A list of "greatest" novels of the 20th Century

I found this list a few years ago somewhere on the internet, and saw it again the other day. It is a survey done by the Uruguayan newspaper El País some time around 2000:

THE GREATEST NOVELS OF THE 20TH CENTURY

Motivated by this special issue devoted to the Novel, the cultural supplement of El País organized a survey amongst critics and writers both Uruguayan and foreign, asking for their opinion concerning the greatest novels of the past hundred years. Each person was sent a brief questionnaire which asked the following:

1. What, in your opinion, are the five greatest Latin American novels of the 20th Century?
2. And what are the five greatest foreign novels (outside of Latin America)?
It is not necessary to give reasons for your selections. You may simply state the title and the name of the author.

Not everyone responded, and of those who did, not everyone adjusted their answers to the premise: in some cases the selections in each category didn't add up to five titles, and in others more than five selections were submitted; some respondents felt it necessary to provide reasons for their choices, and other wished to formally express their disagreement with the meager number of novels requested.

THE NOVELS WITH THE MOST VOTES

Latin American Novels:

Pedro Páramo by Juan Rulfo (39 votes)
Cien años de soledad (One Hundred Years of Solitude) by Gabriel García Márquez (28 votes)
Gran sertón: veredas (The Devil to Pay in the Backlands) by João Guimarães Rosa (21 votes)
Rayuela (Hopscotch) by Julio Cortázar (17 votes)
Conversación en la catedral (Conversation in the Cathedral) by Mario Vargas Llosa (11 votes)
El astillero (The Shipyard) by Juan Carlos Onetti (11 votes)
La vida breve (A Brief Life) by Juan Carlos Onetti (9 votes)
El siglo de las luces (Explosion in a Cathedral) by Alejo Carpentier (8 votes)
El sueño de los héroes (Dream of Heroes) by Adolfo Bioy Casares (6 votes)
Paradiso by José Lezama Lima (6 votes)

Foreign Novels:

Ulysses by James Joyce (19 votes)
In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust (19 votes)
The Trial by Franz Kafka (16 votes)
Journey to the End of the Night by Louis-Ferdinand Céline (10 votes)
The Stranger by Albert Camus (8 votes)
The Sound and the fury by William Faulkner (8 votes)
As I lay Dying by William Faulkner (8 votes)
Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov (7 votes)
The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald (7 votes)
Memoirs of Hadrian by Marguerite Yourcenar (7 votes)

THE AUTHORS WITH THE MOST VOTES

Latin Americans:

Juan Rulfo (39 votes)
Gabriel García Márquez (34 votes)
Juan Carlos Onetti (30 votes)
João Guimarães Rosa (21 votes)
Julio Cortázar (17 votes)
Mario Vargas Llosa (15 votes)
Alejo Carpentier (10 votes)
Roberto Arlt (9 votes)
Juan José Saer (8 votes)
Adolfo Bioy Casares (votes)

Foreigners:

Franz Kafka (31 votes)
William Faulkner (27 votes)
James Joyce (20 votes)
Marcel Proust (19 votes)
Vladimir Nabokov (10 votes)
Albert Camus (10 votes)
Louis-Ferdinand Céline (10 votes)
Thomas Mann (10 votes)
Virginia Woolf (7 votes)
Thomas Bernhard (7 votes)
Marguerite Yourcenar (7 votes)
F. Scott Fitzgerald (7 votes)

great lists.

it's absurd by nature but I can't resist:

Latin American:

(not in order)

Seven Madmen
100 Years of Solitude
Hopscotch
Conversation in the Cathedral
Obscene Bird of Night

NOOOOO---Rosa, Onetti (Brief Life), Fuentes' Death of Artemio Cruz tied for fifth with whichever

Pedro Paramo, of course, is their gravestone.

Great list that got me excited to read some new Latin American authors. Of course, this was immediately followed by frustration caused by the less than 3% of world literature that is actually translated into English. João Guimarães Rosa's masterpiece The Devil to Pay in the Backlands was translated 40 years ago then allowed to go out of print. You can obtain a copy for $500 on abebooks or hope for the rumored new translation by Gregory Rabassa and New Directions.

i hope for the new translation and therefore a better title

by the way, where is Asturias?

Latin America for me revolves around Roberto Arlt, Roberto Bolano, Nicanor Parra, Mario Vargas Llosa, Ricardo Piglia, Ernesto Sabato, Jorge Luis Borges--there are others as well---I wish for instance that there was more translated of the Argentinian Enrique Medina or anything at all of Rodolfo Walsh.

i've entered a borgesian nightmare in which it appears that arlt is well known and loved; there will be an abrupt transition involving caretakers in transparent nightgowns, an embarrassing coffee at a seaside resort; finally I will awaken just before hitting the sea at the same rate as a book dropped from a helicopter.

Considering how few books are asked for, I can understand how certain recipients would have protested. How about an alternate list that doesn't include any of the books or authors listed? Here is my attempt at a list of books that I've enjoyed as much as many of the books on this list, at this moment in a life that's only included five or six years of rather intense interest in Latin American literature (not counting a teenage infatuation with the fiction of Gabriel García Márquez):

1. Sobre héroes y tumbas (On Heroes and Tombs)--Ernesto Sabato
2. Los ríos profundos (Deep Rivers) --José María Argüedas
3. Hijo de hombre (Son of Man)--Augusto Roa Bastos
4. Estrella distante (Distant Star)--Roberto Bolaño
5. Museo de la Novela de la Eterna (The Museum of Eterna's Novel)--Macedonio Fernández

On the issue of translations, it seems that in many cases, it's not necessarily that a book hasn't ever been translated, rather that it's out of print and inaccessible. The other day as I was searching for a book on the internet, I ran across a book that was listed as "Print on Demand." I wonder if this is a model that could work for foreign fiction with a limited but passionate audience in the English-speaking world? It seems that a publisher could have the books on file, and have the capability to print them (or, as much as I hate it and will never condone it, sell them electronically) on request, taking advantage of the wider audience accesible through the internet.

And on an unrelated note, does anyone know how to "touchstone" books with accent marks in the titles?

>8 RickHarsch:

in fact near the end of Roberto Bolano's The Amulet ( a wonderful novella and companion piece to Savage Detectives) he indeed prophesizes that sometime in the future Roberto Arlt's novels will be widely popular.

my list:
Savage Detectives-Bolano
100 Years of Solitude-Marquez
The Peron Novel-Tomas Eloy Martinez
Borges- Collected Fictions
The Tunnel- Sabato
7 madmen- Arlt

I've bought a couple of really large, dense novels in the past year and I'm waiting for life to grant me the free time necessary to give them a just reading. I hope they're as good as I think they will be. One is José Lezama Lima's Paradiso, and the other is Augusto Roa Bastos's Yo, el Supremo. Here's a speech or editorial by Juan Carlos Onetti that may have been written in 1989, when Roa Bastos was awarded the Premio Cervantes:

A few years ago a friend of mine who was living in France paid me a visit to request my adhesion to an event in homage to Carlos Gardel that was going to be held in Toulouse, the birthplace of the singer. I answered that I was in complete agreement, but that she shouldn't forget that there in Toulouse resided, and very poorly, one of the greatest writers in the Spanish language, thrust into exile and holding a Spanish passport, a man by the name of Augusto Roa Bastos. Many books have been published about Latin American dictators, but Roa Bastos cannot be accused of reiteration, because, distancing himself from numerous and often excellent books that have been written about South American tyrants, he did something different.

Instead of writing about one of many villains who were at one time or another thought to be enlightened, the villain wrote. The author introduced himself into the skin, the bones, the past and the present of an anomalous tyrant, and it was Francia the dictator who was obligated to dictate his thoughts and his memories. It was I, the Supreme.

And so like a willing doctor Jekyll, without the aid of any drug, Roa Bastos transformed himself into José Gaspar de Francia during the admirable writer's months and years of labor. And the book is so good that historians of abundant talent and fantasy affirm that I, the Supreme couldn't have been written by Roa Bastos.

They swear to have proof that when the false author began writing the book, Don José Gaspar de Francia had him shot at the foot of a dwarf orange tree. He sent the cadaver to Europe and dedicated his moments of free time to writing the book. They inform me from Asunción that the functionaries of the Magistracy meet each afternoon as the sun grants its daily pardon, and each one of them invents a motion, before the city trembles with the cold night air, to discuss and judge whether the rights of authorship correspond to Francia or to Roa Bastos.

In an extremely small way, this recognition of the talent of Roa Bastos also brings me a great satisfaction. Ever since the modification of the standards for the Cervantes Prize, each year, stubbornly, I've proposed his candidacy, and I've always ended up disappointed. But I believe that in comparing Roa Bastos to those authors who have previously won the Prize, without pressure nor prejudice, it's very possible that my position would be confirmed.

At a time in which Paraguay experiences an moment of hope for the future, the wearisome life of this misunderstood exile today receives its merited recognition.

I found this article at a great web site for fans of Onetti, http://onetti.net/es/home.

Thanks--Onetti is close to my liver. And his generosity here reminds me of the famous lines by Neruda about those who do not read Cortazar and develop the symptoms of scurvy.

Thanks--Onetti is close to my liver. And his generosity here reminds me of the famous lines by Neruda about those who do not read Cortazar and develop the symptoms of scurvy.

I'm an independent researcher currently investigating the nearly fifty-year absence of João Guimarães Rosa from American literary discourse. I can tell you a new translation is in the works not by Rabassa and not by New Directions. If you'd like to know more, send me a message and I'll tell you all about it.FWM

I thought I'd mention the Argentinian Humberto Costantini ('24-'87), praised by Cortázar for one. I loved The Long Night of Francisco Sanctis, a tragicomic novella about a character trying to make a moral choice during the Dirty War (the translations are out of print, but they are not very difficult to find used now.) I don't read any Spanish, and this book was yet another reminder of how many wonderful, under-appreciated authors there are beyond the narrow Anglophone horizon.