Transfuge – foreign literature
The French literary magazine Transfuge asked a group of francophone writers to pick their best foreign work of fiction. These are the results (with their additional choices.) The first name in bold is the writer making the selection. For those keeping score, Philip Roth was the clear winner with 8 votes for 7 different books, followed by Nabokov 4 votes (3 books), Thomas Mann and Arno Schmidt (3 votes; 3 books), Cervantes and Faulkner (3 votes; 2 books), Hesse, Homer, Grossman, Thomas Bernhard, Robert Walser, Gombrowicz, Hrabal, Woolf and Conrad (2 votes, 2 books) and Joyce and Lowry (2 votes, 1 book).
Pierre Assouline
Bernhard Schlink: Der Vorleser (The Reader)
James Joyce: Ulysses
Miguel de Cervantes: Don Quixote
Thomas Mann: Buddenbrook
Virginia Woolf: A Writer’s Diary
Joseph Conrad: Heart of Darkness
Frédéric Beigbeder
Hermann Hesse: Steppenwolf
Malcolm Lowry: Under the Volcano
J D Salinger: Catcher in the Rye
Knut Hamsun: Pan
Nina Bouraoui
Scott Heim: Mysterious Skin
Bret Easton Ellis: Less Than Zero
James Frey: A Million Little Pieces
Rainer Maria Rilke: Briefe an einen jungen Dichter (Letters to a Young Poet)
William Burroughs: The Naked Lunch
Michel Butor
The Ramayana
Goethe: Faust II
Homer: The Odyssey
Miguel de Cervantes: Novelas Ejemplares (Exemplary Stories)
Eric Chevillard
Ramón Gómez de la Serna: Greguerías (Greguerias: The Wit and Wisdom of Ramón Gómez de la Serna)
Jorge Borges: Ficciones
Kobo Abe: The Box Man
Vladimir Nabokov: Ada or Ardor
Witold Gombrowicz: Bakakaj (Bacacay)
Arno Schmidt: Die Gelehrtenrepublik (The Egghead Republic)
Claro
Thomas Pynchon: Gravity’s Rainbow
Vladimir Nabokov: Lolita
Arno Schmidt: Aus dem Leben eines Fauns (Scenes from the Life of a Faun)
Rick Moody: Purple America
Witold Gombrowicz: Ferdyduke
Charles Dantzig
F Scott Fitzgerald: The Great Gatsby
Petronius: Satyricon
Frederick Rolfe: Hadrian VII
Vladimir Nabokov: The Real Life of Sebastian Knight
Tomasi did Lampedusa: Il Gattopardo (The Leopard)
Dawn Powell: The Happy Island
Jacques Darras
Malcolm Lowry: Under the Volcano
Dante Alighieri: The Divine Comedy: Paradise
Joseph Conrad: Lord Jim
Virginia Woolf: Mrs. Dalloway
William Faulkner: The Sound and the Fury
Florence Delay
Miguel de Cervantes: Don Quixote
Charles Dickens: Great Expectations
Juan Rulfo: Pedro Páramo
Vladimir Nabokov: The Real Life of Sebastian Knight
Roberto Bolaño: Los detectives salvajes [The Savage Detectives]
Jean-Paul Dubois
John Updike: Rabbit at Rest
Yoko Ogawa: Kamoku na shigai midara na tomurai [No English translation; translated into French as Tristes revanches]
Redmond O’Hanlon: Into the Heart of Borneo
Erri de Luca: Tre cavalli (Three Horses)
Philip Roth: Patrimony: A True Story
David Gates: Jernigan
Eric Faye
Ferenc Karinthy: Epepe [No English translation; translated into French as Epépé]
Branimir Scepanovic: Usta puna zemlje (Mouth Full of Earth)
B Traven: The Night Visitor
Max Frisch: Stiller (I am Stiller)
Ismail Kadaré: Kush e solli Doruntin’n (Doruntine)
Ernesto Sábato: El túnel (The Outsider; The Tunnel)
Vladimir Bartol: Bartol
Alain Finkielkraut
Philip Roth: American Pastoral
J M Coetzee: Disgrace
Milan Kundera: Nesnesitelná lehkost byti (The Unbearable Lightness of Being)
Vasily Grossman: Все течет (Forever Flowing)
Gabriel García Márquez: El Amor en los Tiempos del Cólera (Love in the Time of Cholera)
Eric Fottorino
Stefan Zweig: Vierundzwanzig Stunden aus dem Leben einer Frau (Twenty-Four Hours in the Life of a Woman )
Cheikh Hamidou Kane: L’avenure ambiguë (Ambiguous Adventure)
Mika Waltari: Sinuhe Egyptiläinen (The Egyptian)
Giorgio Bassani: Il Giardino dei Finzi-Contini (The Garden of the Finzi-Continis
Jérôme Garcin
Julian Barnes: Flaubert’s Parrot
James Joyce: Ulysses
Italo Svevo: La Coscienza di Zeno (Confessions of Zeno)
Franz Kafka: Die Verwandlung (Metamorphosis)
Régis Jauffret
Charles Dickens: David Copperfield
Isaac Babel: Конармия (Red Cavalry)
António Lobo Antunes: As Naus (The Return of the Caravels)
Ludwig Wittgenstein: Tractatus logico-philosophicus
Thomas Bernhard: Beton (Concrete)
James Joyce: Ulysses
Flannery O’Connor: A Good Man Is Hard To Find
Ivan Goncharov: Обломов (Oblomov)
Jacques Julliard
Philip Roth: The Human Stain
Fyodor Dostoevsky: Бесы (The Possessed; The Demons; The Devils)
Henry James: Portrait of a Lady
George Eliot: Middlemarch
Gabriel García Márquez: Cien Años de Soledad (One Hundred Years Of Solitude)
Philippe Labro
Ernest Hemingway: A Moveable Feast
Tom Wolfe: The Bonfire of the Vanities
John Dos Passos: USA
Raymond Chandler: The Big Sleep
Curzio Malaparte: Kaputtt
Michael Herr: Dispatches
Linda Lê
Robert Musil: Der Mann ohne Eigneschaften (The Man Without Qualities)
Sei Shonagon: The Pillow Book of Sei Shonagon
Thomas Bernhard: Auslöschung : ein Zerfall (Extinction)
António Lobo Antunes: Tratado das Paixões da Alma [Treaty of the Soul’s Passions]
Stig Dagerman: Bränt Barn (The Burnt Child)
Robert Walser: Der Gehülfe [The Aide]
Gilles Lipovetsky
Henry Miller: Sexus
Oscar Wilde: The Picture of Dorian Gray
Jack Kerouac: On the Road
Milton Mezz Mezzrow: Really the Blues
John Dos Passos: Manhattan Transfer
Samuel Becket: Mercier et Camier
Richard Morgiève
Cormac McCarthy: All the Pretty Horses
Mary O’Hara: My Friend Flicka
Curzio Malaparte: Kaputt
Jim Harrison: Sundog
Fritz Zorn: Mars
Hubert Selby Jr: Requiem for a Dream
Truman Capote: In Cold Blood
Arno Schmidt: Leviathan
Bohumil Hrabal: Příliš hlučná samota (Too Loud a Solitude)
Bohumil Hrabal: Postřižiny (Cutting it Short)
Marie Ndiaye
Joyce Carol Oates: Blonde
Lady Murasaki: The Tale of the Genji
William Faulkner: Light in August
Claude Pirotte
Jorge de Sena: Sinais De Fogo (Signs of Fire)
George Orwell: Burmese Days
Jean-Paul Richter: Leben des Quintus Fixlein (Life of Quintus Fixlein)
Robert Walser: Der Räuber (The Robber)
Joseph Roth: Das Falsche Gewicht (Weights and Measures)
Herman Melville: I and My Chimney
Lydie Salvayre
Laurence Sterne: Tristram Shandy
Homer: The Iliad
Francisco de Quevedo: Historia de la vida del buscón llamado don Pablos, ejemplo de vagamundos y espejo de tacaños (The Life & Adventures of Don Pablos, the Sharper; An Example for Vagabonds and a Mirror for Scamps)
William Faulkner: The Sound and the Fury
Elfriede Jelinek: Lust (Lust)
Jean-François Sirinelli
Philip Roth: American Pastoral
Qiu Xiaolong: Death of a Red Heroine
Arnaldur Indriðason: Mýrin (Jar City)
Mauricio Electorat: La burla del tiempo [The Mockery of Time]
Henning Mankell: Den femte kvinnan (The Fifth Woman)
Ho Ahn Thai: The Women on the Island
Alain-Gérard Slama
Yukio Mishima: The Temple of the Golden Pavilion
Arthur Koestler: Darkness at Noon
Alexander Solzhenitsyn: One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovitch
Daniel Keyes: Flowers for Algernon
Thomas Mann: Doktor Faustus (Doctor Faustus)
Phillipe Sollers
Euripides: The Bacchae
Philip Roth: Portnoy’s Complaint
Philip Roth: The Breast
Philip Roth: The Anatomy Lesson
Philip Roth: Operation Shylock
Tzvetan Todorov
Vasily Grossman: Жизнь и судьба (Life and Fate)
Orhan Pamuk: Kar (Snow)
Arundhati Roy: The God of Small Things
Salman Rushdie: Midnight’s Children
Göran Tunström: Juloratioriet (The Christmas Oratorio)
Michel Tournier
Daniel Defoe: Robinson Crusoe
Thomas Mann: Der Zauberberg (The Magic Mountain)
Herman Hesse: Das Glassperlenspiel (The Glass Bead Game)
Giacomo Casanova: Storia della mia vita (The Story of My Life)