MY TOP 100 FICTION BOOKS

MY TOP 100 FICTION BOOKS

In alphabetical order. I have listed only one book per author, making an exception for Homer. All are books I have not only read but actually enjoyed, or which have otherwise made a lasting impresssion, rather than ones that have been merely edifying. In the interests of objectivity, I have also excluded books I have translated.

I will admit to having consulted other lists to jog my memory, but have left out books which people often seem to vote for but I honestly cannot believe so many have read, like Ulysses.  Likewise, books I have given up on do not make it.

Titles are quoted first in the language in which I read them, with translations into English where available.

1.     A Confederacy of Dunces, John Kennedy Toole

2.     A Hero for Our Time, Mikhail Lermontov

3.     A Tale of Two Cities, Charles Dickens

4.     Agosto (August), Rubem Fonseca

5.     Arch of Triumph, Erich María Remarque

6.     Arrival and Departure, Arthur Koestler

7.     Arthur and George, Julian Barnes

8.     As Memórias Póstumas de Brás Cubas (The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas), Machado de Assis

9.     Bella y Oscura (Beautiful and Dark), Rosa Montero

10.  Beltenebros, Antonio Muñoz Molina

11.  Candide, Voltaire

12.  Casa de Campo (A House in the Country), José Donoso

13.  Catch 22, Joseph Heller

14.  Charlotte’s Web, E.B. White

15.  Cién Años de Soledad (A Hunded Years of Solitude), Gabriel García Márquez

16.  Closely Observed Trains, Bohumil Hrabal

17.  Contos Completos, Florbela Espanca

18.  Contos da Montanha (Tales From The Mountain), Miguel Torga

19.  Conversación en la Catedral (Conversation in the Cathedral), Mario Vargas Llosa

20.  Crime and Punishment, Dostoyevski

21.  Death in Venice, Thomas Mann

22.  East of Eden, John Steinbeck

23.  El Ingenioso Hidalgo Don Quijote de la Mancha (Don Quixote), Miguel de Cervantes

24.  El Siglo de las Luces (Explosion in a Cathedral), Alejo Carpentier

25.  El Tedio (Boredom), Alberto Moravia

26.  El Túnel (The Tunnel), Ernesto Sábato

27.  Empresas y tribulaciones de Maqroll el Gaviero (The Adventures and Misadventures of Maqroll), Álvaro Mutis

28.  Filomeno a mi Pesar, Gonzalo Torrente Ballester

29.  Flashman, George MacDonald Fraser

30.  Frankenstein, Mary Shelley

31.  Germinal, Émile Zola

32.  Henry IV Part I, William Shakespeare

33.  Iron in the Soul, Jean-Paul Sartre

34.  Journey to the End of the Night, Louis Ferdinand Céline

35.  Jude The Obscure, Thomas Hardy

36.  Kes, Barry Hines

37.  L’Étranger (The Stranger), Camus

38.  La Ciudad de los Prodigios (The City of Marvels), Eduardo Mendoza

39.  La Forja de Un Rebelde (The Forging of a Rebel), Arturo Barea

40.  La Región Más Transparente (Where the Air is Clear), Carlos Fuentes

41.  La Tregua (The Truce), Mario Benedetti

42.  La Vorágine, José Eustacio Rivera

43.  Las Puertas Abiertas (Open Doors), Leonardo Sciascia

44.  Les Misérables, Victor Hugo

45.  Life and Fate, Vasily Grossman

46.  Los Mares del Sur (Southern Seas), Manuel Vázquez Montalbán

47.  Moll Flanders, Daniel Defoe

48.  Nada, Carmen Laforet

49.  Nineteen Eighty-Four, George Orwell

50.  North and South, Elizabeth Gaskill

51.  O Ano da Morte de Ricardo Reis (The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis), José Saramago

52.  O Crime do Padre Amaro (The Crime of Father Amaro), Eça de Queirós

53.  O Delfim, José Cardoso Pires

54.  O Livro do Desassossego (The Book of Disquiet), Bernardo Soares-Fernando Pessoa

55.  Pedro Páramo, Juan Rulfo

56.  Poemas de Amor: Antologia de poesía portuguesa, ed. Inês Pedrosa

57.  Red Harvest, Dashiel Hammett

58.  Regreso a la Misma Ciudad y Bajo la Lluvia (Return to the Same City), Paco Ignacio Taibo II

59.  Riotous Assembly, Tom Sharpe

60.  Slaughterhouse Five, Kurt Vonnegut

61.  Snow, Orhan Pamuk

62.  Soñé que la Nieve Ardía (I Dreamt the Snow Was Burning), Antonio Skármeta

63.  The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain

64.  The Arabian Nights

65.  The Bridge on the Drina, Ivo Andrić

66.  The Canterbury Tales, Geoffrey Chaucer

67.  The Case of Comrade Tulayev, Victor Serge

68.  The Charterhouse of Parma, Stendhal

69.  The First Polka, Horst Bienek

70.  The Good Soldier Švejk, Jaroslav Hašek

71.  The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy by Douglas Adams

72.  The Illiad, Homer

73.  The Long Good-bye, Raymond Chandler

74.  The Man in The High Castle, Philip K. Dick

75.  The Master And Margarita, Mikhail Bulgakov

76.  The Odyssey, Homer

77.  The Quiet American, Graham Greene

78.  The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists, Robert Tressell

79.  The Rattle Bag, ed. Heaney, Hughes

80.  The Secret Agent, Joseph Conrad

81.  The Talented Mr. Ripley, Patricia Highsmith

82.  The Threepenny Opera, Berthold Brecht

83.  The Tin Drum, Günther Grass

84.  The Train Was On Time, Heinrich Böll

85.  The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, B. Traven

86.  The Trial, Franz Kafka

87.  The Truce, Primo Levi

88.  The War Of The Worlds, H. G. Wells

89.  The Woman in White, Wilkie Collins

90.  To Kill a Mocking Bird, Harper Lee

91.  To the Ends of the Earth, William Golding

92.  Tom Jones, Henry Fielding

93.  Um Deus Passeando pela Brisa da Tarde (A God Strolling in the Cool of the Evening), Mário de Carvalho

94.  Under The Volcano by Malcolm Lowry

95.  Un Día Perfecto, Melania Mazzucco

96.  Un Día Volveré, Juan Marsé

97.  Una Vida es Una Vida, Dimas Lidio Pitty

98.  Vanity Fair, William M. Thackaray

99.  Vidas Secas (Barren Lives), Gracíliano Ramos

100.    War and Peace, Leo Tolstoy

The Portable Hannah Arendt (Penguin, New York, 2000)

Hannah Arendt ignited controversy for writing what has become the best known addition to this anthology of her work, her coverage of the Eichmann trial, and a recent film seems to have rekindled the whole debate. Her detractors have charged her with giving succour to that most evil of enemies, the Nazis, or at best that she was a good philosopher but a bad historian.

Until I have time to read her critics in detail, I personally thought I had better start by reading Arendt in her own words. It is beyond the scope of a general reader’s review of an anthology to quote the chunks of her writings that would be required to refute her critics point by point, or at least put their critiques in context, but I can now at least say that her conclusions are demanding, and that often leads to misunderstanding or misquoting.

To fully grasp her ideas would in fact require reading shelves full of books, especially when it comes to her academic texts, although Arendt helps the reader by adeptly summarising in order to share her easy familiarity (she read Kant at 14) with centuries of thinking while she develops her arguments, step by step.  One other thing that transpires from her works is her consistency and intellectual honesty, and any rebuttal of them needs to be well grounded indeed.

First of all, I think reading her essay on the oft-forgotten Rosa Luxemburg ought to put paid to any notion that Arendt was a poor historian. It was interesting to learn not only about the Polish-born revolutionary’s life here (yes, I used to have a poster of her on my wall), but how her work brought her into conflict (but not enmity) with Lenin – somewhat surprising for a Marxist, one might have been tempted to think -- and anticipated many of the failings of the Soviet Union.

But that’s not all, by any means. Arendt points out that Luxemburg’s murder (and that of Karl Liebknecht) in 1999 was sanctioned by the Weimar authorities and thus marked a tipping point that led to Hitler. She explains this far better than I, so if you want to know more, read the book.

Now for her famous series of reports in The New Yorker on the 1961-2 trial in Jerusalem of Eichmann, who had organised the deportation of millions of Jews from across German-occupied Europe to Nazi death camps during the Second World War.

In her subtitle to the piece Arendt coined the now famous phrase ‘the banality of evil’ because she concluded Eichmann was a not a born monster, but rather an utter non-entity as a person who came to do monstrous deeds in a monstrous society. Indeed, Eichmann comes across as a pettifogging bureaucrat in the archive footage used in Margarethe von Trotta’s much-maligned biopic.

Eichmann was well aware of what he had done, and even used to boast about it, but he was simply thoughtless, incapable of thinking beyond Nazi clichés and even when the hangman slipped the noose around his neck. To have depicted Eichmann as a monster would have been akin to the Devil appearing in a medieval morality plays, which reminds us that Shakespeare’s Iago was far more terrifying precisely because he was human (although Arendt says Eichmann was duller than Iago, but that proves her point).

That went against the grain for many, who effectively said – and still say – that that was tantamount to letting Eichmann off the hook. What raised even more hackles was her contention that there was “cooperation between the Nazi rulers and Jewish authorities” (N.B. by no means Jews as a whole) leading to the destruction of the latter’s own people, because Eichmann negotiated with Jewish leaders over who was to be deported from each community. Only one such leader testified in Jerusalem, and Arendt charged the court with “the gravest omission” in not devoting more time to the issue.

One riposte to her report included in the anthology is from the American playwright Lionel Abel, who “charged that Arendt had made Eichmann aesthetically palatable and the Jews aesthetically repugnant”.  

While nobody is above criticism, I submit the obvious point that Arendt suffered from persecution and nearly found herself on one of Eichmann’s transports. The point is often elided and it is one Arendt never dwells on (incidentally, I think it’s to von Trotta’s credit that she resists the temptation to recreate Arendt’s escape from Camp Gurs). In this light, it is highly unlikely Arendt would have failed to sympathise with anyone who has suffered persecution, let alone her fellow Jews, including countless close friends and relatives.

Besides, Arendt had already given her reasons for focussing on the Judenräte:

“I have dwelt on this chapter of the story, which the Jerusalem court failed to put before the eyes of the world in its true dimensions, because it offers the most striking insight into the totality of the moral collapse the Nazis caused in respectable European society."

Tragically this rings true, because the Nazis were perversely and infamously capable of making others do some of their dirty work for them, including Jews such as the Kapos and the Brenners chillingly portrayed by Russian war correspondent Vasily Grossman in his epic work Life and Fate.

As to the hand-wringing testimony of the former community leader who rhetorically asked the court, “What could we have done?” Arendt answers that while resistance was impossible, it would have been better for the Jewish leaders to simply do nothing. Chaos would have been more helpful and such people as were able to flee before boarding the transports had at least a chance to survive.

In her own words again, she summed up her approach as fiat veritas et pereat mundus, which translates as ‘let the truth be told, though the world may perish’, or to put it another way, issues cannot be ducked just because they are thorny. If that sounds trite to anyone, then I invite them to read Arendt’s thirty-page disquisition on the inevitability of truth winning out.

If I have one criticism to make of the anthology, it is that her academic work is often less readable than the Eichmann report, but as I said earlier, the former is inevitably demanding but always thought-provoking and illuminating.

For instance, it was by no means immediately obvious what the point is of her long exposition on the differences between the public and private domain, until I next read a passing reference to the theme in ‘The Social Question’. As an example of her consistency, it crops up again in her discussion of forced desegregation in the 1950s, which she said was none of a government’s business, and as a non-American I wouldn’t mind reading more about that.

If my reading of other texts is correct, Arendt believes the French Revolution to have paved the road to hell with good intentions, namely to have paid too much attention to the pressing needs of the destitute masses, which she deems to be a private rather than a public matter.

The American Revolution, she adds, was superior to the French one because it was not swayed by such inappropriate and self-defeating aims. She does recognise that the American Revolution was open to charges of hypocrisy because its claims of equality before the law did not apply to the 20% of the population who were slaves, but says slavery was Europe’s fault. I beg to differ with this latter point, because the new Republic was much slower than the mother country in ending it.

Another quibble I have was the short space devoted to her views on Heidegger, but maybe that is more personal and not central to her work. My main beef with the anthology, however, concerns the preface, which is leaden and dispensable.

Above all, I was left wondering what happened to such readable repositories of vast learning like Arendt? Here was someone who could deftly quote from Plato in Greek, from Heine in German or Shakespeare in English, and describe her approach to the truth by paraphrasing medieval Latin axioms. All of this, mind you, from someone whose chosen field was philosophy.

Again, this does not make her infallible, but it certainly makes her arguments compelling and very readable.