r/GlobalTalk • u/TchaikenNugget United States • Aug 11 '21
In America, there's some debate over what the "Great American Novel," or a famous novel that embodies the essence of America, is. What would you consider to be the "great novel" of your country? [Question] Question
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u/whichrhiannonami Aug 12 '21
In Australia, high school students read Tomorrow When the War Began. I remember it being an interesting book
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u/hagamablabla Aug 12 '21
I found the first book in the young adult section of my library and thought it was interesting. It wasn't until years later that I found out it was a fairly popular series.
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u/saugoof Australia Aug 12 '21
Australia is a bit weird in how most of our best known novels seem to take place outside of the country. For example "Schindler's List" (Germany), "The Power Of One" (South Africa), "Shantaram" (India).
The two novels that absolutely everyone here seems to have read and that are actually set in Australia are "Cloudstreet" by Tim Winton and "The Slap" by Christos Tsiolkas. Both are fairly recent books though, I don't know if they have been around long enough to be considered classics.
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u/ArabellaStrangeLIVES Aug 12 '21
Great examples! I would add Jasper Jones to that list of ‘recent’ classics. Maybe My Brilliant Career or On the Beach for a couple of older books?
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u/shezofrene TURKEY Aug 11 '21
Yaban (The Wild) by Yakup Kadri
its about a soldier who lost his arm in the great war and has trouble adjusting the life after Allies occupied territories of late empire. I think this book highlights the struggles this country always had and still does to this day,its a great analogy of a common man who can’t just get a break in this part of the world.
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u/TchaikenNugget United States Aug 11 '21
Wow; sounds intense. I’ve never read any Turkish literature; I should check it out.
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u/Luutamo 🇫🇮 Finland Aug 12 '21
There is 2 answers to this:
Seitsemän veljestä (Seven brothers) by Aleksis Kivi https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seitsem%C3%A4n_veljest%C3%A4
Tuntematon sotilas (Unknown Soldier) by Väinö Linna https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Unknown_Soldier_(novel)
Both are very much classics and read by almost all Finns in school.
The first one is considered to be, as the wiki says, the very first significant novel written in Finnish and by a Finnish-speaking author, and it is considered to be a real pioneer of Finnish realistic folklore. Today, some people still regard it as the greatest Finnish novel ever written.
The latter one is a story about war time and many consider it being the most realistic story about war. It's not just about the fights but the downtimes.
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u/quistodes Aug 12 '21
As a Brit there are hundreds of years of literature that collectively define the culture but I'm struggling to think of anything recent that really captures the current zeitgeist of modern Britain
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u/alcard987 Poland Aug 12 '21 edited Aug 12 '21
If you ask, basically, any Polish professor.
"Pan Tadeusz" by Adam Mickiewicz
Practically everyone knows the opening quatrain.
You can look up the plot summary on English wiki.
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u/Dreikaiserbund Aug 12 '21
Russia here...
I'm not sure any one definitely stands out as THE Great Russian Novel, but the short list would probably include the main works of Tolstoy (War & Peace, Anna Karenina) and Dostoyevsky (Crime and Punishment, The Brothers Karamazov), with Bulgakov's Master and Margarita, and Pushkin's Eugene Onegin rounding out the list. Most of them deal, in a broad sense, with questions of tradition, morality, and modernity, and ask what is a person to do in the modern world--which has been something of an obsession for Russia since Peter the Great. We think of ourselves as a Great European Power, but we're also always on the periphery and catching up with what seems like the Modern World, always stuck between a technological West that feels alien and unfriendly, and an idealized Past that seems mired and antiquated.
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u/TchaikenNugget United States Aug 12 '21
That’s really interesting. I’ve been getting a lot more into Russian literature these days, and have found I really like Gogol especially. Haven’t read a ton of Pushkin, aside from a couple poems and about half of Onegin, but I’ve heard he’s especially popular. I’ve also heard some people say Pushkin is Russia’s equivalent of Shakespeare in England, although I’ve seen lots of similarities between Shakespeare and Chekhov, myself.
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u/Dreikaiserbund Aug 12 '21
Pushkin is Russia's Shakespeare in the specific sense that he very much expanded the literary language--he borrowed a great deal from French, and he was prone to making up words when he needed to. As a result, he's absolutely revered by the Russian literary community.
That said, because he wrote complex, rhyming poems with internal meter and tricky wordplay, he's exceedingly difficult to translate, and most English translations don't quite catch the spark.
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u/squirrelcat88 Aug 11 '21
Wow, what a great question! My SO and I are happily debating now. This will keep us entertained for hours, and we are so looking forward to seeing other answers.
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u/seolaAi Aug 12 '21
The Fifth Business by Robertson Davies (Canada)
Although...it's been quite some time since I read it and my opinion of what "Canada" is has changed.
I would have to give it a reread.
Now, I think the "Great Canadian Novel" would have to carry a theme of decolonization, and represent the history of the Indigenous People of Canada accurately (and also depict how the country was shaped by the Indigenous People, accurately).
If that novel exists and someone knows of it, let me know the title so I can read it, pls!
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u/squirrelcat88 Aug 12 '21 edited Aug 12 '21
Hi! Canadian too, and the one who commented that my spouse and I were debating. Fifth Business was strongly on my list! That represents my mother’s culture perfectly. The problem is we are such a mix of peoples and cultures, both indigenous and settlers, one book could never represent all of us. Other books I was coming up with-
Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town by Stephen Leacock
Green Grass, Running Water by Thomas King
Obasan by Joy Kogawa ( I’m from B.C.)
The Stone Angel by Margaret Laurence
The Colony of Unrequited Dreams by Wayne Johnston
The Book of Negroes by Lawrence Hill
All books I thought did a good job of representing some part of us.
Oh! And not a novel but my spouse says I have to include The Cremation of Sam McGee. And of course I’m leaving out all of our literature in French.
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u/seolaAi Aug 12 '21
BC here, also :)
I have not read any of those - thanks for the list!
And I agree with your spouse, Cremation of Sam McGee is a classic.
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u/Canadairy Aug 12 '21
Not a fan of Sunshine Sketches. Being from a little town in Ontario I found it condescending. The narrator is a city person talking about these quaint bumpkins and thier foibles.
For a similar setting try Letters from Wingfield Farm by Dan Needles. Still a humorous look at rural life, but the urban narrator is as often the butt of the joke as his neighbours.
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u/squirrelcat88 Aug 12 '21
I always took that as part of the joke! Leacock was poking fun at human nature and that attitude is part of it, I think.
I have some of the Wingfield Farm DVDs and think Rod Beattie is amazing. I used to read Dan Needle’s column in Harrowsmith and loved it. I think you are right, without ever having actually read any Wingfield Farm stuff. Thanks for the idea!!!.
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u/nicholt Aug 12 '21
My first thought was "hatchet" but maybe that's too pedestrian.
Haven't read much Canadian lit tbh.
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u/seolaAi Aug 12 '21
Hatchet is a classic, but too YA to be considered "The Great Canadian Novel." I think the prose is as important here, as much as subject matter, to be considered "great."
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u/TchaikenNugget United States Aug 12 '21
I’d be interested to know, too! Modern novels with a theme of decolonization sound really interesting, especially since so many “classic” novels carry colonialist themes.
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u/anavsc91 Argentina Aug 15 '21
In Argentina, it's an epic poem called Martin Fierro. It was written in the second half of the XIX century and narrates the story of a renegade gaucho called Martin Fierro. Everybody reads at least some passages of the poem in high school and can recite some of the most famous lines. Whether or not it can be considered an embodiment of Argentinian idiosyncrasy is debatable, but it was written specifically for this purpose in the years when foreign immigration was on the rise. So, the style and the characters are supposed to be representations of the 'true' Argentinian spirit in contrast to the 'others' (namely natives and immigrants). It also helped to popularize the gaucho as a national figure, despite being written by a wealthy landowner with little connection to actual gauchos, in a time when most gauchos had been forcibly recluted to participate in a war against Paraguay.
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u/Lazzen Mexico Aug 11 '21
In Mexico el laberinto de la soledad by Octavio Paz is rather the opposite, what does Mexico embody? What are the roots and identity of a Mexican outside and inside the country? Where do icons, symbols, and even the swears that we say come from and what do they make us? It's not perfect and slighly "outdated' but it poses many questions many mexicans think about in relation to the identity of Mexico post-revolution.
If you mean a great aclaimed and influential novel then Pedro Paramo by Juan Rulfo, which went on to inspire Garcia Marquez to write Cien años de Soledad