have depicted. An interesting, well-written (like all of Racine so far) but ultimately slightly unsatisfactory read.

Ryszard Kapuściński - Another Day of Life

If a Polish journalist active in the 1970s and 1980s is available in the Penguin Modern Classics line, not with one but with several books, he must have been one damn good journalist. Given my “Read Poland in 2026” reading project (a very simple one: read at least one book by a Polish author each quarter of 2026) I had taken two Kapuścińskis with me, one about the fall of the Iranian Shah (because: topical) and this one: Another Day of Life, about the completely forgotten descent into civil war of the African nation of Angola on the cusp of its independence from Portugal - a story swept under the carpet of Portugal’s own glorious carnation revolution, despite the impact it had on the thousands of its own soldiers sent to a pointless colonial war, the hundreds of thousands of Portuguese colonists who fled back to the motherland and, of course, millions of Angolans.

Straight on page 1 it becomes clear why Kapuściński was inducted into the Penguin line: his quicksilver prose and utterly engaging style makes journalism read like a James Bond novel. Arriving in Luanda (the Angolan capital) when every other journalist has left it, his depiction of the slow emptying of the white part of the city, the accumulation of wooden boxes on streets and avenues (large boxes for the rich Portuguese, small ramshackle ones for the poorer ones), then the disappearance of these boxes as they get loaded onto ships, and the transformation of white Luanda into a ghost town is one of the most magisterial description of such an exodus I’ve ever read. But Kapuściński doesn’t stay hidden in his hotel. Itching to see the front, he uses his contacts to the (Communist) MPLA party which controls Luanda to travel to the parts of the country where the fighting is happening in scenes reminiscent of Mad Max. If only we had more Kapuścińskis today!

Antal Szerb - The Pendragon Legend

Books like Szerb’s delightful The Pendragon Legend prove, once again, that the “smaller” European literary traditions have produced some of the most interesting works of world literature. Published in 1934 - truly not a year one would except to be associated with delight - The Pendragon Legend is maybe the antithesis of the modernist novel à la Joyce and Woolf. Szerb riffs on the Sherlock Holmes-style detective novel (a heritage plot involves the Earl of Gwynedd, an Indiana-Jones-like Irishman, and a mysterious femme fatale), the gothic novel (an ancestor of the Earl may or may not be making appearances as a ghost; a Welsh village prophet promises doom for the Earl’s line) and, while he’s at it, the esoteric essay (the history of Rosicrucians is explored in ways that would have made Umberto Eco proud). At the centre of this mayhem: a bumbling Hungarian professor with a “Continental” penchant for beautiful women and a sardonic view of his British hosts.

Szerb (and indeed the Hungarian professor in the novel) called this “neo-frivolism”. And it is an utterly playful parody of the popular genre fiction of Szerb’s time. More than that, it feels utterly ahead of its time. Modernism had barely crawled out of his shell, and here was a Hungarian author experimenting with forms that would later define post-modernism? Szerb sadly died in a labour camp in 1945. Who knows what this amazing author could have produced in the second half of the 20th century!

Kalidasa - The Recognition of Shakuntala

Immensely satisfied with my reading during my two weeks of vacation, I still have a 3-hour flight back to Germany in front of me - and three hours seemed like the perfect timespan to read a play! Feeling brave, I went for the Indian poet Kalidasa’s masterpiece, The Recognition of Shakuntala, based on an episode of the Mahabharata which Kalidasa (who lived sometime during the resplendent Gupta Empire, probably) tweaked. At the centre of the play is the love story between king Dusyanta and Shakuntala (who lives in the forest with her foster father, a famous hermit). The king and Shakuntala fall in love during the first acts, but, due to a curse, the king forgets about her and doesn’t recognise her when she travels from the woods to his palace.

The pinnacle of Sanskrit drama, this play doesn’t follow Western traditions (be it Ancient Greek, be it Shakespearean) with regards to plot or structure. Instead, its anchor points are the mood of the play (here: an erotic undertone that is crystallised in eminently beautiful poetry) and spiritual elevation (allegorically achieved towards the end of the play - NB: all this is taken from the very helpful introduction by W.J. Johnson of the Oxford World Classics edition I read). Kalidasa mixes prose and poetry, and uses different linguistic registers (the king and the hermit speak elevated Sanskrit; Shakuntala more vernacular Prakrit; the servants use a more colloquial version of Prakrit). The end result (as far as can be glimpsed in translation) is strange and beautiful.

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In brief:

Overall, I can highly recommend almost all these books / plays (for Racine, I would probably rather suggest Andromaque or Bérénice, which I liked better than Iphigénie). If you prefer a more colloquial / rambling review of these books, I also did a YouTube video:

With the Fifa World Cup in full swing, I wondered: how many of the countries participating does my library cover? Can I find a book for each of them? Let’s find out!

(Note: in most cases, these books are yet-to-be-reads for me - look at this list not as a series of book recommendations, but rather as a collection of serendipitous finds while browsing a bookshop on a city trip.)

Group A

Mexico

One of the host countries of this World Cup, Mexico is of course a behemoth in Latin American literature. Juan Rulfo’s Pedro Páramo is a talismanic novel, Octávio Paz a celebrated poet, Carlos Fuentes a key novelist of the Latin American boom - his Terra Nostra, a maximalist magic realist chunker, was one of the strangest reading experiences I’ve had. But Mexican literature is so much more. Before Spanish, there was Nahuatl literature (I recommend looking out for anthologies of Aztec poetry). And literature in other languages than Spanish is still being written. The book I’ll highlight is therefore Natalia Toledo’s The Black Flower and other Zapotec Poems, a testimony to the continued vibrancy of Mexico’s myriad languages.

South Korea

After its conquest of TV drama, film and pop music, South Korea reached the pinnacle of literature with Han Kang’s win of the Nobel Prize in 2024. But there’s more to South Korean literature than The Vegetarian. Kim Un-su’s novel The Cabinet eviscerated South Korean society in a weird, manga-like fantasy. The recently issued Penguin Book of Korean Short Stories offers another entry point into this country that tries very hard to be neither Japan nor China. The weirdest-sounding one in my library might be Jung Young-Moon’s Vaseline Buddha, a novel that promises a goldfish named Kierkegaard, a swan attack in Versailles and a masturbating monkey. Only in South Korean literature!

Czechia

The home of of both Kafka and Kundera, Czechia has left its imprint on world literature. Karel Čapek’s play R.U.R. even coined the word robot. I’m going with a more contemporary work, however: Daniela Hodrová’s City of Torment, a trilogy about Prague recently published as a single volume in English.

South Africa

The “rainbow nation” has twelve official languages, yet it is fiendishly difficult to find books originally written in languages other than English. Even books in Afrikaans seem to be virtually unavailable; my library only contains Agaat, by Marlene van Niekerk. Alan Paton’s Cry, the Beloved Country is a recent addition of a local English canonical piece, courtesy of BookTube (check out the South African YouTuber Mike, at Riff Raff's Reading Renaissance). My pick for South Africa will be Damon Galgut’s The Promise, a novel I read a couple of years ago and absolutely adored. It tackles apartheid and its aftermath via a white family that made a promise to their black housekeeper - a story told in a virtuoso sequence of varying points of view.

Group B

Canada

Canada, another host country, flies under the literary radar. Its English-language authors are part of the US-American literary scene; the smaller French-language literature seems to look inward, sticking to Quebec. It has, of course, celebrated masterpieces, from Anne of Green Gables (by Lucy Maud Montgomery) via Gabrielle Roy’s Bonheur d’occasion (The Tin Flute) to Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale and Alice Munro’s short stories [NB: the first and third are missing in my library] - and these are only those by female authors. But let’s stay with the women for once. My pick is Anne Carson’s Nox. An accordeon-like collage of poetry and pictures, it marks Carson’s attempt to deal with the death of her brother.

Qatar

The first country where I have a gap in my library. Amazingly, there is a Wikipedia page on Qatari literature, with a prominent place (as in many Arab traditions) given to poetry - though the aptly named Qatari ibn al-Fuja’a, leader of a seventh-century sect, seems to have wielded the sword as swiftly as the qalam, if his nickname “Father of Death” is to be believed.

Switzerland

Another multi-lingual country that has left an imprint on the literatures of three languages. Personal favourites include Christian Kracht’s Imperium (German), Charles Ferdinand Ramuz’s La Grande Peur dans la Montagne (The Great Fear on the Mountain - French) and Fleur Jaeggy’s Proleterka (a Hemingway-like short novel in Italian). In view of the World Cup’s organisation in North America, my pick is L’Or (Sutter’s Gold) by Blaise Cendrars, a novel about the Swiss-American adventurer and businessman John Sutter, a prominent figure in the Californian Gold Rush.

Bosnia and Herzegovina

Who owns an author? What is a language? Nowhere are questions like these - basic questions of any budding librarian - more fraught with controversy than in the countries that emerged from the former Yugoslavia. Is Ivo Andrić, author of The Bridge on the Drina, to be considered a Bosnian author nowadays? A Serbian one? Both? Should his novel written in “Serbo-Croatian” be put together with Serbian-language or Croatian-language literature, or in its own separate (and unlikely to grow) section? More clearly associated with Bosnia and Herzegovian is Meša Selimović, another “Yugoslav” author with two famous novels under his belt, Death and the Dervish and this one: The Fortress, both a “recreation of Bosnian history” and “an exploration of the universal forces of human nature”. One gets the feeling that nothing less would feel adequate for a Bosnian literary masterpiece.

Group C

Brazil

A giant in football (or soccer, if you’re reading from North America), Brazil is also a colossus in literature - but a sleeping one. While geographically linked to Spanish-speaking Latin America, Brazilian literature is proudly idiosyncratic, self-sufficient, following its own path. Magical realism? Not here, please. Brazil is magical enough on its own. Nor does the country look back to Portugal, the colonial master it broke free from in 1822 in truly flamboyant fashion, by declaring itself an Empire, with the Portuguese heir to the throne as its Emperor. Brazil is Brazil. No concessions. It’s for you to discover it, not for it to advertise itself. Some of its canonical authors - Machado de Assis, Clarice Lispector - are finally gaining international prominence, decades after Spanish-speaking Latin America’s literary superstars. Others, like word-wizard Raduan Nassar (his Lavoura Arcaica / Ancient Tillage is a gem of the Portuguese language) remain little known. And the giant in this country of giants is littlest-known of all: João Guimarães Rosa, with his masterpiece Grande Sertão: Veredas (weirdly translated as The Devil to Pay in the Backlands). So far, I read the first page, stopped, wondered whether what I was reading was really Portuguese, and if so, from what century before or after the current time. It promised wonders, a literary Everest to climb, to suffer, to enjoy. Wonders to explore at a later, wiser, humbler age. Clarice Lispector, not a traditionalist by any standard, gushes in the book’s many blurbs: “I’ve never seen anything like this!” Indeed. This novel is Brazil.

Morocco

The three nations of the Maghreb - Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia - have made it to this expanded World Cup, and in each of them contemporary authors have a choice: to write in Arabic or to write in French. Each of them can look back to a long literary tradition. Morocco, for instance, was the birthplace of the most well-travelled man in pre-Atlantic-navigation days, Ibn Battuta. His Travels should be as known and read as the more famous account by Marco Polo, spanning most of the known world from China and India to the Swahili Coast, Mali and the Iberian peninsula. More recently, Mohamed Choukri has explored not foreign lands but the destitute underbelly of urban Morocco; his short stories have recently been collected in English into Tales of Tangier, itself a city at the crossroads of trade routes, at the doorstep of Europe, in the maelstrom of history.

Scotland

Splitting British literature into English, Scottish and Welsh literature (and what about Northern Irish literature?) feels like an act of pedantry even to a pedant like myself, but hey! ho!, the gods of football have spoken and decided. The degree of Scottishness of British authors in my library can be hard to gauge, so I’ll take the easy route and look for a birthplace in Scotland and other signs of the author’s Scottishness on their Wikipedia page. Graeme Macrae Burnet’s Case Study, an experimental book set in the world of psychotherapy, fits the bill nicely.

Haiti

My first encounter with Haiti happened in a damp fortress close to the French-Swiss border. The Fort de Joux was not only a Vauban remodelling project, it also served as prison (and place of death) to Toussaint Louverture, the leader of the Haitian Revolution. Haiti’s history is truly epic: the only successful slave revolt resulted in the first independent black nation in the Western hemisphere. A nation proud of its achievements, proud of its unique culture, proud to contribute to the world. Far from the literary circles of Paris, literature was and is written in French, with a local sensitivity. Jacques Roumain, for instance, wrote the hypnotic La Montagne ensorcelée (roughly: The Bewitched Mountain), an “indigenist” novella where a remote village engages in a witch hunt; his masterpiece is considered to be Le Gouverneur de la Rosée (Masters of the Dew). Marie Vieux-Chauvet’s trilogy of novels Amour, Colère et Folie (Love, Anger and Madness) caused the ire of the Duvalier regime - the cleptocracy that dominated Haiti’s late 20th century and is the cause of many of its present-day woes. The most momentous Haitian writers was Oswald Durand, however, a 19th century poet worthy of his European counterparts, creator of the “National Song” (briefly the national anthem), and, most importantly, the author of Choucoune, the first poem written in Haitian Creole. His works are virtually unavailable, but thanks to the wonders of global trade and Amazon (yes, that Amazon), a Haitian edition of his Poèmes choisis (Selected Poems) managed to find its way to me.

Group D

United States of America

A member of the Swedish Academy raised eyebrows in 2008 by claiming American literature to be insular, too isolated, unwilling to “participate in the big dialogue of literature”. And there is something to this claim. Contrary to Mr Engdahl, however, I don’t believe the answer lies in ignoring it and concentrating instead on European literature. Like all continent-sized countries, such as the aforementioned Brazil, China, India or even Japan, the US literary sphere is large enough to be self-sufficient. Its literary movements can exist, thrive and evolve within the confines of North America. What distinguishes the US from Brazil, however, is the former’s belief in the universality of its literature. Hemingway’s minimalism is deemed universal, Pynchon and DeLillo’s post-modernism are deemed universal, Toni Morrison’s dissection of race relations is deemed universal. And yet: these authors are quintessentially American authors looking at the world through an American lens (and they are by no means bad: I love Pynchon, for instance). Look beyond the claims of universality, however, and you find something completely different: the quest for “the great American novel”. Conceptually, this is, again, a purely American construct. No-one is looking for “the great French novel”, or “the great English novel”, or “the great Hungarian novel”. It’s an ambition similar to the quest to conquer the American West, to place a man on the Moon, to develop artificial intelligence. And this oh so American ambition brought us masterpieces like Moby-Dick (very deserving of its iconic status!), The Great Gatsby and Gravity’s Rainbow, and even the counter-American novel On the Road. On the other end of the spectrum, Americans have redefined genre fiction, first and foremost science fiction (Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Dispossessed comes to mind, besides the currently fashionable Dune series), but also horror (Lovecraft is a personal favourite), fantasy, thrillers, etc. Due to America’s prominence in academia, it also sets the tone in most genres of nonfiction. And, last but not least, it has created its own unique genres: the Western (Larry McMurtry’s Lonesome Dove is widely acknowledged) and the genre I’ve decided to feature here: business journalism. Bryan Burrough and John Helyar’s Barbarians at the Gate, an account of the 1988 leveraged buy-out of the firm RJR Nabisco, reads like a novel and offers insights into the psychology of the boardroom that are still relevant today - which explains why this book keeps being in print and a staple in any bookshop business section.

Paraguay

The land-locked South American country has the unique distinction of losing 50% of its population in a single conflict, the little-known War of the Triple Alliance (said triple alliance - Brazil, Argentina and Uruguay - fought it against lonely Paraguay). This war was launched by Paraguay’s dictator Francisco Solano López, one in a long range of dictators of this Republic (the most recent one, Alfredo Stroessner, left his own gruesome legacy). It may be little wonder, then, that the most highly regarded work of Paraguayan literature is the quintessential “dictator novel” - a genre that has become a staple of Latin American literature. Augusto Roa Bastos’s highly experimental novel I, the Supreme centres around Paraguay’s first dictator, José Rodriguéz de Francia (Dr. Francia), a stern man that isolated the country and ruled as “Supreme and Perpetual Dictator of Paraguay”. A precedent many would strive to imitate.

Turkey

Literature has been written on the territory of present-day Turkey since the time of the Hittites, whose clay tablet libraries continue to be deciphered (and, tantalisingly, corroborate element of the Iliad). A millennium of Byzantine literature was compiled on the shores of the Bosphorus. Ottoman poets adapted Persian and Arabic forms to the, linguistically completely unrelated, Turkish language. Evliya Çelebi, a 17th century explorer, wrote a celebrated Travelogue. In the 20th century, the novel was enthusiastically adopted by Turkish writers, with Yaşar Kemal’s Memed, My Hawk gaining cult status. Yet, Turkey’s rich literary tradition remains virtually unknown outside its borders (or the world of Byzantine or Hittite studies). But one contemporary figure has put Turkey’s literature onto the global stage: Orhan Pamuk. His novel My Name is Red is the richest (and, let’s just say it, best) historical novel I’ve read so far; the book presented here, Nights of Plague is one of his more recent ones, published in the wake of the covid-19 pandemic.

Australia

So far, the literature of Australia has mostly remained alien to me. Richard Flanagan, Alexis Wright, Shirley Hazzard, Gerald Murnane, Patrick White and even Colleen McCullough’s The Thorn Birds have all found a spot on my shelves but have yet to excite my curiosity. Nonfiction authors may have a better chance; Christopher Clark’s The Sleepwalkers, an account on how Europe went to war in 1914, is eminently readable and a milestone in WWI historiography. One novelist, however, has managed to break the spell. Jessica Au’s Cold Enough for Snow is a quiet novel about a mother-daughter relationship that should not have worked for me but was utterly spellbinding in the way it used silence and the sparse communication to explore the contradictions, misunderstandings but also the underlying love between both protagonists.

(Parts 2 and 3 covering Groups E to L to follow.)

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This sounds like McCarthy’s novel of doom The Road, but it’s actually an impression of a (possibly superior) contemporary masterpiece: Serhiy Zhadan’s The Orphanage (which I read in the German translation, where it’s called Internat), and originally published in Ukrainian in 2017 (i.e. before the start of the current war in Ukraine, but after the rebellion of the Donbas “republics”). Nowadays heralded as a Ukrainian war novel, it’s much more than that - it’s possibly one of the best novels written anywhere in the past decade.

The synopsis is quickly told: Pasha, an apolitical schoolteacher, goes to fetch his nephew from a residential school (not an actual orphanage) in “the city” - which has been taken over by rebels. As he progresses into the city, and closer to the school, he comes closer and closer to fighting and to the horrors of war, and his mission - bringing the nephew back out of the city - comes more and more into doubt.

Zhadan manages to create a unique feat: on the one hand, The Orphanage is action-packed and suspenseful like an airport thriller. Were it not for the subject matter, and were the unnamed city located in a post-apocalyptic North America, I have no doubt this novel would already have been made into an action blockbuster movie

On the other hand, the book is eminently lyrical and literary. Zhadan is also a poet - and one of my first actions after reading this book was to get one of his works of poetry. The language shifts from the gutter talk of the soldiery to beautiful but bleak similes as Pasha considers the landscape around him. Dogs appear as allegories of the inhabitants of the city - ravenous dogs that have been abandoned and are hungry and threaten the main protagonists; a pitiful dog that at first follows Pasha around after receiving a cuddle, but then decides to follow the rebel soldiers after they’ve thrown him a scrap of food; a puppy symbolising hope at the very end. I have some quibbles with the German translation, but overall it was a fantastic read.

Thematically, Zhadan deals with (and condemns) apoliticism. Pasha is initially unconcerned by the takeover of the city by rebels. These rebels are locals, after all, and he’s never been too concerned with Ukraine itself (he barely if ever utters the word Ukraine - instead, we read about the “state flag” being torn or having been removed from buildings). Yet, he is a schoolteacher of the Ukrainian language - a fact he very soon decides to hide from the various soldiers (and locals) he meets. Like him, many of the people he meets - including a cohort of women hiding in the city’s train station - don’t see the conflict as having anything to do with them. The city has new rulers? Fine. They’ll find an accommodation.

Yet war doesn’t care for your unwillingness to take a side. Buildings are destroyed no matter what political stance its residents had. People are killed by snipers before being asked their allegiance. Bombs and gunfire kill saints and sinners alike. Yet, a word of defiance addressed to the wrong person might doom you as well.

And so Pasha - and the reader - have to reckon with their own stance. Can I afford to take a side? Can I afford to take none?

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Also check out my YouTube video - a more off-the-cuff comment on the book:

One thought has been haunting me since my last post (15 lesser-known masterpieces of European literature - see below): how could I be so confident, or presumptuous, in claiming to be able to identify literary masterpieces? Especially with regards to the seven (almost half the full list!) published after 1990?

The Literary Buffet

15 lesser-known masterpieces of European literature

Like, presumably, most of you reading this article, I’m an avid consumer of book-related content. YouTube - or BookTube, for the cognoscenti - is my go-to supplier of daily book musings, but I will also peruse other book-related media, from the erudite Times Literary Supplement (TLS) to the more plebeian doomscrolling pleasures of Instagram (or Bookstag…

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5 months ago · 255 likes · 32 comments · Luis R Domingos

Older works are, of course, already recognised as such. They wouldn’t be in print otherwise. The literature of most of the 20th century is also slowly being clustered in (modern) classics and the rest. But what about more recent literature? The literature written in my lifetime? Which of these works will be considered classics in the future?

The easy, and facile, answer is that only time will tell. Such an axiom is self-evident, but also utterly unhelpful for someone sifting through the publications of the past decades and trying to identify those worth adding to one’s library.

And online discourse isn’t really helping. Content creators (here, or over on BookTube, YouTube’s little corner for bookworms) tend to focus either on contemporary literature (often following the award seasons like herds of antelopes follow the rains on the Serengeti) or on the “classics” (generously defined, roughly from the Epic of Gilgamesh to Rushdie’s Satanic Verses). The books that fall in the cracks land in Book Purgatory: almost nobody talks about them anymore, at least not online, and they dance on the precipice of going out of print while hoping old-fashioned word-of-mouth will save them from oblivion. The lifecycle of the book is not new - it has even inspired its own novel, Nathalie Sarraute’s Les Fruits d’Or (The Golden Fruits, 1963) - but it’s astonishing that the digital age hasn’t fundamentally changed the equation.

So how can books - fiction in particular, but not solely - escape Book Purgatory? Which of today’s bestsellers will become tomorrow’s classics?

Death of the Critic - the growing irrelevance of the literary tastemakers

In the past, the emergence of a classic was not actually left up to time, like a tulip bulb planted before the rigours of winter ultimately grows and blossoms into a pretty flower come spring. Classics were forged. Tastemakers - famous authors, literary critics, tweed-wearing professors or the bureaucrats in charge of departments of education - would define the classics. They possibly reached the pinnacle of their power right before the dawn of the internet. Harold Bloom was the ultimate judge of not just English literary valour, but of the Western Canon as a whole (at least for Anglo-Saxon audiences). A similar role was played in Germany by Marcel Reich-Ranicki, fondly nicknamed the Literaturpapst (Pope of Literature), who seized on the medium of television to issue his literary edicts (some quarrels he participated in on the show Das literarische Quartett even became memes!); Reich-Ranicki’s magnum opus was Der Kanon, his definition of the ultimate canon of German literature.

Authors bristled at the authority literary critics had with the reading (and book-buying) public. The most infamous riposte might have come from the German author Martin Walser, who, following a devastating review by Reich-Ranicki, published the novel Tod eines Kritikers (Death of a Critic, 2002), a thinly-veiled fantasy about the murder of a literary critic widely believed to have been templated on Reich-Ranicki. Walser’s reputation tanked, Reich-Ranicki’s didn’t.

The explosion of the internet (and later of social media) shattered the pedestals of the literary critics. Everyone could be a critic now (even yours truly!). But more on this later. As literary “criticism” became democratised, less money (and less space) became available for professional literary critics. Book sections got reduced or even eliminated at struggling newspapers. The little space left was often devoted either to books worth praising, or (more and more seldomly) to book eviscerations. A glance at the review aggregator Book Marks, on The Literary Hub, presents a starling picture: at the time of writing, almost all the new books boast an average of “positive” or even “rave” reviews. Either literary quality has exponentially improved since the days of Tolstoy, Mann and Proust, or book reviews have morphed into book panegyrics.

For someone, like me, who doesn’t typically read new releases (with a few exceptions, e.g. new releases by favourite authors such as Thomas Pynchon - Shadow Ticket was one of the books I reviewed online), using old reviews to identify which of the novels of the past decades to read becomes an exercise in futility. When all reviews are “positive” or “rave”, none are. By focusing on the books they want to praise, today’s critics just increase their own irrelevance. Granted, not all do. The Times Literary Supplement will often feature pans. And some book critics maintain their integrity and their sharp pen (Steve Donoghue, chief editor of the online literary magazine Open Letters Review, and a successful BookTuber, comes to mind).

The Hour of the Star - the yelpification of reading

Just as the power of the professional critic waned, the internet, and later social media, brought forth the golden age of the common literary critic. Many probably first experienced the thrill of the review via Amazon.com. Having spent money on a purchase online, what is more natural than sharing one’s experience with the purchase (be it with the book itself or with the travails of the actual acquisition - bad prose and shoddy delivery both incur the wrath of reviewers equally)? Goodreads, a book cataloguing site later bought by Amazon, took the thought further and encouraged all its users to become book reviewers. Or, at least, to leave a “star review”.

So prevalent is the concept of star reviews nowadays that they have moved from online sites to the YouTube and TikTok book communities. Content creators typically summarise their qualitative reviews with a star rating - many eschew the qualitative part altogether. The fundamental flaws of star ratings are obvious: each user rates books according to vastly different criteria (literary quality often, but not always, being one of them); users have different preferences (in terms of genres, in terms of plot devices, or “tropes”, in terms of length, in terms of difficulty); users may have nefarious motives for their ratings (as mentioned in my other post, I came across this phenomenon when checking Thanassis Valtinos’s Orthokostá (1994) - a book detested by some left-wing Greek readers). As a result, the romantasy bestseller Onyx Storm by Rebecca Yarros currently has a rating of 4.21, while Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf has to content itself with 3.77 stars. No shade on the readers of Onyx Storm - readers should read what they want to read and enjoy, and I’m happy many enjoyed Onyx Storm. I doubt, however, that Rebecca Yarros will achieve the literary esteem that Virginia Woolf has earned (nor, I suspect, does she aim to). For readers looking for the future classics (typically to be found in so-called “literary fiction”, but see below!), Goodreads is near useless.

These issues are compounded by the “grade inflation” prevalent on Goodreads and other book-ranking sites - and indeed on all other, similar review sites, such as Yelp, Tripadvisor or even Google Maps. Far from being linear, the five-star scale skews heavily to the right. 4-5 stars have become the standard rating; anything below is considered a slap of the glove; a 1-star review is a condemnation to hell. Thus, even if one were to correct for the above-mentioned factors, comparing only the literature of one genre, one time-period, one literary movement, would one be able to separate the literary masterpieces from the literary chaff? I’m not so sure.

And there is no sign that more discerning ratings will become reality anytime soon. On the contrary - according to a (possibly anecdotal) video the YouTube algorithm presented to me yesterday, the discussion among romantasy bookfluencers currently turns around the question whether negative reviews are actually mean to the author, and should therefore be avoided. I get the feeling Martin Walser would have agreed with that sentiment.

Book Purgatory is thus a fluffy, comfortable type of limbo. Books are slowly being killed with coddles, with participation awards, with encouraging but indifferent praise. Death by evisceration might sound worse than death by kindness, but for a book, both yield the same result.

The Trophy - decline and fall (and maybe renaissance?) of the literary award

I could extend my litany to literary awards. Countless are the controversies associated with individual such prizes. The Nobel Prize in Literature, for instance, supposedly rewarding the pinnacle of the world’s literary creation, has accumulated a whole collection of minor and major scandals, some of which the Swedish Academy actively courted (such as the awarding of the prize to Bob Dylan, the American songwriter, in 2016), some provoked by its decisions (Swedes and Frenchmen are either particularly good writers or sometimes got selected on the basis of other criteria than absolute literary merit), some threatening its very existence (the cancellation of the 2018 award following multiple resignations of Academy members). French prizes have seen the independence of their juries criticised; British prizes have raised eyebrows by including non-literary celebrities in their juries. One common critique over the past decade was the recognition of books and authors for non-literary reasons (the unusual splitting of the 2019 Booker Prize between Bernardine Evaristo’s Girl, Woman, Other and Margaret Atwood’s The Testaments, for instance, coincided with the first Trump presidency and the highly successful TV adaptation of Atwood’s earlier novel The Handmaid’s Tale (1985)).

I could go on. But, for all their flaws, I actually like literary awards. In an ocean of book publications, their long and short lists provide at least a semblance of order, a menu, even when the signature dishes aren’t to my taste. Some Nobel winners make me roll my eyes, but others have been revelations - I probably wouldn’t have tried out Mo Yan (I loved his Sandalwood Death (2001) and The Republic of Wine (1992)), Orhan Pamuk (My Name is Red (1998) is my gold standard for historical novels - check out my review) or Olga Tocarczuk (currently immersed in the mammoth The Books of Jacob (2014) and loving it!) without them winning the Prize.

And for all their flaws, for all the politics they engage in, all the controversies they court, all the mini-me prizes that sprout around them, literary awards do ultimately care about quality. Their own relevance ultimately depends on honouring at least a few future classics. After a few wayward decisions, they tend to sway back to literary criteria when deliberating. Even when the finalists aren’t works of the highest quality, the short and long lists offer alternate candidates for the seeker of literary quality.

So, while a nice bauble might not save a book from Book Purgatory, it will at least increase its visibility while thousands of its neighbours sink into irrelevance.

My word is my bond - and cash is king

It’s ironic that in a world where everything is rated and everyone is a critic (and awards offer pointers, but are often hit-and-miss) personal trust has become more important than ever. When every book has fawning reviews from a multitude of people (professional and lay), the aggregate reviews become meaningless and the individual reviewer becomes paramount. I am more likely to trust the judgment of people that like the same books as I do, value the same types of classics I do, have given me recommendations that have worked out for me. A book mentioned, even in passing, by a reviewer or critic I trust will automatically get a beacon that increases its visibility in Book Purgatory. I thus look forward to reading Helen DeWitt’s The Last Samurai (2000), a book that doesn’t often make an appearance in the online discourse, but when it does, usually comes with high praise by people I trust. The same goes for Lucy Ellmann’s Ducks, Newburyport (2019). On my end, I will spread the good word about yesteryear’s online fave The Luminaries, by Eleanor Catton (2013), or some recent exceptional works of nonfiction (David van Reybrouck’s Congo (2010) and Revolusi (2020) immediately come to mind, as do the economic studies of Adam Tooze, e.g. The Deluge (2014) and The Wages of Destruction (2006)).

The reason why these susurrations are essential is because they keep books alive. Word-of-mouth, even online word-of-mouth, will lead to sales, which in turn will lead to re-editions and reprints. Even the acquisition of second-hand books will bring them back into publishers’ minds. Unsuccessful searches on Amazon might ultimately even resurrect a book. Books that were almost forgotten have gained a new life on the basis of advocacy by dedicated fans - John Williams’s Stoner (1965) seems to be a case in point.

Ultimately, the true democratisation of literary canonisation might reside in our pockets. As long as enough people are willing to advocate for an individual book, and support it with their hard-earned cash, it might survive purgatory and emerge on the other end as a bona fide modern classic. Literary quality is a key component of this journey - once the initial hype has passed, the marketing budget has dried up, the critics have moved on, the awards have been allocated, literary quality (how a book resonates with readers, how well crafted it is, how re-readable (and thus memorable) it is) is the only thing remaining that can keep the word-of-mouth prayer mill and the flow of money going. Once that flow stops (as it seems to be doing for formerly acclaimed authors such as John Updike and may yet do for authors with a limited (though currently vocal) fanbase, such as David Foster Wallace), books slowly but surely descend into oblivion.

The Call of Cthulhu - classics elevated from the plebeian swamps of genre fiction

The best proof point of the power of our credit cards in creating the canon comes from genre fiction. When I read J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings (1954-1955) ages ago in the late 1990s or early 2000s, before the Peter Jackson movies came out, it was a well-known piece of fantasy literature, a fantasy classic maybe, but not yet a classic of English Literature with capital letters - at least I don’t remember it as such. Nowadays, it’s studied in universities and a staple of any Top-100 list. It did so on the strength of its writing, of course, though that went unrecognised for a long time. More importantly, it was constantly in print, kept alive through the years of purgatory by generations of dedicated fans that kept praising it forward - until some of those fans decided to convince a film study to finance an extravagantly lush movie adaptation of the novel.

Other genre authors have made it to canonical status. H.P. Lovecraft was available in cheap mass-market formats when I first read him in French, again in the 1990s. Now he’s been inducted into both the Library of America and the even more elitist French imprint La Pléiade. I would bet that Frank Herbert’s Dune series is well on its way to achieve canonical status, too. Maybe more surprisingly, so is John Le Carré, hitherto an author of spy fiction, now soon-to-be a modern classic English author (Penguin has already added him to their Penguin Modern Classics line, despite featuring him under other, non-classic imprints as well).

Nor is there anything new to this. Beloved classics like Bram Stoker’s Dracula or Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice were the genre fiction of their day; Agatha Christie and Arthur Conan Doyle (joined more recently by Georges Simenon) are both classic and mystery authors. The reason they achieved their illustrious status is because for decades people kept spending money on their books - because they kept hearing from their friends and family how good they were.

And so the conclusion of my ramblings about that age-old topic of how books become canonical is ultimately a hopeful one. While social media, rating platforms and the broader literary hullaballoo may hype up contemporary books, it is word-of-mouth, trust and ultimately money that shepherds books through Book Purgatory. Most will fail, but those that make it through will have done so thanks to our advocacy, our recommendations, our discussions and our passion in keeping them relevant.

Not the worst purpose for a platform such Substack, is it?

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Like, presumably, most of you reading this article, I’m an avid consumer of book-related content. YouTube - or BookTube, for the cognoscenti - is my go-to supplier of daily book musings, but I will also peruse other book-related media, from the erudite Times Literary Supplement (TLS) to the more plebeian doomscrolling pleasures of Instagram (or Bookstagram).

Yet, while my library has, over the past years, spread its tendrils to more obscure parts of the literary canons of the world, the books featured on (English language) social media have a tendency to come from the same restricted list of trending classics or contemporary works. More than fostering a discussion of niche interests, YouTube and Instagram become an echo chamber, featuring the same books over and over again.

There’s nothing inherently wrong with that, of course. Content creators, as the hobby video- and photographers like to style themselves, want to be part of a broader discussion, want to “please the algorithm”, and the best way to do so is to stick to well-trodden paths. The pity with this approach is that it solidifies those books that are “in the canon” (a canon, admittedly, evolved towards the taste of a digitally native crowd), while excellent, but lesser-known works of literature continue to fail to find an audience. I was reminded of this by both a recent and a current read - Arto Paasilinna’s The Year of the Hare and Agustina Bessa-Luís’s Vale Abraão / Abraham’s Valley. And so I decided to come up with my own little list of book recommendations - 15 books of European literature that I have read and consider a masterpiece (not yet a classic, necessarily - only time can bestow that accolade). I might follow it up with additional (potential) masterpieces of European literature from my library, which I haven’t yet read - let me know if this is something you’d be interested in.

1. Agustina Bessa-Luís: Vale Abraão / Abraham’s Valley (1991)

This is my current read, and it is proving to be a revelation. On the surface, it’s a retelling of Madame Bovary, taking place in the provincial bourgeoise of the central Douro valley in northern Portugal. Ema, unhappily married to a local doctor with limited ambitions, seeks fulfilment in buying expensive clothes, covering their house in gilded woodcarvings, and seeking a lover. As to be expected, none of these activities quell Ema’s unsatisfaction with life. Agustina Bessa-Luís (1922-2019) openly plays with her template - Ema earns the nickname A Bovarinha (little Ms Bovary) from her gossiping neighbours - but what she really explores is petit-bourgeois life in the Portuguese province, and the changing roles of women and men as Portugal moves from conservative autocracy to liberated democracy. What really stands out is Bessa-Luís’s fabulous prose - one of the best I’ve read in Portuguese, and possibly superior to her much-better-known contemporaries José Saramago and António Lobo Antunes. A pity, then, that, as far as I can see, Vale Abraão hasn’t yet been translated into English.

2. Arto Paasilinna: The Year of the Hare (1975)

Finland and comedy aren’t two words that seem to go together - we associate Finns with melancholy, winter depression, silent contemplation in their ubiquitous saunas. And yet Finland has also brought forth the cute Moomins (created by Tove Jansson, who is currently enjoying a bit of a renaissance for her non-Moomin work), and won the Eurovision song contest 2006 with hard rock back Lordi wearing monster masks and singing (or rather belching) Hard Rock Hallelujah. Deadpan comedy, therefore, might be a little-known undercurrent of Finnish culture. A prime example is the author Arto Paasilinna (1942-2018), who built a career on deadpan comedic novels. Surprisingly, these enjoyed quite the popularity in French translation, and I read this one, and a couple others, over twenty years ago in French. Upon discovering its recent re-edition with a gorgeous cover by Pushkin Press, I decided to re-read it, this time in English. Vatanen, a journalist from Helsinki, hits a young hare one night while on his way back from an assignment. He follows the hurt creature into the woods, decides to nurture it back to health, and starts a life of vagabondage through the woods of northern Finland, taking odd jobs here and there, most of which degenerate into funny set-pieces. During all this time, he’s accompanied by his pet hare. By the end of the book, Vatanen has transformed into a Tom Bombadil-like figure who can’t bear living in the structured, urban fabric of Helsinki anymore. An escapist novel par excellence, The Year of the Hare is an unexpectedly funny Finnish contribution to European literature.

3. Vladimir Sorokin: Day of the Oprichnik (2006)

Fyodor Dostoevsky would probably be flabbergasted by the adulation his works elicit among 21st century social media bookfluencers (especially of the male kind). More generally, Russian classics remain beloved, from Tolstoy to Bulgakov to (more recently and more surprisingly) Vasily Grossman. Less love is bestowed on contemporary Russian authors, however. That’s a pity. Vladimir Sorokin (b. 1955) follows in the footsteps of his illustrious predecessors (in particular Bulgakov, with the fantasy-infused world of The Master and Margarita) to deliver a biting critique of today’s Russia in Day of the Oprichnik (which I read in a German translation). In this alternate version of Russia, we follow a day in the life of one of the henchmen of the Russian autocrat. Inspired by the oprichniks, the secret police created by Tsar Ivan IV (the Terrible) to terrorise his hapless subjects, this autocrat has created a modern-day secret police with unfettered power to subjugate any opponent to the regime. The oprichniks enjoy the terror they inspire and the violence they inflict upon the populace, while living a life of debauchery. In this novel of the grotesque, Sorokin, nowadays living in exile, unveils the corruption, physical and moral, pervading Russian society at every level.

4. Christian Kracht: Imperium (2012)

Some of the best contemporary authors in the German language are not actually from Germany. Christian Kracht (b. 1966) is Swiss, and possibly one of the most versatile and interesting authors currently writing in the language of Goethe and Mann. While his debut novel Faserland (1995 - haven’t read it yet) became the poster child for 1990s “pop literature” in Germany, his latest one, Air (2025 - have read) mystified by its hermeticism, its sparse language and its dual narrative featuring a modern-day interior designer and a Nordic fantasy world. Imperium sits somewhere in between. Written in exquisite prose, it explores a little-known episode of German history: its far-flung colony of New Guinea, and a German mystic (who did exist, though Kracht plays around with the biography) who settled there and founded a cult based on the exclusive consumption of coconuts.

5. Charles Ferdinand Ramuz: Great Fear on the Mountain (1926)

Switzerland also produced outstanding literature in French. C.F. Ramuz (1878-1947), sadly, was not only a contemporary of Proust, Gide and Céline, but also decided to spend most of his life in his native Lausanne, instead of that unforgiving centre of French taste-making: Paris. The theme of this novel, Great Fear on the Mountain (also less accurately translated as Terror on the Mountain) probably did nothing to endear him to the Parisian intelligentsia: in a small village in the Swiss mountains, an alpine meadow, shunned so far due to a mysterious and long-standing taboo, is about to be reclaimed by cattle-herders; tragedy and paranoia ensues. Ramuz unapologetically focuses on the common people of his country, Switzerland, on their dialects of French, to which he applies a modernist sensibility. The result is visceral, earthy, and utterly modern.

6. Marguerite Yourcenar: Memoirs of Hadrian (1951)

It would be easy to dismiss this novel by Marguerite Yourcenar (1903-1987) as a French version of Robert Graves’s I, Claudius. Sure, both are fictitious autobiographies by Roman emperors. Both nod more or less directly to the actual memoirs we have by a Roman emperor, Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations, a darling book of the modern-day aspiring stoic. But where Graves tells us the bloody history of the early Julio-Claudian dynasty through the eyes of the inoffensive Claudius, Yourcenar has little time for intrigues and empire management. Her moody Hadrian despises the expansionist policies of his predecessor and adoptive father Trajan (and, indeed, the Roman Empire reached its largest extent under Trajan) and spends most of his “memoirs” reminiscing about his “lover”, the teenage Antinous. Memoirs of Hadrian eschews both the pretentious ruminations of the fabulously powerful Marcus Aurelius (who, for all his airs of philosopher-king, took the ruinous decision to name his inept son Commodus his heir, after various successful generations of “adoptive succession”) and the Game-of-Thrones-style drama of I, Claudius. Instead, we get the interior world of a powerful, but flawed Roman statesman. More than that, we get it in flawless French prose. For all the praise heaped upon Proust, Yourcenar’s is the superior French: endlessly elegant, restrained (no serpentine sentences here), using words like gemstones in a precious necklace. In 1980, Yourcenar became the first woman elected into the illustrious French Academy. While this says a lot about the French Academy, it’s also a testament to Yourcenar the writer.

7. Mateiu Caragiale: Rakes of the Old Court (1929)

Romanian literature is currently enjoying a moment in the spotlight, with Mircea Cărtărescu’s Solenoid (2015 - haven’t read yet), a maximalist post-modern work. It’s probably the only work of Romanian literature most English-language readers have ever come across. But, of course, Cărtărescu has a long line of literary ancestors to look up to. One I chanced upon a couple of years ago is Mateiu Caragiale (1885-1936). I happened to read his novel Rakes of the Old Court right after finishing Marcel Proust’s Swann’s Way, and the timing couldn’t have been better. Caragiale taps into the same bourgeois reflections as Proust, the same introspection, but condenses them into a short volume. We follow a group of Bucharest dandies who spend their days at banquets as they fall into decadence, while their demagogue friend from the lower classes rises to prominence in the “new” post-aristocratic Romania. More pessimistic than Proust, and also less verbose, Caragiale provides a different prism to analyse the society of interwar Europe.

8. Thanassis Valtinos: Orthokostá (1994)

While Ancient Greek literature continues to enjoy strong popularity, both online (no doubt enhanced by the recent hype for Greek myth retellings) and in literary media (with new translations of Homer being their own cottage industry, it seems), modern Greek literature is barely talked about. That’s a shame, as it means readers miss out on masterpieces like this experimental novel by Thanassis Valtinos (1932-2024). Set during the Greek Civil War at the end of World War II, when left-wing and right-wing guerillas fought over the wreckage left by the departing Nazis, we follow the goings-on in the small remote region of Kynouria, in the Peloponnese (Valtinos’s home region). Instead of a linear narrative, we get 46 statements, or testimonies, from villagers and guerilleros, some shorter and some longer, all circling around a particular incident and related atrocities committed in the dilapidated monastery of Orthokostá. The catch: we aren’t told the names of the people who make those statements, though we get indications that some of the speakers are mentioned by other witnesses, and not necessarily in a positive light. We’re faced not with one, but with potentially 46 unreliable narrators, some of whom have reason to hide the crimes they may have committed. The edition I read, by the Yale Margellos World Republic of Letters line, charitably provides a detailed recounting of the Greek Civil War for those readers (likely the majority, like myself) who have little to no knowledge of that historic episode; it also contains detailed footnotes explaining the bewildering number of guerilla acronyms used in the novel and some untranslated Greek terms. When Orthokostá came out in Greece, it created outrage: by puncturing the myth that the left-wing guerillas had been the good guys, and the right-wing ones the bad guys (as these same people later formed the Greek military junta that briefly, and disastrously, ruled Greece), the novel attacked one of the foundation stories of the modern Greek republic. The anger continues to this day - a number of Greek 1-star reviews on Goodreads regard it as a vehicle for right-wing propaganda. Looking at it as a purely literary work, I found the choir of different testimonies absolutely mesmerising and unique. Valtinos was the author who convinced me that non-conventional literature can often be found outside the major languages of the global Republic of Letters.

9. Arno Schmidt: Dark Mirrors (1951)

James Joyce has gained an almost messianic status in English letters. His stretching of the English language to its limits (Ulysses) and beyond (Finnegans Wake) - disclaimer: I’ve read half of the former, and four pages of the later - have firmly established Joyce as foremost experimental writer. But Joyce wasn’t the only author playing around with the foundations of the language they were writing in - other literatures had their own language alchemists. By their very nature, the works that come out of such endeavours are fiendishly difficult to translate. By operating at the atomic level of the language - its vocabulary, its syntax, its grammar - their appeal is mostly restricted to native speakers of that language (one might argue that Finnegans Wake takes this to the extreme by eluding even native speakers of English). Arno Schmidt (1914-1979) has sometimes been described as the German Joyce, and his ginormous magnum opus Zettels Traum / Bottom’s Dream vies with Finnegans Wake for inaccessibility (not least in terms of price: due to the way it requires publication with three columns of text, set in a certain way, a new edition of the German version currently trades for 348 EUR on Amazon for the hardcover, and a mere 248 EUR for the four-volume paperback). But Arno Schmidt also wrote much more accessible works. Indeed, his early output mostly consists of short novellas. Dark Mirrors is playful in its syntax and features the wordplay fireworks that Schmidt would push exponentially in his late work, but it remains an eminently readable work. And a surprisingly fun one. The protagonist, the sole survivor of a nuclear apocalypse that killed everyone else in northern Germany, spends his days foraging for canned food in the empty villages he comes across and building himself a home in one of them, ultimately content that, given circumstances, he’s actually quite well off, since he has all he needs to survive. His new home takes shape, adorned with works of art pilfered from the main museums of nearby Hamburg, until he meets another survivor - a woman. Dark Mirrors is deeply critical of the nuclear arms race that focused minds when it was written, but it also hopeful in all its bleakness - a counterpoint to the style of post-apocalyptic novel so popular in the 21st century.

10. Danilo Kiš: The Encyclopedia of the Dead (1983)

The short story is a paradox. Authors are encouraged to start with it before graduating to the novel, while readers vastly prefer the immersive world of the latter to the keyhole vignettes of the former. Authors are told it’s easy to write because it’s short, even though the shorter the literary form, the more difficult it actually is to create something that is not simply banal dross (the shortest form of poetry - the haiku - provides ample evidence for this theorem). It is no wonder, then, that the short stories of many novelists are often ignored. Short stories require specialists - a Chekhov, a Maupassant, an Akutagawa, a Welty. A Jorge Luis Borges, my favourite short story writer (a form I normally don’t gravitate towards). Borges freed the short story from the chrysalis of realism. The short story became philosophical, magical, speculative. In Europe, the Borgesian torch was taken up by the Serbian (then Yugoslav) writer Danilo Kiš (1935-1989). The title story of this short story collection might be the closest in spirit to the Argentinian master: in the Royal Library of Stockholm, the protagonist finds a book that contains accounts of the lives of everyone who has lived since the 18th century, and she ends up reading the biography of her father. Other stories retell ancient legends with a twist, track the history of a book eerily reminiscent of the anti-semitic pamphlet The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, or wonder about the execution of an anti-Habsburg rebel. History, legend, conspiracy and mystery intermingle in this fun little collection.

11. Avvakum: Autobiography (The Life Written by Himself) (c. 1675)

I’ve stuck to the 20th and 21st centuries so far, but lesser-known masterpieces appear in all eras and sometimes in the most unexpected of places. Western readers of Russian literature will rarely go beyond Pushkin in their explorations of the classics, but Russian was, of course, written before Pushkin. One of the most revered pre-Pushkin classics is not a work of fiction, but rather a kind of memoir - the Archpriest Avvakum (c. 1620 - 1682), who wrote it down during his imprisonment in his twilight years, didn’t really have a word for autobiography, and therefore called it a hagiography. Maybe he considered his life so similar to a saint’s that he might have considered the label more than appropriate. Avvakum’s life was certainly exceptional. A member of the Orthodox clergy, he opposed the reforms by Patriarch Nikon, thus becoming one of the leading figures of what would become the Old Believers. Exiled by the tsar, he was sent to the farthest corners of Siberia then known. Upon his return, and given his continued heresy, he was imprisoned, and finally executed. His autobiography is filled with bile against the satanical Patriarch Nikon, with the conviction of the religious zealot, with endurance in the face of life’s harshness. The account of his exile to Siberia oscillates between a travelogue describing the wondrous nature of this foreign land and a passion narrative, a martyrology of hunger and cold. Most impactful of all is Avvakum’s unique voice: sometimes stern, sometimes awestruck, always charismatic.

12. Fleur Jaeggy: Proleterka (2001)

You thought we were done with Switzerland, right? But Switzerland has also brought forth a contemporary voice in Italian literature: Fleur Jaeggy (b. 1940). Her novel Proleterka follows a daughter who joins her estranged father on what might be his last cruise, on the eponymous Yugoslav ship. The novel is an oxymoron: its style is sparse and cutting, like Hemingway’s, but it was written by woman; its protagonist has father issues, but that protagonist is a daughter, not a son; instead of the EQ that women supposedly display more adequately than men, the female protagonist exhibits cold, emotionless, rational IQ. Were it written by a man (and in English), this novel would doubtless have found its way into the lit-bro canon (and, in fairness, it is mentioned here and there). As it is, it remains a literary UFO, and a counterpoint to the claim that some styles can only be written by men, or women.

13. Samantha Harvey: Orbital (2023)

This week’s news cycle was dominated by the conflict in the Middle East, which overshadowed a far more cheerful event: the first crewed lunar mission since the 1970s, and the first one in my lifetime. Artemis II took mankind the furthest out into space it’s ever been, and allowed it to gaze directly at the Moon’s far side. And all those picture of Earth seen from space, of astronauts floating around and beaming at the camera, reminded me of Orbital, the 2024 Booker Prize winner by Samantha Harvey (b. 1975). And “reminded” is the right word - like so much new fiction, including prize winners, it is at risk of disappearing into that void between contemporary literature and modern classics. Not new enough to warrant new online reviews, yet not old enough for the content creators focused on more established works, classics or classic wannabes (and yes, this channel is the latter). Indeed, even I forgot it when doing the thumbnail picture for this article! And that’s a shame! Orbital may be the most lyrical novel I’ve read in English, more poetry than prose - and, after all, if we have prose poetry, why shouldn’t we have poetry prose? We follow a day (i.e. 16 orbits) in the lives of a group of astronauts. Nothing happens, except the constant swooshing by of continents, oceans, weather formations below them. Harvey bravely tries to reach for superlative after superlative to describe the awe that Earth itself inspires. She is defeated, ultimately, and maybe she had to be, the human vocabulary in limited after all, too limited to describe our home in the solar system, let alone the wonders beyond. With the astronauts, we constantly seem to be falling towards Earth, a never-ending tumbling towards this planet greater than humanity, and in the end, we, too, are lost for words.

14. Pär Lagerkvist: The Dwarf (1944)

Classifying works of literature by publishing date reveals history’s odd ruptures and hiatuses - the fall of empires and dynasties eclipses whole traditions, whole genres fall out of favour as societal values shift, languages leap continents to continue as “exile literature”. One such hiatus is the Second World War - very few works of literature were published in the early 1940s, if compared to the plump decades of the 1920s and 1930s, and the boom of the 1960s and beyond. The books that were published in those years (and that have survived the judgment of time) tend to emerge from non-combattant nations: Latin America, for instance, or, in this case, Sweden. And yet one gets the feeling that a novel like The Dwarf couldn’t have been written in any other decade, be it in Sweden or anywhere else. Pär Lagerkvist (1891-1974) conjures a Renaissance court inhabited by the titular dwarf, plaything of the local prince for the amusement of his family and courtiers. The dwarf, knowing nothing other than the intrigues and shenanigans of court life, and facing constant displays of contempt and degrading pranks, develops a worldview of the deepest nihilism. Amoral, petty, vindictive, the dwarf (whose point-of-view we inhabit) turns more and more into a figure of evil. Yet, is he to blame? Anyone fascinated with the character of Tyrion Lannister in George R. R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire series will be mesmerised by Lagerkvist’s The Dwarf - and recognise that Lagerkvist’s is the better cynical dwarf.

15. Michel Houellebecq: The Map and the Territory (2010)

I’ll freely admit it - I am a fan of the enfant terrible of French literature, Michel Houellebecq (b. 1956). I’ve devoured the scandalous Platform, the weird The Possibility of an Island, the scandalous Submission and the scandalous, but more sloppily written Serotonin. Houellebecq has been described as prophetic - his books presaged the Islamist attacks on tourist areas such as Bali and the revolt of the gilet jaunes in rural France. Submission, a book whose premise is the takeover of France by an Islamist party, was published on the day the offices of the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo were attacked by Islamist terrorists. In his various novels, Houellebecq has revelled in graphic descriptions of sexual acts (a literary trope less scandalous in France, the home of the Marquis de Sade, than abroad), to the extent that, in Serotonin, Houellebecq ends up satirising Houellebecq. He has courted controversy in the press. He has been taken to court for “racial hatred” (he was acquitted). Most of all, he has cultivated the public persona Houellebecq. Yet, despite being the most famous literary figure in France, he was denied for long time that ultimate acknowledgment by French literary pooh-bahs: the Prix Goncourt. So, in 2010, he reined in his most houellebecqian tendencies and wrote his least scandalous, his tamest, but also his best-written novel: The Map and the Territory. We follow an artist who finds success in photographing road maps, and later in a painting series focused on people at work (one painting featuring, for instance, Steve Jobs and Bill Gates discussing the future of IT). In a cameo appearance, Houellebecq appears as a curmudgeon writer living in Ireland. By eschewing the scandalous, this novel showcases Houellebecq’s actual talent better than his other novels (which all ultimately cover the same theme). Houellebecq isn’t so much a prophet as an uncannily accurate portrayer of the contemporary Parisian man, with all his flaws, his disgusting predilections, his hopes for a better future, his misguided attempts in bringing it about, his failures, his bigotry, his incapacity to form relationships. And it’s this precise but ultimately humane dissection of the French male that has earned him his readership, not the crude and graphic descriptions in his novels (because, let’s be honest, contemporary French literature abounds with graphic depictions of carnal acts).

You may agree or disagree with my assessment of these books, and their classification of masterpieces (and feel free to let me know). But I hope it may spark some interest in these (or other) less known pieces of European literature.

This list is based on a more off-the-cuff YouTube video I did a few days ago. You can check it out here:

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Ein alter Tibetteppich

Deine Seele, die die meine liebet,
Ist verwirkt mit ihr im Teppichtibet.

Strahl in Strahl, verliebte Farben,
Sterne, die sich himmellang umwarben.

Unsere Füße ruhen auf der Kostbarkeit,
Maschentausendabertausendweit.

Süßer Lamasohn auf Moschuspflanzenthron,
Wie lange küßt dein Mund den meinen wohl
Und Wang die Wange buntgeknüpfte Zeiten schon?

I could wax lyrical about this poem for hours - the word choices (“verwirken” instead of “verweben”), the alliterations (the t-b-t-p of “Tibetteppich”, which is swapped for “Teppichtibet” in the second verse, thereby switching the horizon from a rug to the wide plateaus of an imagined Tibet), the word agglutinations (a key feature of the German language, used of course in the caterpillar word that fully fills verse 6, but also the very creative “buntgeknüpft” in the last verse - “colourfully knotted/woven”).

For my little fledgling YouTube channel, I therefore decided to feature this poem. However, I realised that the translation available on Wikipedia by no means conveys any of these stylistic elements so essential to this poem - nor does it rhyme. While rhyme nowadays is dismissed as old-fashioned, Lasker-Schüler used rhyme, and so, in my opinion, should a faithful translation to English. I looked for other translations online, but none I immediately found struck me as particularly faithful to Lasker-Schüler’s original.

So I decided to attempt my own translation:

An Old Tibetan carpet

Your soul, by mine beloved,
Cross-woven both in carpet-Tibet

Ray in ray, enamoured dyes,
Stars in courtship across the skies.

Our feet rest on the rug so treasured,
A-thousand-thousand-stitches-measured

My sweet lama son on musky flower throne
For how long has your mouth kissed mine? How many
Coloured knots of time have our joined cheeks known?

[NB: I later did come across an official translation I liked, by Robert P. Newton, which can be found here: https://archive.org/details/oapen-20.500.12657-39850/page/137/mode/2up?q=rug. No claims that my translation is better.]

Feel free to check out my YouTube where I read out the poem, in the original, and in the wikipedia and in my translations:

(This is a complement to my more casual review on Youtube - see link at the bottom of this post. Both reviews include light spoilers).

Expectations were sky-high when a new Pynchon novel was announced earlier this year. Was it even possible? Had Easter and Christmas and Halloween suddenly fallen on the same day? Would we get the final, epic, Gravity’s Rainbow-style account of our current times?

Such expectations were impossible to fulfil even at the best of times, and there’s no indication that Pynchon ever intended to even nod to them. Nevertheless, taken on its own terms, in the current, contemporary literary landscape, Pynchon’s Shadow Ticket is a more than fine novel.

The plot - before it descends into zanyness - is more or less as follows. Hicks McTaggart, a Milwaukee private eye, is tasked with finding Daphne Airmont, heiress to Bruno Airmont (“the Al Capone of Cheese”) and his dairy empire (which extends beyond the fringes of legality). Daphne has absconded with a clarinettist; due to a Chippewa legend and a convoluted backstory, Hicks is bound to be the one searching for her, while evading the local and Chicago mafia gangs. So far, so noir. By the middle of the novel, the “cheez princess” has absconded to Europe, and Hicks finds himself in Budapest. POVs multiply, one protagonist more zany than the other, we encounter golems, Hungarian magicians, various flying machines, etc. We’re in full Pynchon territory now.

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Based on this summary, you could be tempted to agree with some of the more negative reviews of this novel. Where is the cutting criticism of our descent into authoritarianism? Where is the dissection of the rise of Adolf Hitler, of the atrocities perpetrated by the Nazis? Even Mussolini, the irritable Italian Duce, is only mentioned in passing.

Yet, as usual in Pynchon’s novels, things are not all that they seem. It starts with the book’s cover: seemingly a random 1930s American city with neon lights (Milwaukee, perhaps?) - until one reads (or rather: doesn’t) the billboards. They’re in Hungarian, the photograph is from Budapest, as the flap tells us.

The initial setting - private eye investigating mystery - leads us to view the book as the third instalment in a Pynchon dectective trilogy (Bleeding Edge and Inherent Vice, Pynchon’s two previous novels, both feature investigators as main protagonists). By the time Hicks awakes on the ocean liner Stupendica, we enter a completely different novel - think clueless American in Central Europe. Almost a coda to Against the Day (a novel to which Shadow Ticket ends up having more in common than with its direct predecessors). Characters with insane names abound - my favourite being the movie star “Squeezita Thickly”, a Pynchonesque version of Shirley Temple, perhaps.

The commentary on our current times is weaved into the novel in curious anachronisms (e.g. the evolution of early television into a flirting device called “FaceTube”), while the folklore of the 1920s and 1930s forms a narrative quilt on which the action progresses (think golems, zeppelins, the Trianon treaty, Pabst-ett cheese). Are we really to take the following exclamation, for instance, as merely a commentary on 1930s politics?

“But Al Capone, I say - Republicans and gangsters? How can such things be?”

And is it really coincidence that vengeful post-Trianon Hungary - then under the authoritarian rule of Miklos Horthy - is the core setting for the second half of the novel? The same Hungary nowadays ruled by the proponent of “guided democracy” Viktor Orbán? Isn’t Pynchon saying that’s the path the other Western democracies are on, rather than the scarier, shriller, but also more hysterically invoked version of Nazi Germany?

Ultimately, one of the clues to understanding this novel may be its title (in a similar fashion to Against the Day and Inherent Vice). Shadow is the operative word here. Not only do we have the standard Pynchonian shadowy societies (this time cheese - i.e. corporate - syndicates), secret services, gangs of Russian assassins (the Vladboys - I wonder if there are any current rulers whose name could be shortened to Vlad…), etc. But Depression America is itself a shadow of its former self (a trip past the Hoovervilles of Pennsylvania being the eeriest section of the book), Vienna and Budapest are shadows of their former selves, Hamburg - now Nazi-infested - is a shadow of its former self, the port city of Fiume (now Rijeka, and a bone of contention after the First World War) is a shadow of its various former selves, and a timeless shadow of Europe in general. While the action focuses on Europe, we learn that - unbeknownst to Hicks, and thus, in the shadows - the US has suffered a military coup. The 1930s turn into a shadow of what the 2030s could become.

Shadow Ticket thus hides its messages in the shadows of its crazy acrobatics, its songs, Pynchon’s excellent prose. It’s a book for everyone, not just for Pynchon aficionados. It’s a book for now, not to read as the endpoint of a Pynchon reading marathon. Read it on its own terms and maybe, like me, you’ll pine not for it to be another Pynchon novel, but pine for it not being longer than it is.

My more casual, off-the-cuff BookTube review can be found here:

David van Reybrouck starts his voluminous history of the Congo with the first image Europeans would glimpse of the country for centuries: the dark muddy waters of the Congo River estuary, mixed into the ocean’s blue, long before the coast itself becomes apparent. He ends it with another arrival, this time by plane, landing in Kinshasa, back from a trip to Guangzhou, China, and its improbable Congolese expat community.

In between, we follow the history of this gigantic country, from the 1870s to 2010 (when the book was originally published in Dutch - van Reybrouck himself being Belgian). Famous - or, mostly, infamous - figures of history make their appearance: Tippu Tip, the Arabic slave trader that created a proto-kingdom in the jungle; Henry Stanley (of Livingstone fame), for whom Stanleyville (now Kisangani, Congo’s fourth-largest city) was named; Leopold II, obviously, the rapacious King of the Belgians who dreamed of and connived to acquire an African colony; Patrice Lumumba, the ill-fated firebrand who would (briefly) become the first Prime Minister of an independent Congo; Mobutu Sese Seko, the extravagant dictator with the leopard cap, who renamed the country to Zaire; Kabila père and fils, finally, who would overthrow Mobutu, see Congo descend into what’s become known as Africa’s Great War, and stitch the country back together in a fragile peace.

But what distinguishes van Reybrouck’s account from other histories is the meshing in of eyewitness accounts into these drumbeats of official history. In the early chapters, we follow him to dilapidated houses in Kinshasa, Kisangani and beyond to speak with men of unlikely ages, born before the turn of the 20th century, who still remembered Leopold II’s henchmen or the slave-traders’ boats on the mighty Congo River. We meet veterans from both World Wars and their unfairly forgotten raids into Tanzania (then German East Africa) and later Ethiopia (then Italian Abyssinia) - in both cases, Belgium’s contribution to the war effort of the Allies was mostly outsourced to the colony multiple times its size.

The book truly starts to shine as we approach Congolese independence and move towards van Reybrouck’s present. Many more witnesses are now available, and through their testimonies, we see the decline and fall of Congo into civil war, authoritarianism, penury, civil war again, and finally a tenuous economic revival, fuelled mostly by Chinese trade. The breadth of people van Reybrouck’s lets speak out is staggering: a pop musician, a radio presenter, a former child soldier, a women who suffered unspeakable atrocities during the civil war in the Great Lakes area, a rebel leader in the same area, a political prisoner in Kinshasa’s most infamous prison, a Belgian brewery manager, a woman on her way to China to import cheap goods she will resell in Kinshasa, any many many more. The closer we get to the present day, the more the book becomes a journalistic essay - anecdotes and testimonies take over from official accounts.

Van Reybrouck is clearly more interested in the “man of the street” than in the politician, minister or CEO - and so we get a history filtered through the experiences of everyday people. While this could be a recipe for disaster, for missing the big picture in the anodyne, van Reybrouck’s stellar writing pulls it all together. It’s a magnificent achievement, which has earned its author well-deserved acclaim.

Van Reybrouck decided to end his book with a chapter set in the Congolese expat community in Guangzhou. Not in Brussels, Paris or London - major expat centres in Europe, the former colonial powers of the continent, but in China, whom these same powers (disingenuously) decry as neocolonial. Van Reybrouck doesn’t pass judgment on Chinese investment in Congo - after all, has Western aid really helped that much? (During his trip to war-torn Eastern Congo, his interlocutors cynically note that all the foreign NGOs reside in fancy buildings and their employees drive brand-new SUVs.) It is a bittersweet ending: Congo remains weak and dependant on foreigners, but at the same time, the Congolese themselves are starting to seize the economic opportunities offered by globalisation.

Van Reybrouck would go to apply the same formula to Indonesia and its independence struggle in “Revolusi: Indonesia and the Birth of the Modern World” (originally published in 2020) - a more focused account that stops after independence and is scathing about the Netherlands, the former colonial overlord. I read it last year, and found it equally compelling. Both books are thus strong recommendations, not just for those interested in colonialism and the struggle for independence, but for anyone keen to learn more about two enormous countries we tend to skim over in our own world history accounts.

The plot marries a murder mystery with a love story, and takes place in the cloistered world of late 16th century Ottoman court painters. Four of these have been tasked by The Uncle with creating a set of miniatures in the European style for a book commissioned by the sultan, and the novel opens with the murder of one of them. In parallel, the Uncle’s nephew Kara (the Black) returns from the East and vies for the love of the recently widowed daughter of the Uncle, Shekure. He soon becomes embroiled in the murder mystery and has to find out who amongst the remaining painters has committed the murder.

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So far, so Umberto Eco’s Name of the Rose. Yet in a time when well-crafted plots are poo-pooed in literary fiction, it’s still worth highlighting it as the first reason why this is a masterpiece:

1. It has an engaging plot that keeps you turning the page (and trying to uncover the assassin / wondering whether Shekure will become the Black’s lover).

But My Name is Red is much more than a whodunnit with a topping of Pride and Prejudice. It has a unique, polyphonic structure, with multiple POVs narrating its 59 chapters, starting with The Corpse, and then featuring the main protagonists (the Black, Shekure, the Uncle, Master Osman (the head of the sultan’s court painters), the three painters, and the assassin himself), but also a series of caricatures told in the voice of a satirist (including one POV of the colour Red - the novel’s title-giver). Multiple POVs are not easy to pull off, but Orhan Pamuk manages brilliantly. So this is the second ingredient of this masterpiece:

2. An innovative structure featuring multiple POVs, including the assassin as one of the painters and (in a different voice) as the assassin himself. In an echo of postmodernism, the protagonists are aware that we are reading a book about them, and the assassin is teasing the reader to identify him among the three painters - one of which, thus, becomes the ultimate unreliable narrator.

But plot and structure only bring you so far:

3. Flawless execution brings it to life. The characters are three-dimensional, interesting, and sometimes behave in mercurial ways (looking at you, Shekure). A whole arsenal of Chekhov’s guns are put in place and later wielded, including metaphorical ones: the story of the Persian painter Bihzad, the idol of Master Osman and some of the painters, is more than just an ornament to the novel - it ends up driving major (and unexpected) parts of the plot. So does Shekure’s other love interest, Hassan, her lost husband’s brother.

4. Pamuk conjures an immersive world: we wander through the back alleys of the Istanbul of Murad III’s Ottoman Empire with Esther, the Jewish matchmaker, and discover the sultan’s palace through the admiring eyes of the Black. The world of miniature painting, too, slowly unfolds, in the recollections of Master Osman, the explanations of the painters when describing their techniques, the stories about precious books and their provenance, which are contrasted to the quick-and-dirty sketches done for the satirist.

Up to this point, this makes for an excellent historical novel. But Pamuk takes it up a notch, makes it literary, which is nowadays a pompous way of saying that he not only tells us a compelling story, but also makes us think, makes us ponder the past and the present.

5. On the one hand, My Name is Red is a work in dialogue with literature more broadly - and I’m just a sucker for that. I referenced the post-modernist touches already. But it’s also paying its reverence to the classics of Persian and Arabic literature - the Shahnameh, the Quran, Layla and Majnun, and first and foremost Nezami’s Khosrow and Shirin, which is referenced multiple times and frames the Black’s and Shekure’s love story. Needless to say, Khosrow and Shirin soon made it into my Amazon basket.

6. It also explores thorny philosophical questions, in particular as they relate to art. What is style? Should an artist aim to have an own style, or aim to emulate the ancient masters? Should the individual take precedence before the community? Should art aim to depict the real world or should it rather aim to depict the ideal world as God sees it? The way these discussions weave in and out of the story is very reminiscent of Thomas Mann’s Magic Mountain, and like Mann Pamuk leaves it up to the readers to make up their mind.

7. Last but certainly not least, it’s a novel that speaks to issues we face today. My Name is Red is marketed as exploring the tension between the East and the West in Ottoman Turkey - but of course these questions were just as relevant when Pamuk published it in 1998, and remain relevant today. Turkey is and has always been at the crossroads of Europe and the world of Islam (and beyond that, as the novel notes occasionally, China and India). The figure of the conservative preacher Nusret Hodja (pointedly referred to as coming from Erzurum, i.e. from Anatolia - to the East of Istanbul) is a stand-in for the religious conservatives that dominate Turkish politics today - and beyond that, for religious fanatics as well as other conservative (and populist) forces that have surged recently in the political discourse. In the end, the tension between the Western painting style and the Eastern one remains unresolved - as does the more cosmic tension between those promoting the new and those wanting to preserve the old (and those who don’t care and just want to take profit from whatever faction is winning at any given time).

Finally, all these elements are linked by

8. a thematic red thread that stitches all those thoughts together. A recurring contrast is made in My Name is Red between seeing and blindness. The miniaturists are masters at seeing the smallest details, yet their art threatens them with old-age blindness. But maybe it’s better to become blind and thus closer to God? Seeing, being seen, not being allowed to see: the protagonists of the novel (and maybe we, too) navigate their world with varying sets of blinds. Some choose not to see what they don’t want to see. Some are unafraid to gaze at that most flamboyant and most garish of the colours, and at beauties and horrors it fills:

   Red.

A piece of literature that leaves you pondering for days on end is either a very flawed work (e.g. a work that keeps you wondering how its enticing premise could have been squandered in such a deplorable way - looking at you, House of Leaves) or a work of genius that layers various strata of meaning that you have to peel like an unexpected literary onion. Wole Soyinka’s famous drama “Death and the King’s Horseman” luckily falls into the second category.

On the surface, the work features the confrontation between the native and the colonial, represented by Elesin, the titular King’s Horseman scheduled for ritual suicide, and Pilkings, the English representative of the Crown, bound to ensure the visit of the Prince goes without indigenous hick-up. The play is based on a real incident that happened in 1945 (though Soyinka moves it back to the middle of WWII).

It would be easy to read the play as a critique of colonialism versus African traditions. And, indeed, my very first urge went in that direction. The titular Yoruba suicide ritual is (Spoiler alert!) fulfilled, but not by the King’s Horseman. Instead, his Britain-educated son takes his stead. Pilkings, the bumbling colonial emissary who arrests Elesin to stop the ritual, is presented as out of his depth and contemptuous of traditional Yoruba values.

Wole Soyinka duly warns us against making this a simple “Africa vs Britain” interpretation. In his Author’s notes, he states:

One of the most obvious alternative structures of the play would be to make the District Officer [i.e.. Pilkings] the victim of a cruel dilemma. This is not to my taste and it is not by chance that I have avoided dialogue or situation which would encourage this. No attempt should be made in production to suggest it. The Colonial Factor is an incident, a catalytic incident merely.

Soyinka points to the metaphysical struggle between the world of the living and the dead - I’ll leave it to smarter and more knowledgeable people than me to ponder this point.

But a few takeaways I’m taking for myself are the following:

1. Women are the driving force of this play

Both on the African as well as on the British side, women play a key role in this play. The Yoruba market women act as an ancient Greek chorus, egging Elesin on, confronting Amusa (the local sergeant in the employ of the British), chanting and bringing about the tragic conclusion of the play. Iyaloja, their main spokesperson, is strong-willed, yet bound by tradition. She ultimately gives in to Elesin’s final desire: “marry” Iyaloja daughter-in-law-to-be before departing. The young girl, only known as the Bride, is the ultimate victim of the play.

Jane Pilkings, the British officer’s wife, is just as strong-willed, but just as steeped in British tradition (and carelessly dismissive of some local traditions, such as wearing local religious garb for a fancy-dress party). In contrast to her husband, she at least tries to understand the motivations of 'the natives’, yet ultimately fails.

Last but not least, the sub-chorus of the Yoruba schoolgirls is a delight. They mock Amusa and his officers, as well as their colonial masters, in eloquent English that contrasts to the pidgin Amusa and his officers speak throughout the play (it should be noted that all Yoruba characters except those in the employ of the British speak highly polished English in this play).

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The men, in contrast, are passive actors, driven by their desires (Elesin) and their duties (Olunde - Elesin’s son - by his religious duty; Pilkings by his official duty).

2. A play in dialogue with local and world literature

As the references to Greek choruses should make plain, Wole Soyinka put his play in the tradition of ancient Greek tragedies. One is reminded of Sophocles’s Antigone (the blurbs on the back of my edition allude to it), especially with regards to Olunde’s fulfilment of religious duty no matter the consequence. Certainly other parallels with other plays could be found - Antigone is the one I read the most recently. Certainly some Shakespearean plays could also be referenced - I’ll leave that to the scholars of the Bard, however.

It is not a pure transcreation of a Greek play in a Nigerian setting, however. Yoruba traditions, song, dance, drums are weaved into the play, with the Praise-Singer (a character that accompanies the ceremony Elesin is supposed to perform) in particular pinning the play just as firmly in Yoruba tradition (at least so it seems to me - I admit having virtually no knowledge of that tradition). The mocking song of the schoolgirls also adds some comic relief in an otherwise quite serious play.

With regards to the anti-colonial struggle, Wole Soyinka’s play is very much in the same vein as his fellow Nigerian Chinua Achebe’s foundational novel Things Fall Apart. Both “heroes” - Elesin and Okonkwo - are deeply flawed characters that end up playing a role in the anti-colonial struggle almost by accident. Neither is supposed to be liked. Nor are the colonial masters cruel, evil demons - instead, ignorant of local affairs and with little sympathy for “the natives”, they spend their time at parties on at the “English Club”. The absurdity of colonialism is thus laid bare.

3. An ambiguous take on Africa’s post-colonial struggle

Chinua Achebe’s novel was written in 1958, two years before Nigerian independence. Wole Soyinka’s play dates from March 1975 - the Nigerian Republic had since succumbed to military rule and gone through the Biafra War; another military coup would happen mere months after publication.

It would thus be wrong, I think, to interpret the end of the play as a victory of Yoruba tradition versus British colonialism (and Soyinka warns us against that interpretation). Yes, the Yoruba ritual has finally been completed, despite the arrest of Elesin by Pilkings. But at what cost? The brightest character - Olunde, son of Elesin - has died for the father. Elesin’s young “Bride” (which he took from her designated betrothed) is saddled, we’re led to believe, with his child. The next generation of Yoruba has been sacrificed on the altar of that ancient ritual. Was it worth it?

The Praise-Singer accuses Elesin thus:

Elesin, we placed the reins of the world in your hands yet you watched it plunge over the edge of the bitter precipice. […] Your heir has taken the burden upon himself. What the end will be, we are not gods to tell. But this young shoot has poured its sap into the parent stalk, and we know this is not the way of life. Our world is tumbling in the void of strangers, Elesin.

The Yoruba ritual (and, more broadly, the appeal to pre-colonial African tradition) is seen as a way to combat the encroaching world of the foreigners, of the British colonisers. Yet it doesn’t bring freedom - instead, it traps and condemns the young.

In this light, the post-colonial struggles could equally be viewed as flawed: the reins of the world / Nigeria were placed into the hands of those hearkening back to the virtues of pre-colonial Africa. Yet these leaders only cared about enriching themselves (Elesin is granted precious and flamboyant clothes before the ritual) and taking advantage of the population (Elesin’s “Bride”). The young were sent to fight in the disastrous Biafran War for their leaders (Olunde muses about the useless sacrifice of young Europeans in the ongoing World War - Wole Soyinka purposefully moved the date of the incident back), to sacrifice themselves for Nigeria - but nothing changed, and indeed the military dictatorship would endure for several more years.

Surely, there’s much more to this play than my layman’s brain can capture. Feel free to comment / add to this / correct my mistakes in the comments.

In Adam Tooze‘s magisterial „The Deluge - The Great War and the Remaking of the World Order“, the aftermath of WWI becomes an economic thriller, the denouement of which - Hitler‘s rise to the Chancellorship, Japan‘s slide into militarism and Stalin‘s consolidation of power - is sadly well-known in advance. Tooze deftly highlights how America retreated to aloofness in international matters (refusing to remain involved in European security) while remaining adamant about British and French repayment of their war debts. France - left without security guarantees and saddled with those enormous debts - saw no other recourse than intransigence towards Germany with regards to reparations. Britain - also heavily indebted - found the management of its vast Empire suddenly more burdensome than before, and France rather annoying. The erosion of trust between the three Western Allies would culminate in the protectionist policies of the Great Depression.

Weimar Germany, on the other hand, comes across as more resilient than often thought. It navigated various severe crises - hyperinflation, Hitler‘s Beer Hall putsch, the French occupation of the Rhineland - without collapsing. But the burden of reparations led to reckless policies: it amassed massive loans from Wall Street in order to pay French and British reparations (which France and Britain in turn then used to pay their war debts to the US). The irony was not lost on the Soviet leaders. Tooze quotes Trotsky as follows:

From the financial shackles on Germany’s feet, there extend solid chains which encumber the hands of France, the feet of Italy and the neck of Britain. [Prime Minister] MacDonald, who nowadays fulfills the duties of keeper to the British lion, points with pride to his dog collar, calling it the best instrument of peace.

When the Great Depression hit, the whole carousel collapsed on itself.

One should be cautious when deriving lessons from historical episodes. 2025 is not at all like 1925. Yet the squabbling between Europe and the US, Russia on a trajectory completely at odds with the rest of the world, high levels of debt in many countries and a renewed popularity of tariffs are all elements eerily reminiscent of a century ago.

I look forward to reading and hearing more from Adam Tooze. His WWII book „The Wages of Destruction“ is already on my To-Be-Read pile.

In the previous instalment of this little series, we looked at the concept of national poetry, and looked at two examples, Fernando Pessoa (Portugal) and Giacomo Leopardi (Italy).

Today, we’ll visit three contemporary poets (i.e. who lived at the same time, not currently living ones) from three countries with widely idiosyncratic histories: Ukraine, Hungary and Haiti.

Ukraine - Taras Shevchenko

It’s been often quipped in the past few years that nothing contributed more to creating a Ukrainian sense of nationhood than Vladimir Putin’s invasion starting in February 2022. But that’s, of course, too simplistic a view - Ukraine (like every other nation) has multiple episodes in its history it can build a national story around, from the Grand Principality of Kyivan Rus’ in the Middle Ages (an entity that Russia, too, claims as its cultural progenitor) to the Cossack Hetmanate, the cavalry-based military state of the steppes that enjoyed autonomy from both Poland-Lithuania and the Russian Empire.

It is also true that for long stretches of history Ukraine was subjugated by neighbouring powers, and often partitioned between them. It was during one of these periods, in the first half of the 19th century, that Taras Shevchenko (1814-1861) emerged as the national poet of Ukraine - in particular because he elevated the Ukrainian language to literary status.

Shevchenko’s poetry was published under the title Kobzar (i.e. a bard playing a traditional Ukrainian instrument, the kobza), first in 1840 (with 8 poems), followed by editions in 1844 and 1860 that expanded the number of poems (though censorship prevented the inclusion of some of them). He himself was later styled Kobzar, and the edition I have includes (supposedly) all his poems under the name The Complete Kobzar. Like many figures that fell afoul Russian Imperial (or later Soviet) power, Shevchenko was arrested, and later exiled to a remote corner of Kazakhstan (to a penal colony nowadays called Fort-Shevchenko).

Like Leopardi, Shevchenko despairs at the wretched state of his beloved Ukraine. In My Fraternal Missive, we find passages like this one (all translations by Peter Fedynsky):

Behold your quiet paradise,

Behold this land of yours,

Come to love with all your heart

The great Ukrainian ruin,

Throw off your chains, be brothers,

Do not seek and do not ask

In foreign lands

What even heaven does not proffer.

How resonant these verses are today when large swathes of Ukraine are, again, ruins!

The past partitions of Ukraine are alluded to in the following verses (again reminiscent of Leopardi):

And thus our parent spilled their blood

For Moscow and for Warsaw

And to you, their sons, they passed

Their shackles and their glory!

And the glory of Ukraine is the motto for the last segment of the poem, where Shevchenko “beseeches” and “implores” his brethren to heed his call to revive their homeland.

But not only Ukraine itself is heralded in this poem. So is the Ukrainian language:

It has harmony, and power,

It’s music, say no more.

And history!… it’s the poem

Of a people and their liberty!

With Shevchenko, the Ukrainian language itself, spoken by the “simple folk”, becomes an instrument of defiance, of rebellion. Only when Ukrainians view their own language as equivalent to other Slavic languages, Shevchenko implies, will their nation be equivalent to the others as well.

Shevchenko’s poems also depict Ukraine’s plight in a more oblique way. A very moving poem, written during his exile in Siberia (in 1847) is The Princess, a dark fairytale that ends tragically. The poem follows two women, the Princess, married to a drunkard who keeps her in captivity, and her daughter, who is neglected after her mother’s death, and is raped by her drunken father upon returning home from Kyiv. This tragedy unfolds in a village ravaged by famine and the indolence of the prince:

Years go by; people die,

Famine rages in Ukraine,

It rages in the princely village.

The prince’s sheaves have rotted.

It’s all the same to him—

He drinks, he dances,

And awaits the Jew with money.

(NB: I hesitated whether to include the last verse. Unfortunately, as was so common in 19th century literature (and before and after), latent and pervasive anti-semitism casts Jews as greedy money-lenders. Shevchenko was a creature of his time - this neither exonerates nor damns him, but readers should be aware.)

The “famine” cruelly foreshadows the Holodomor of the 1930s, of course, but more than that, I can’t shake the thought that both the Princess and her daughter are images for Ukraine itself: captured and imprisoned, ravaged by its rulers, both foreign (the tsar) and local (the nobility).

Last but not least, I’d like to highlight his poem The Caucasus (from 1845, one of those that couldn’t be included in Kobzar due to censorship). In it, Shevchenko highlights the plight of another region, also shackled but unbowed. By criticising Russian imperialism in the Caucasus, he implicitly chastises Russian imperialism overall, including in Ukraine (and indeed Ukraine is alluded to at the end of the poem). It starts with an amazing evocation of the Caucasus:

Mountains beyond mountains

Shrouded in clouds,

Seeded by grief and showered with blood.

Prometheus is invoked (myth had it that he was chained to a mountain in the Caucasus, and that an eagle would come and eat his liver every day - just for it to regenerate over night). Yet Prometheus - like the Caucasian people, like the Ukrainians - remains defiant each night he regains his life:

The heart pulses again,

And again it knows laughter.

Our soul does not perish,

Not does freedom expire.

Like in Pessoa, like in Leopardi, tears run: the tears of widows are enough to drown the czars and their descendants, as are the tears of the maidens, the “burning tears” of mothers, “the old and bloody tears of fathers”. The poem is full of rousing imagery. The people of the Caucasus are poor, living in their traditional huts, but Orthodoxy has been brought to them by their Russian conquerors:

The reason we’re literate

Is to read the word of God!..

And from the deepest dungeon

To the highest altar—

We’re all in gold and naked.

Has imperialism ever been indicted by more powerful imagery than this: the naked body of the colonised wrapped in the fool’s gold of Empire and Christianity?

Hungary - Sándor Petőfi

Where Taras Shevchenko yearned for revolution, Sándor Petőfi was in the midst of it. Born in 1823, he was in his early twenties during the Hungarian Revolution of 1848 (where he was a major figure) and is supposed to have died in 1849 at the Battle of Segesvár (lost by the Hungarians revolutionaries against the troops of the Russian Empire, which the Austrian Emperor had called for help). The Hungarian Revolution is a seminal event in Hungarian history, and paved the way for a reconfiguring of the Habsburg monarchy into the Austro-Hungarian Empire in 1867, which put Hungary on equal footing with Austria (but kept all other peoples subordinated to the Dual Monarchy).

Petőfi’s claim to fame is The National Poem - more than Leopardi’s All’Italia, this work has almost anthemic qualities; when Petőfi read it to the crowd in Budapest, it chanted the refrain with him:

A magyarok istenére
Esküszünk,
Esküszünk, hogy rabok tovább
Nem leszünk!

In the translation of László Kőrössy, this becomes:

By the God of the Hungarians

We vow,

We vow, that we won’t be slaves

Any longer!

Rousing stuff. Replace “Magyar” with any other nationality, and it could easily be the national song/poem of that nation, too. It even includes lines like this one:

The Magyar name will be great again,

But Petőfi was not just the revolutionary poet, the proto-MAGA poet, the poet of the barricades. He also evokes Hungary in lush, romantic landscape poetry. A very beautiful one is Az Alföld (The Plains), for which, sadly, I couldn’t find an English translation (the book on Hungarian Poetry I have is in German). It helped establish our general image of Hungary of the country of plains, of steppe, of flat grasslands and of the puszta. Indeed, he starts by dismissing the “romantic Carpathian mountains” that one can admire but not love, and to which his imagination never wanders. Instead, the green plains of Hungary captivate him, the cattle with their bells, the wind of the puszta, the hooves of the horses, the wild geese and the poplar trees that dot the flat landscape, etc.. Hadn’t he been a revolutionary, one can’t help but imagine that he’d have been the perfect spokesperson for the Hungarian tourism office.

Haiti - Oswald Durand

Where Shevchenko dreamed of revolution, and Petőfi lived it, Oswald Durand (1840-1906) celebrated the successful Haitian revolution that had taken place from 1791 to 1804, and, in contrast to the Hungarian one, resulted in Haiti’s independence. The extraordinary history of Haiti can’t be told often enough: it was the only successful slave revolt in human history; it established the first country in the Americas led by former black slaves; the Haitians gained their independence from France while Napoleon Bonaparte (yes, he who conquered most of Europe) was in power. While Haiti today is a byword for a failed state, it was a beacon of freedom during the 19th century.

As other newly independent countries in the Americas, Haiti was keen not only to establish a powerful polity (at one point it had an emperor, and later a king) but also to foster a cultural environment that would rival its former overlord. Haiti’s elites spoke French, and so did (and, to a large extent, still does) its literature. But it would take till the second half of the 19th century for Haiti to produce a poet that went beyond imitating what was being written in Paris and who could genuinely be called the father of Haitian literature: Oswald Durand.

(NB: One note of praise here for Jeff Bezos and Amazon - I know, I know, it’s a satanic company and Bezos is Lucifer descended upon Venice: weren’t it for them, I doubt I would have been able to get hold of a book of Durand’s poetry, published by a Haitian press (and thus allowing my money to make its way to Port-au-Prince)).

Durand, too, wrote a National Song (Chant National), which starts where Shevchenko and Petőfi stopped:

Quand nos Aïeux brisèrent leurs entraves

In my translation:

When our forefathers broke their shackles

But instead of being a song of joy, of glory, it instead reminds readers (and listeners, as it served as Haiti’s unofficial anthem for some time) of the hard work that is still needed in order to build the nation, while appealing to the memory and the “strong arms” of the Haitian founders (Jean-Jacques Dessalines, Toussaint Louverture, Marie-Jeanne Lamartinière - Durand doesn’t forget the women who led the revolution!). Each chorus ends on the following lines:

Il nous faut la devise austère :
Dieu ! Le Travail ! La Liberté !

In my translation:

We require this austere motto:
God ! Labour ! Liberty !

Yet Durand is even more famous for another poem - one that arguably did even more for Haiti’s sense of nation: Choucoune, the first poem written in Haitian Creole, the language of the common people of Haiti. While Wikipedia focuses on its subsequent incarnation as a song, its importance at bringing the vernacular into literature can’t be overstated (and is reminiscent to similar endeavours in e.g. China or Turkey to introduce the vernacular into literature instead of sticking to the Court Mandarin or Ottoman Turkish spoken only by the elites and literati). The poem celebrates Haitian women, and is probably too titillating for Substack (though I welcome you to check out Dady Chery’s translation of the song version here). But let’s at least cite the first few verses in the musical, original Haitian Creole:

Dérié yon gros touf’ pingoin,

L’aut’jou, main contré Choucoune;

Li sourit l’heur’ li oué moin,

Moin dit: “Ciel! À la bell’moune!”

I’m one of those people who’ll pack their luggage full of books - more books by weight than clothes - when travelling on holidays. Holidays are still some time off, but as I finally settled the weeks I wanted to take off, the logical next step was to go through my bookshelves and pick out those books that might make the trip with me. I won’t read all of them, of course, but right now these are the ones that feel right for a summer read. So here they are!

Fiction

Z, by Vassilis Vassilikos (Greece, 1966)

Originally bought last year for a planned trip to Athens that was cancelled at the last minute, Z has been taunting me ever since. Modern Greek literature is seldomly talked about - probably forever overshadowed by Homer, Sophocles and the other Classic Greek luminaries. And it’s a shame. Early last year I read the wonderful Orthokostá by Thanassis Valtinos - a novel told in testimonies by unnamed (and likely unreliable) witnesses of the Greek Civil War at the end of WWII in a rural corner of the Peloponnese. Z also tackles a historical episode of recent Greek history: the assassination of the left-wing politician Grigoris Lambrakis in 1963. One year after its publication, a military junta seizes power in Greece, and Vassilikos was forced into exile. The novel was banned. 2025 feels like a year to read banned books.

The Memory Monster, by Yishai Sarid (Israel, 2017)

A knee-jerk reaction to any geopolitical conflict is to “cancel” any cultural artefact from the belligerant(s) one disagrees with. This is, of course, short-sighted. The books, music, works of art of a country may, on the contrary, offer a different - and corrective - image of what makes the soul of a country as compared to its government’s words and deeds. In The Memory Monster (Monster in the German translation I have), Yishai Sarid explores the effect of the Holocaust, and the memory of the Holocaust, on an Israeli tour guide at the Treblinka concentration camp. A bleak summer read, granted, but it’s short - and I like reflections on history, and how history is reinterpreted and used over time.

Island of the Doomed, by Stig Dagerman (Sweden, 1946)

We stay in bleak territory with Stig Dagerman’s Island of the Doomed - a novel that “was unlike any other yet seen in Sweden” when it was first published, as the blurb titillatingly claims. Seven castaways “await[ing] their inevitable death on a desert island”, blind gulls, “hordes of iguanas”, a “poisonous lagoon” - doesn’t this just sound like the perfect summer getaway? Or like Lost, half a century before Lost? Le Clézio calls it “undoubtedly one of the strangest novels of the twentieth century” - high praise that raises high expectations. But I’m already hooked.

Arjuna and the Hunter, by Bharavi (India, c. 6th century AD, written in Sanskrit)

The Mahābhārata contains a world of stories, and centuries of Indian poets since its composition in the depths of time have strived to give those stories their own spin and to develop them further. Many of these attempts have become classic Indian epics in their own right - such as Bharavi’s Kirātārjunīya (Arjuna and the Hunter). Arjuna, one of the Pandava brothers (the main protagonists of the Mahabharata) travels to the Himalayas to request a boon from Shiva. Shiva tests Arjuna in combat, allowing the epic to explore themes such as discipline, valour and the warrior ethos.

Khosrow and Shirin, by Nezami Ganjavi (Azerbaijan, c. 1180, written in Persian)

Another epic, this time from Persian literature. Nezami wrote five epics overall, each of them considered a masterpiece. Khosrow and Shirin, the second of the five, tells the tragic love story between an Iranian prince (Khosrow) and an Armenian princess (Shirin). The blurb makes it sound like a sort of Persian Romeo and Juliet, with court politics mixed in - is there anything more one can wish from a romance novel?

Cubafruit, by Alexander Sorondo (USA, 2025)

The most recent book on my list of possibilities is by Substack’s very own Alexander Sorondo and comes with high praise from book critic and Youtuber extraordinaire Steve Donoghue (yes, do check out all those links - they’re all worth it!). This literary thriller has it all: a historian getting a call from an unlisted number, an imaginary Caribbean nation called San Mara, a late fascist dictator named Omar Basto, a political exile turned potential shooter - and that’s only what the blurb has on offer! I’m sold!

The Old Man and the Bureaucrat, by Mircea Eliade (Romania, 1967)

Sticking to police states: in this short 128-page satire on Ceaucescu’s Romania and its bureaucrats, Mircea Eliade channels his inner Kafka. A retired schoolteacher is taken in for questioning and, to survive, tells his interrogators fantastical stories like a modern-day Sheherazade. As the interrogators fall under the spell of these folkloric stories and try to find hidden meanings in them, they themselves become suspect.

On the Calculation of Volume - I, by Solvej Balle (Denmark, 2020)

The sensation novel out of Denmark. Planned as a septology, five books have so far been published in Danish (two in English, three in German). A new take on Groundhog Day (where the same day repeats again and again), On the Calculation of Volume follows Tara Selter, stuck in 18. November. Initially trapped with her husband, Tara finds out that while time is fixed, place is not, and she’s able to travel and awake in other locations. This twist is what makes the novel quite intriguing. And yes, I went for the German translation because the cover looks nicer than the English one. That’s how shallow I am.

Air, by Christian Kracht (Switzerland, 2025, written in German)

Ich werde hier sein im Sonnenschein und im Schatten, by Christian Kracht (Switzerland, 2008, written in German)

I fell in love with Christian Kracht’s prose in Imperium, his exploration of German New Guinea. For me, he’s the true heir to Thomas Mann. Once the enfant terrible of German-language literature, he’s one of its most celebrated authors nowadays. His newest novel Air was just published, and the premise (Swiss interior designer living on the Orkney islands gets a mysterious commission that takes him to Norway and beyond) is very intriguing. But I might also go for a previous novel of his, Ich werde hier sein im Sonnenschein und im Schatten (seemingly untranslated to English, but sth. like: I’ll be be here in the sunshine and the shadow), which imagines a dystopian Swiss Soviet Republic that has been at war with fascist Germany and England for decades. What? I fell like reading it now!

My Name is Red, by Orhan Pamuk (Turkey, 1998)

From Swiss interior designers to Ottoman artists: Orhan Pamuk’s masterpiece takes us to the Sultan’s workshop of illuminators. A murder has been committed, and the miniaturists are tasked with illuminating a work in the Italian style - the horror! A mystery that muses on Turkey’s place between the East and the West: sounds like a win to me.

Chronicle of a Blood Merchant, by Yu Hua (China, 1995)

Contemporary Chinese literature tends to hit hard. Be it through scathing satire (such as Yan Lianke’s new novel Heart Sutra), the “hallucinatory realism” of Mo Yan (in The Republic of Liquor) or the deeply pessimistic science fiction of Liu Cixin, the darker sides of China’s astonishing rise are laid bare. Ages ago I read Yu Hua’s Brothers, which follows the same approach. In this earlier work, Yu Hua chronicles the life of Xu Sanguan, who sells his blood in order to support his family during a bout of famine. Chilling, and sounds worth reading for the amazing title alone.

Drive your Plow over the Bones of the Dead, by Olga Tokarczuk (Poland, 2009)

For some strange reason, Olga Tokarczuk’s German translators decided to title this “Song of the Bats”, which made me check various times whether this was indeed the correct book. A mysterious death in a Polish village on the Czech border is investigated by an elderly lady who’s fond of astrology and William Blake. Soon she starts to believe that the local animals did the killing. But did they? Sounds like the perfect book to read on a beach while watching sea gulls and eating fish. Right? Right?

The Good Son, by You-Jeong Jeong (South Korea, 2016)

“The smell of blood woke me.” Thus starts our next murder novel, this one from Korea. This is no Han Kang (she may have won last year’s Nobel Prize, but she’ll have to wait, sorry) but probably more beach-appropriate. And no killing animals are implied this time, only a psychopath. Phew! Feeling at once more at ease.

Piranesi, by Susanna Clarke (United Kingdom, 2020)

Is there an accolade Susanna Clarke didn’t win for Piranesi? The titular character lives in the House with its innumerable halls and arcades. Maybe he has always lived there. But one day he perceives signs that there may be somebody else in the House. Susanna Clarke may have reinvented the myth for our modern times.

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Jerusalem, by Gonçalo M. Tavares (Portugal, 2004)

A Voyage to India, by Gonçalo M. Tavares (Portugal, 2010)

As I’m planning on travelling to Portugal, I feel I should read a Portuguese author. Gonçalo M. Tavares has been anointed by José Saramago as the greatest Portuguese author of the next generation and has garnered awards like others collect Pokemon. I have two books of his. His break-out novel Jerusalem is simply blurbed with: “A woman, an assassin, a doctor, a child, a prostitute and a madman. And one night.” A Voyage to India is a modern-day epic poem, a response to that cornerstone of Portuguese literature, Camōes’ Lusiads.

Autobiography of Red, by Anne Carson (Canada, 1998, written in English)

Greek myth retellings have been popular in recent years, to the extent that Greek mythology has been raked clear like the sea floors after a rapacious fishing trawler. But this the real deal. Anne Carson, the celebrated Canadian poet, takes fragments from a forgotten Greek poet, Stesichoros, about a forgotten mythological figure, Geryon, and recreates the myth - in verse, of course.

Near to the Wild Heart, by Clarice Lispector (Brazil, 1943)

Clarice Lispector has become a contemporary darling on BookTube (the segment of Youtube for the literary inclined). Her first novel (this one) caused a sensation in Brazil for its focus on interiority and its stream-of-consciousness style (then a novelty in Portuguese language literature). While Brazilian literature is often included under the Latin American tag, it seems to me that it has always beaten to its own drum, and within it Clarice Lispector has played a bossa nova to other authors’ samba.

M. The Man of Providence (Italy, 2020)

This is the second tome in Antonio Scurati’s celebrated historical novel on Benito Mussolini. I read the first tome - M. Son of the Century - during the winter break and absolutely loved it. And though I needed a pause from Mussolini’s mind, now might be a good time to re-descend to its sordid depths.

Nonfiction

For decades, I’ve read more nonfiction than fiction (like many men, I suspect - the current kerfuffle about why men don’t read fiction could easily be turned on its head: why do women read so little nonfiction?), and a good nonfiction book can be as spellbinding as a good novel

But nonfiction depends on individual interest - and mine clearly lies in history. The five nonfiction books that have piqued my interest are all history books. Wu Han’s biography of the founder of the Ming dynasty intrigued me because Chinese nonfiction is so rarely translated - and how better to learn about a Chinese emperor than through the lens of a 20th century Chinese historian? Celebrated Indian author Amitav Ghosh’s latest book looks at the opium trade. Adam Tooze analyses the economic consequences of World War I. Norwegian author Erika Fatland wrote a bestseller in her native Norway on the lands formerly visited by and colonised by the Portuguese - as a Portuguese, I’m flabbergasted Norwegians could be that interested in our history! Last but not least, and certainly inspired by recent events, a full history of the Arab world, edited by Andreas Kaplony, beckons - and its weight might serve it well in preventing beach towels from being blown away.

The 2020s have seen the remarkable renaissance of nationalism, across Europe, in the US, in India and beyond. We’ve been here before, of course, in the days of national awakening (and imperialism) of the 19th century, in the apocalypse of the two world wars, in the new nations that rose out of colonialism. Maybe nationalism never really died, and only slumbered.

Poets have often wrestled with the meaning of the nation, with its soul, be it as an exhortation to regain the splendour of a lost golden age, be it to despair of its flaws. The Portuguese national anthem tells its people to “raise again today the splendour of Portugal” (and contemporary Portuguese author António Lobo Antunes examines the post-colonial reality of this call to arms in his novel “The Splendour of Portugal” - one I have yet to read). The Polish national anthem famously starts with the statement that “Poland is not yet lost”. And Taras Shevchenko’s oeuvre as a whole is a lament on the (then) state of Ukraine and an appeal for its people to remember and save their fatherland.

But not all poetry that reflects on the nation is necessarily a glorification of its greatness or declaration of its decadence. Russian poets, for instance, have both admired their vast country and dissected the flaws of its governance (under its various historic incarnations). Ko Un tackles the various tragedies that have befallen Korea during his lifetime. Constantine Cavafy, on the other hand, takes us on an escapade to an imagined Ancient Greece.

For this little overview, I did a little search through my library and came up with a few examples of how “the nation” has been approached in poetry.

Portugal - Fernando Pessoa

Whenever I think of my own “nation”, I’m reminded of Fernando Pessoa’s poem Mar Português (Portuguese Sea), a poem that I encountered as a teenager and that has entranced me ever since.

Fernando Pessoa famously used various “heteronyms” - various personas, we would call them today - which wrote in completely different poetic styles according to their (imagined) backgrounds. Alberto Caeiro, a shepherd, wrote bucolic, pastoral poems. Ricardo Reis, a doctor, wrote in the style of the Latin classics. Álvaro de Campos was a futurist, then a nihilist. But Fernando Pessoa also wrote one poetry collection in his own name - his nationalist poetry (interestingly, his heteronyms never approached this topic). It’s called Mensagem (Message), and contains poems alluding to Portuguese history, various kings, Portugal’s symbols. One of the most famous is Mar Português (in Portuguese followed by my own English translation):

Mar Português

Ó mar salgado, quanto do teu sal

São lágrimas de Portugal!

Por the cruzarmos, quantas mães choraram,

Quantos filhos em vão rezaram!

Quantas noivas ficaram por casar

Para que fosses nosso, ó mar!

Valeu a pena? Tudo vale a pena

Se a alma não é pequena.

Quem quer passar além do Bojador

Tem que passar além da dor.

Deus ao mar o perigo e o abismo deu,

Mas nele é que espelhou o céu.

In my translation, this becomes:

Portuguese Sea

Oh salty sea, how much of your salt

Comprises tears of Portugal?

For us to cross you, how many mothers wept,

How many sons in vain a prayer kept!

How many brides no husband see,

So that you were ours, oh sea?

Was it worth it? Everything is worth it

Unless your soul has lack of spirit.

If you want to pass Cape Bojador

Go past the pain, and then some more.

God to the sea gave danger and abyss

But in it mirrored heaven’s bliss.

Clearly summing up the Portuguese Age of Discoveries, Pessoa encapsulates the suffering, the pain, the tragedies that accompanied Portugal’s naval expansion. The imagery is gorgeous - the tears of a nation transform into the salt of the endless sea. The personal tragedies, the families torn asunder are poignantly referred to.

And yet, the poem’s second stanza turns to a defiant note. Was it worth it? Everything is worth it - as long as your soul (and the national soul!) is up for it! It reminds me of the sentiment expressed in the surprisingly martial Portuguese national anthem, which starts with “Heróis do mar…” (Heroes of the sea) and ends with the chorus “… contra os canhões marchar, marchar!” (against the canons march, march!). Pessoa ends the poem with another beautiful image: danger and the abyss are contrasted with heaven, which is mirrored in the sea - the implication being clear: nothing could be nobler than conquering the sea, as it’s the reflection of paradise, of eternity (and of eternal national glory).

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Originally published in 1922, it appeared at a time which couldn’t be further removed from the glories of the Age of Discoveries. Portugal had entered the First World War on the side of its traditional allies, the British. Not only did the war lead to high losses and huge costs on the Portuguese economy, the peace did not bring Portugal any of the expected benefits (e.g. parts of the German colonies in Africa) either. The First Republic was immensely unstable, grappled with its own populist (Sidónio Pais, who was assassinated after less than one year in power, and who Pessoa commemorated as “President-King”). It would succumb to a military coup in 1926, which would later evolve into Salazar’s autocratic Estado Novo (New State).

Italy - Giacomo Leopardi

At least Pessoa could write about a nation-state with centuries of history. Giacomo Leopardi lived in a patchwork of states, witnessed the Napoleonic invasions and the reconfiguration of the mosaic of Italian states by the Congress of Vienna. A study of his hugely influential Canti will have to wait for another day (and another person). But the first two poems of the collection, All’Italia (To Italy) and Sopra Il Monumento di Dante (On the Monument to Dante) lament the ruined state of Italy, and exhort his fellow Italians (who don’t yet exist as such) to find the courage of the Greeks at Thermopylae to strengthen Italy.

All’Italia starts as follows:

O patria mia, vedo le mura e gli archi

E le colonne e i simulacri e l’erme

Torri degli avi nostri,

Ma la gloria non vedo,

Non vedo il lauro e il ferro ond’eran carchi

I nostri padri antichi. (...)

Jonathan Galassi translates this beginning as follows:

Oh my country, I can see the walls

And arches and the columns and the statues

And lonely towers of our ancestors

But I don’t see the glory;

I don’t see the laurel and the sword

Our ancient fathers wore.

We see glory again, the missing glory. Where Pessoa evokes the sea, Leopardi looks upon the ruins of Ancient Rome, the distinguished architecture - or, more broadly, the culture of Italy’s past (both Roman and Renaissance), which he vividly alludes to in the wonderful “il lauro e il ferro” - the laurel and the sword. The diminished state of Italy is the red thread of the poem, punctuated by cris de coeur such as this:

Perchè, perchè? dov’è la forza antica,

Why, why? Where is the ancient strength, — (my translation)

The Napoleonic invasions on his mind, he regrets the time when citizens would rally to defend their homeland, even if it meant death - this is where the poem veers into a recollection of the valiant Spartans defending Greece against the armies of Xerxes.

The second poem, Sopra Il Monumento di Dante, continues the enumeration of the woes of Italy: the lack of men of honour, the horrors of the wars in the Italian lands

You didn’t see Italian wives

in barbarian soldiers’ arms — (Galassi’s translation)

as well as the fate of the Italian men that found a grave in the ice of Russia. The titular monument to Dante hasn’t yet been built - “oh vergogna!” / “oh shame!” (my translation) - but the actual monument that remains to be built is “Amor d’Italia” / “Love for Italy”. Tears make a comeback; the many tears that Italy still has to weep for this monument.

These two poems, both much longer than Pessoa’s, are suffused with urgency, with passion. We will see a similar sentiment, oscillating between yearning and despair, in the poetry of Shevchenko, which we will visit in one of our next instalments of this series.

Leopardi, of course, wasn’t alone in his desire for a strong united Italy. And Italy did coalesce, did unify, though Leopardi did not witness it. He died in 1837, decades before Garibaldi and the armies of Piemont-Sardinia commenced and completed the creation of Italy.

In our next instalments of this series, we will be visiting other countries and other moods: Shevchenko and subjugated Ukraine, Sándor Petőfi and rebelling Hungary, Cavafy and the mirage of imagined Greece, Oswald Durand and the thrill of independent Haiti, Ko Un and the tragedies of Korea, and various Russian poets and their difficult relationship to what Hélène Carrère d’Encausse called “the Eurasian Empire”. So stay tuned!

For the past twenty years, if anyone was to ask me “what’s your favourite book?”, the answer would invariably be Umberto Eco’s Foucault’s Pendulum. I read it twice as a student, and lodged in my memory under FBF - Favourite Book Forever.

How much of its charm still holds up as a middle-aged man? Is it still my FBF?

My original copy has long since disappeared - I couldn’t say whether in one of my moves, or because I lent it to someone, or sold it to an online thrift shop. The version I have now was acquired on a whim, last year, in a thrift shop. It’s “pre-loved”, as vintage fashion hunters would say. But I felt I couldn’t have a personal library within my FBF.

So how does it hold up?

Student me was always somewhat fascinated by the occult, the esoteric, zodiacs and tarot and the like. In Portugal, I’d been to Tomar (the headquarters of the Order of Christ, the local successor of the enigmatic Templars). It was the time of Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code - which, like many, I devoured. Foucault’s Pendulum came with the strong recommendation of fellow students the opinion of which I valued. So I dug in - and was immediately caught up in the matrix of esoteric orders, references to the Kabbalah (the chapter headings follow the ten sefiroth), the Count of Saint-Germain, etc. As the three main protagonists get entangled in the web of world conspiracies they spun themselves, I marvelled at Eco’s erudition, the intricate structure of the novel, his musings about the need of many people for believing in a conspiracy instead of the boring truth. I read this post 9/11 - that last message resonated particularly strongly. Umberto Eco would revisit this in his last novel The Prague Cemetery (another excellent Eco book), with the Protocols of the Elders of Zion replacing Templar conspiracies.

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Re-reading it now, still remembering the basic plot, I found myself less enthralled by the Rosicrucians, the Okhrana, the Free Masons, and instead got more interested in the characters. Jacopo Belbo’s reminiscences about his life as a child in a little Piemontese village in the dying days of fascism (scenes I had completely forgotten) gripped my interest this time. Umberto Eco’s fine humour, already a feature I loved the first time, got me smiling this time too. Casaubon’s and Belbo’s slow descent into obsession with “the plan” they themselves made up reminded me of other stubborn obsessions middle-aged me has witnessed or experienced since that first read. Supporting characters like Lorenza, the mysterious (but calculating) Count Agliè, the publisher Signor Garamond (yes, like the typeface) stuck out much more this time. Last but not least, I noticed many more literary allusions, references to pop culture, puns and general playfulness than during my first reads (an obvious point, perhaps, since student me didn’t have the breadth of reading under his belt as I have now). Umberto Eco also masters the art of telling instead of showing (a lost art in the 21st century where the “show don’t tell” dogma reigns supreme) - his “info dumps” are always interesting and fun to read.

So is it still my FBF?

Probably not - I’ve read books with more beautiful prose and more subtle themes since. But the experience was very enjoyable. The novel immediately gripped me, like that first time. I took the reading more leisurely, appreciating the non-conspiracy parts more. It remains a cherished read.

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When I learned about Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o’s death, I decided it was time to finally read something from the acclaimed Kenyan author. His masterpiece Wizard of the Crow would have to wait - I was in the mood for something shorter. So I settled on The Language of Languages - Reflections on Translation, a collection of lectures and essays on translation, and on literary languages more generally (Ngũgĩ famously switched from writing in English to writing in Gikuyu). In the first lecture of the volume, he recalls a conference he attended in 1966 that featured a panel between Pablo Neruda, Arthur Miller and the Italian author Ignazio Silone:

“I was still half lost in my enjoyment of the atmosphere when I heard Silone complain about the lack of translations of modern Italian writing into English, adding: ‘(…) And you know, Italian is not like one of those Bantu languages with one or two words in their vocabulary.’”

Ngũgĩ’s enjoyment of the conference quickly faded, as one can imagine. No wonder he became a firebrand defender of writing literature in African languages!

More broadly, this episode also sheds light on several problems inherent in the concept of Western literature and the “Western Canon” - which, for many, still remains the pole star that guides them when first venturing beyond contemporary or genre literature.

1. If there is a Western Canon, what is the non-Western Canon?

In short, the non-Western Canon doesn’t exist.

The Western Canon is a shared list of literary masterpieces that erudite Western Europeans and Americans consider the most influential and, one assumes, the best. It’s intensely tied to the origin of the people who conceived it: the literati of the big cities of Western Europe (Paris, Berlin, London, St Petersburg pre-1917) and the US. In other words, the capitals of the leading nations of the 19th and early 20th century - nations that all traced their cultural heritage to Ancient Rome and Greece (or at least imagined they did).

The rest of the world, of course, did not spring from such a unique cultural primordial soup. Instead, each culture had its own literary tradition - some ancient and massive (the Chinese, the Indian traditions), others newer and narrower (the Armenian, the Thai traditions), others still stunted or interrupted (the Nahuatl, the Sumerian traditions). This doesn’t mean that interchange didn’t happen - Chinese literature influenced Korean, Japanese and Vietnamese literature; the Indian Ramayana resurfaces as the Thai Ramakien and is the source for myriad Javanese shadow-puppet plays. But there’s no easy linearity as the imaginary line that links Homer to Shakespeare to Goethe to Proust.

Looking beyond the well-trodden paths of the Western Canon, one thus can’t rely on a neat well-established “Non-Western Canon” list (the “Eastern Canon” lists one can find online are typically quilts stitching together several disconnected traditions - the Mahabharata sitting uncomfortably next to Du Fu and The Tale of Genji). Instead, it requires an almost archaeological sifting through the literary canons of the various traditions that exist outside Europe. Yet even if one does find such information (I’m in the market for a good History of Swahili Literature, if anyone can recommend one), where will one find translations of those canonical works of Turkish, Ethiopian, Javanese or Mayan literature?

2. The problem of translation

Ngũgĩ ended up translating most of the works he wrote in Gikuyu to English himself. The three Armenian works of literature I have waiting for me to read are translations into French. Classic works of Polish literature (i.e. pre 20th century) seem only to be available in German. Classic Portuguese literature is barely translated at all (apart from Camões). (I have the good fortune of speaking those languages - French, German, Portuguese - fluently, the benefit of being born a Portuguese in multi-lingual Luxembourg. Most other people didn’t have the opportunity to learn even a second language fluently.)

Vast swathes of world literature thus remain inaccessible. Untranslated, unpublished, unavailable. While I have no doubt that soon AI translations will try to bridge the gap in accessibility, it will take some time till these are good enough to provide a solid translation of the Ethiopian Kebra Nagast into English, let alone Malaysian.

Till then, the only power that can make non-Western literature more readily available is the invisible hand of the market. Buy those available Chinese, Indian, Persian classics! Talk about Haitian post-independence poetry, Javanese court literature, contemporary African literature written in African languages! Create a market. Make it worthwhile for publishers and reprint houses to consider the literatures outside the Western Canon.

3. The coming death of the Western-only canon

The Western Canon à la Harold Bloom was a creation of a time when the West reigned supreme. Earlier, “classics” referred more narrowly to the works of Latin and Greek Antiquity. During the Cold War, the Western Canon helped create a civilisational commonwealth - Western (i.e. non-Communist) culture defined itself by the literary touchstones of Britain (and its estranged daughter, the US), France, Germany, Italy, Golden Age Spain, Ancient Greece (but not anything post the fall of Rome) and Russia (as long as it was from the 19th century - i.e. pre-revolution - or dissident/émigré).

The existence of other traditions were of course acknowledged, but considered outside the Canon. Something for the nerdy Orientalist. Nothing a well-rounded Western erudite needed to concern him-/herself with. Writers from the rest of world were expected to write in the major Western languages if they wanted any recognition. Chinua Achebe very consciously wrote Things Fall Apart in English instead of Igbo, thus fuelling the tradition of African writers using colonial languages (English, French, Portuguese) for their expression. When Rabindranath Tagore was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1913, it was explicitly “because of his profoundly sensitive, fresh and beautiful verse, by which, with consummate skill, he has made his poetic thought, expressed in his own English words, a part of the literature of the West”. No word about his Bengali works.

It took until 1945 for the Nobel Prize to venture outside the West again: in that year, Gabriela Mistral from Chile received the award. In 1967, the Guatemalan Miguel Ángel Asturias, and, in 1968, Yasunari Kawabata from Japan followed.

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One might charitably presume that the Swedish Academy was swayed by calls for it to consider non-Western traditions. But why these two - Latin American and Japanese - specifically? Why not award a Korean author, or another Indian author, or an Arabic author? Bill Clinton knows why: it’s the economy, stupid!

Latin America was experiencing an economic boom. Unaffected by the Second World War, and undergoing industrialisation, Latin America seemed to enter a golden age. The construction of Brasília (from 1956 onwards) as Brazil’s new capital and the 1968 Summer Olympics in Mexico City - the first in Latin America - were two signposts of this new prosperity. Things went awry later (military dictatorships, hyper-inflation and debt crises) - but by then Latin America had established itself as a literary behemoth with the Latin American Boom and the development of its own literary school: magical realism.

Japan, two, was undergoing an economic boom - an even more impressive one than Latin America. By the late 1980s, Japan’s economy was second only to the USA’s. Japan, too, displayed the baubles of economic development: Tokyo hosted the 1964 Summer Olympics, and futuristic architecture dotted its cities. Japanese literature gained an audience in the West - not just Kawabata and Mishima, but also the works of the Japanese canon: Murasaki Shikibu’s The Tale of Genji, the haikus of Bashō, the Chūshingura, i.e. the tale of the 47 rōnin. This popularity continues unabated even as Japan’s economy has stagnated. Manga are a staple of the teenager’s bedroom, Haruki Murakami remains a beloved author, Japanese crime novels have gained a Western following, Sayaka Murata appeals to newer generations.

The induction of Latin American and Japanese literature into Canon-adjacent status pointed the way to the future expansion of the canon. South Korea has followed in the footsteps of Japan (1988 Seoul Summer Olympics, GDP per capita now roughly the same as France’s, relevance in pop culture with K-pop and TV dramas) and is the current literary darling, as exemplified by Han Kang’s 2024 Nobel Prize. Just like in the Japanese case, Korean classics are being unearthed and made available for Western audiences. Just recently I came across a new German translation of Kim Siseup’s New Stories of the Golden Turtle, a 15th century work written in Chinese (the language of Korean literati at the time).

China is fully embarked on that path, too (2008 Summer Olympics, Mo Yan’s 2012 Nobel Prize). Contemporary Chinese authors have gained audiences in the West (Yan Lianke, Yu Hua, Can Xue and others). Most surprising, perhaps, has been the success of Chinese science fiction, in particular Liu Cixin and his Three Body Problem. In parallel, Chinese classics are being rediscovered or translated for the first time. Sun Tzu’s The Art of War is a staple of business & leadership literature, Confucius and Zhuangzi are quoted next to Plato and Aristotle, popular video games based on the Three Kingdoms period, or last year’s phenomenon Black Myth: Wukong, bring new audiences to the great classics The Romance of the Three Kingdoms and Journey to the West, aka Monkey - though I’m still waiting for a gorgeous new edition of The Dream of the Red Chamber, one of the best reading experiences I’ve had. (France’s luxurious La Pléidade imprint has already inducted it, as well as Water Margin and Jin Ping Mei, into its pantheon). But also less famous classics are being made accessible - Feng Menglong’s sprawling Kingdoms in Peril aka Chronicles of the Eastern Zhou Kingdoms has recently been translated for the first time into English by Olivia Milburn, and made available by University of California Press (I immediately ordered it when I saw it).

Next is India. Its economy is growing briskly, buoyed by favourable demographics. A Summer Olympics is probably just around the corner. Already Indian classics are being rediscovered - Harvard University Press launched the Murty Classical Library of India series in 2015, focusing explicitly on non-Sanskrit works from the subcontinent. Another notable evolution is the decline of Indian literature in English. Until very recently, when Indian literature came up in a list of Top X Books to Read, the authors listed would be English language writers: Salman Rushdie, Vikram Seth, RK Narayan, Arundhati Roy, Amitav Ghosh, etc. This is changing. As India develops, Indian authors do not need to seek an external, Western audience. Geetanjali Shree’s international success (and International Booker Prize win in 2022) with Tomb of Sand, originally written in Hindi, is just a sign of things to come.

And after India there will be other literatures that will come to the fore as countries rise economically. Maybe twenty years from now we will be discussing the latest Thai literary sensation, or discovering those elusive Javanese shadow-puppet plays in affordable English translations. Maybe the Arab world will break from its cycle of economic stagnation (outside the Gulf monarchies) and e.g. Egyptian authors beyond Naguib Mahfouz will be staples in our virtual libraries. And maybe we will see the Nobel Prize awarded to a writer in an African language - the ultimate coronation denied Ngũgĩ.

4. Should I ditch the Western Canon then?

So my point is that as other continents become economic juggernauts, and Europe (especially) slumbers in economic stagnation, the Western canon won’t suffice in order to get a “well-rounded” view of the literary world. Shanghai, Bangkok, São Paulo, Dubai, Istanbul will be speaking of other canons - and fully ignoring those will make you an illiterate barbarian (in the classical sense) in the broader conversation of the Global Republic of Letters.

This doesn’t mean the Western classics should be thrown overboard. Sophocles, Horace, Dante, Jane Austen, Franz Kafka: they all remain eminently relevant, globally relevant. It’s just that they will enjoy the company of Rumi, Tulsidas, Borges, Sédar Senghor and Cao Xueqin going forward.

Challenging the Western canon is, of course, a hobby of many literature enthusiasts. Many take an iconoclastic approach: the “old white men” should be toppled, and replaced by a canon of female and minority authors. This is nonsense, of course. The literature that exists was created under the social conditions of the past. Women, sadly, were seldomly afforded the luxury of pursuing a literary career (Virginia Woolf’s famous A Book of One’s Own - yet to be read, I admit - examines the problem); black slaves were, of course, forbidden from any such activity (and free black people in America were - and are - poorer than whites, making the pursuit of writing as a career or even a hobby an economically hazardous venture). We have to create our canons out of the works that were written, not out of those we wish had been written. There are sadly no additional Sapphos, no additional Maries de France or Christines de Pizan, no female Dantes, Shakespeares or Molières. Maybe some forgotten manuscript in the Vatican Library or a remote Austrian abbey can add a female masterpiece to the canon. But let’s face it: it’s pretty unlikely. The only thing we can do is add female and minority voices to the future canon, by ensuring writers living today get their chance at reaching an audience, no matter their gender, sexual preference or skin colour.

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But the Western Canon itself is a bit of a misnomer. Check any canonical list (or Top 100 list, etc.) you can find online, and you’ll find pervasive home biases. Lists compiled by English or American editors will include writers barely known in continental Europe; French lists will, not surprisingly, extol the cultural dominance of France across the centuries; even Norway’s Bokklubben World Library felt the need to include two Norwegian books in its 100 best books of the world, as many as books from Japan. The Western Canon itself is thus a fluffy and unsettled concept.

So multiple perspectives are needed even when considering Western literature. The Western Canon shouldn’t be taken as a single list, but as multiple canons of classics, dependant on country and language. Read your Dostoyevsky, yes, and your Mann, and your Chaucer, and your Proust (at least give Swann’s Way a try) - but also consider the realist novels of Eça de Queirós, the poetry of Luis de Góngora (and of his nemesis Francisco de Quevedo), the Renaissance Croatian plays of Marin Držić (if you can get hold of them), Taras Shevchenko’s national Ukrainian poetry in his Kobzar or the travelogue of Jens Baggesen. Had the Western Canon be conceived in Lisbon, Madrid, Zagreb, Kyiv or Copenhagen, these might all have found their place in it.

5. From canonical set menu to literary buffet

How will I be able read all of those global books?

For most of us, reading time is precious, and “reading the world” a seemingly unsurmountable task, and one necessarily requiring choices. I’ve seen some people attempting “reading the world challenges”, where they will strive to read one book per country. I appreciate the heart that’s into broadening their horizons, yet that seems to me like a flawed approach. It feels, for instance, surprising that Catalan literature will be represented by a work from Andorra, with e.g. Don Quixote standing in for Spain. No shade on Andorran literature, but certainly there are classical (or contemporary) Catalan works that may be more worthwhile reading. Such endeavours thus often end up with blind graspings at literary straws or easy shortcuts (e.g. reading Nino Haratischwili for Georgia (the country), even though she writes in German).

My own approach is different. Global literature is like a giant breakfast buffet at a luxury hotel catering to businesspeople from around the globe. Some dishes - Yourcenar, Melville, Goethe, Pessoa - sound familiar, others - Baalu Girma, the Samguk Sagi, Caragiale, Ibn al-Sa’i - feel exotic. Just as I would read up on the temples of Kyoto when travelling to Japan, I try to read up on those exotic authors I come across, and how they fit into their literatures. Just as no cuisine is inherently superior to another (despite what the French might say), so no language is inherently superior to another (a point Ngũgĩ was adamant about). Just like French cuisine has signature dishes and less famous, regional specialties, so French literature has towering authors and less famous ones. Just like Indian cuisine is composed of a myriad of regional sub-cuisines, so Indian literature extends beyond Sanskrit to Tamil, Kannada, Hindi, Bengali, and many more literatures, all in conversation with each other and with the Sanskrit classics, but all also containing their own canonical works. By sampling the buffet, I hope to get a global understanding of literature, and at the same time to discover those global authors I like the most.

My aim is to have a taste of every major author of the world’s literatures (at least of those I come across). But I will not force myself to eat more if I dislike the dish. So, sorry Charles Dickens and Immanuel Kant: you’ve had your chance. Kalidasa, Ovid, Mickiewicz, Ferdowsi: let’s see what you have on offer!