language, timothy

I'm a sucker for a book list, as you know, so when I came across this list of foreign novels YOU MUST READ in the Independent this week (I have read one, Norwegian Wood, and own another, Foucault's Pendulum) and spotted a link to a story about a woman who'd set herself the task of reading a book from every country in the world, I was intrigued. Needless to say this was a stunt itself designed to generate a book (and here it is) but it's quite interesting nonetheless.

Slightly frustratingly, there isn't just a list of what she read, but you can get it from here since the relevant book from each country is the hyperlinked one. There aren't many places where the list coincides with stuff I've read, but it does happen occasionally, specifically for Australia, Norway and Russia.

A quick and very unscientific scan of my bookshelves for novels originally written in foreign yields the following list of authors, in no particular order:

• Italian: Alessandro Baricco, Italo Calvino, Umberto Eco, Primo Levi
• French: Alain-Fournier, Michel Houellebecq, Françoise Sagan
• Norwegian: Knut Hamsun, Jostein Gaarder
• Russian: Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Leo Tolstoy, Arkady and Boris Strugatsky, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
• Danish: Peter Høeg
• German: Franz Kafka, Heinrich Böll, Patrick Süskind
• Czech: Milan Kundera
• Swedish: Stieg Larsson, Henning Mankell
• Hungarian: Sándor Márai
• Spanish: Gabriel García Márquez, Mario Vargas Llosa
• Japanese: Haruki Murakami, Banana Yoshimoto, Kenzaburō Ōe
• Hebrew: Amos Oz
• Portuguese: José Saramago

Plenty of gaps to be filled in there, even just in Europe: Polish, Greek, Finnish, Dutch. There are a couple of authors who you assume might generate some entries on this list, but who turn out to have actually written most of their novels in English, like Chinua Achebe and Vladimir Nabokov.