In response to one of those recent Facebook 'challenges', I forced myself to come up with a list of my '10 favourite books', which I posted on my timeline as follows (chronological order of publishing):
Du Côté de
Chez Swann (Marcel Proust, 1912, fr)
Os Sonâmbulos (Die Schlafwandler, Herman Broch, 1930-32,
de)
Brideshead Revisited (Evelyn Waugh, 1945, uk)
Nineteen-eighty four (George Orwell, 1948, uk)
Lord of the Flies (William Golding, 1954, uk)
The Complete Chronicles of Narnia (CS Lewis, 1950-56, uk)
Le Maître
et Marguerite ( Мастер и Маргарита,
Mikhail Boulgakov, 1941/1966, ru)
La Peste
(Albert Camus, 1947, fr)
Le Hussard
sur le Toit (Jean Giono, 1951, fr)
Le Rivage
des Syrtes (Julien Graq, 1951, fr)
In doing so, I realised I had roughly presented a geographical mapping of the reflexive aspect of my cultural roots: an aspect seeped most of all in the tragic foci of European history of the XXth Century - WWI and WWII, social revolution and totalitarianism, colonialism, epidemics, and the decay of the leisured ruling classes.
I was not surprised at the weight of English, a language I learnt as a child in England, but I was surprised at the importance of French (sur quoi j'en parlerai un peu plus en bas), which I only started reading some years later. A Russian and a German novel - both rooted in the social-political convulsions of the early XXth Century - round up the top 10.
When enlarging this list, I came across the fact that most of my preferences reflect a cultural idea of Europe, which extends beyond the European peninsula Eastward across the vast steppes of Siberia and westward across the Atlantic to the Americas. I also noticed that Southern Europe and Latin America were grossly underrepresented (to my shame). To clarify my preferences, I then stacked them up in additional, obsessively neat piles of 10, representing different traditions I was interested in. Thus:
English - British Isles
If I had not so neatly stacked these in piles of 10, this particular list would have been longer than any of the others, and would include many more genre books from, e.g. historical naval fiction, boys adventure stories, theatre, and poetry. As it is, what it includes moves from romantic, through the tragedy of war and the nightmare of totalitarianism, to fantasy and the limits of Western influence in the 3rd World. Hamlet is a strange bedfellow to these other titles as the only play. But it has an intensely deserved berth in my heart for both content and prose, and its influence (i.e. in the dark, brooding introspection and constant struggle with conscience and inner passions) can be felt both on the books in this next 10 list, and in European and human culture more generally.
Hamlet (William Shakespeare, 1603)
Wuthering Heights (Emily Brönte, 1847)
Kidnapped (Robert Louis Stevenson, 1886)
The Jungle Book (Rudyard Kipling, 1894)
Heart of Darkness (Joseph Conrad, 1899)
Death to the French (CS Forester, 1934)
Animal Farm (George Orwell, 1945)
The Sword of Honour (Evelyn Waugh, 1952-61)
The Lord of the Rings (J. R.R. Tolkien, 1954-55)
The Comedians (Graham Greene, 1966)
English – America and elsewhere
In contrast, this one would not have been much longer - unfortunately. Why do I find these important enough to put here? America represents an extension of Europe - in language certainly, but not only. In both its advances and its failings it pushes, pulls, and changes Europe. It is often brutal in its authenticity. Roy is here as a non-American outlier - and her prose sometimes feels more French in its intricacy (see below).
Leaves of Grass (Walt Whitman, 1855)
The Red Badge of Courage (Stephen Crane, 1895)
USA (John dos Passos, 1930-36)
Delta de Vénus (Delta of Venus, Anaïs Nin, 1940s/1977)
The Naked and the Dead (Norman Mailer, 1948)
The Old Man and the Sea (Ernest Hemingway, 1952)
Lolita (Vladimir Nabokov, 1955)
The Thin Red Line (James Jones, 1961)
Angela’s Ashes (Frank McCourt, 1996)
The God of Small Things (Arhundati Roy, 1997)
Français
La langue francaise, si proche du Portugais et pourtant si 'autre', me permet d'éprouver les sentiments ainsi que de m'exprimer d'une manière plus authentique parfois même que l'anglais; la litterature francaise du XXème Siècle me bouleverse avec sa richesse de subtilités de sonorité, imaginaire, et emotion. La lecture se fait surtout en plaisir, volupté, et epanouissement. Et, pourtant, les grands thèmes sont tous lá et donnent un poids de sérieux à l'ensemble. Partout la grande question posé par Camus à l'âme de l'individu occidental: solitaire, ou solidaire?
Viagem ao Centro da Terra (Voyage au Centre de la Terre, Jules Verne, 1864)
Vol de Nuit (Antoine de Sainte-Éxupery, 1931)
Le Chant du
Monde (Jean Giono, 1934)
Le Silence
de la Mer (Jean Bruller, ‘Vercors’, 1942)
L’Étranger
(Albert Camus, 1942)
Citadelle
(Antoine de Sainte-Éxupery, 1948)
L’Oeuvre au
Noir (Marguerite Yourcenar, 1951)
L'Exil et le Royaume (Albert Camus, 1957)
Hiroshima
mon Amour : Scenario et dialogues (Marguerite Duras, 1960)
Les
Centurions (Jean Lartéguy, 1963)
Others / Autres / Outras
Includes, to my shame, only a couple of Portuguese books, amongst a larger sprinkling of Russians and Germans. Among these are some of the most outstanding analyses of social and political relations between the XIXth and XXth century. Add the roots of European culture in Greece, and its extensions into Africa, and these 10 round off a vision of Europe that moves onwards and outwards relentlessly.
Antigona
(Sófocles, 441BC, gr)
First Love (Первая
любовь,, Ivan Turgenev, 1860, ru)
La Guerre
et la Paix (Война и миръ, Léon
Tolstoy, 1869, ru)
O Primo Bazílio
(Eça de Queiroz, 1878, pt)
Os Maias (Eça de
Queiroz, 1888, pt)
O Processo (Der Prozess, Franz Kafka, 1915/1925, de)
A Montanha Mágica
(Der Zauberberg, Thomas Mann, 1924,
de)
The Man without Qualities
(Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften, Robert
Musil, 1930-43, de)
Une Journée
d’Ivan Dessinovitch (Оди́н день Ива́на Дени́совича, Alexandre Soljenitsine, 1962)
Terra Sonâmbula
(Mia Couto, 1992, mz)
Nonfiction
From travelogues to scientific books, this one includes anything that is not fiction. From paleoanthropology and culture, politics, social and psychological theory - from the objectively theoretical to the subjectively empirical - with a home in my heart.
Du dandysme
et de George Brummel (Jules Barbey D’Aurevilly, 1845)
La
Revolution Trahie (Преданная революция,
Léon Trotsky, 1936)
Hommage to Catalonia (George Orwell, 1938)
When the Going was Good (Evelyn Waugh, 1946)
Intergroup Conflict and Cooperation: The Robber’s Cave
Experiment (Muzafer Sherif et al, 1961)
Nations and Nationalism (Ernest Gellner, 1983)
Time within Time: The Diaries (Martyrolog, Andrey Tarkovsky, 1986)
Rediscovering the Social Group: A Self Categorization Theory
(John Turner et al, 1986)
Structures of social life: The four elementary forms of
human relations (Alan Fiske, 1991)
Origins Reconsidered (Richard Leakey & Roger Lewin, 1992)