the 101 favourite novels of Le Monde readers

Le Monde called its readers to vote for their five favourite novels, with no major surprise in the results, except maybe Harry Potter coming up top. Before Voyage au bout de la nuit and (the predictable) A la recherche du temps perdu. And a complete unknown, Damasio’s La Horde du Contrevent, as 12th and first science fiction book. Above both the Foundation novels (16th). And Dune (32nd). And Hyperion Cantos (52). But no Jules Verne! In a sense, it reflects upon the French high school curriculum on literature that almost uniquely focus on French 19th and 20th books. (Missing also Abe, Conrad, Chandler, Dickens, Ishiguro, Joyce, Kawabata, Madame de Lafayette, Levi, Morante, Naipaul, Rabelais, Rushdie, Singer, and so many others…) Interestingly (or not), Sartre did not make it to the list, despite his literature 1953 Nobel Prize, maybe because so few read the (appalling) books of his chemins de la liberté trilogy.

I did send my vote in due time but cannot remember for certain all the five titles I chose except for Céline’s Voyage au bout de la nuit (2nd), Cormac McCarthy’s The Road (74th) and maybe Fedor Dostoievski’s Brothers Karamazov (24th). Maybe not as I may have included Barbey d’Aurevilly’s L’ensorcelée, Iain Pears’ An instance at the fingerpost, and Graham Greene’s The End of the affair, neither of which made it in the list. Here are some books from the list that would have made it to my own 101 list, although not necessarily as my first choice of titles for authors like Hugo (1793!) or Malraux (l’Espoir). (Warning: Amazon Associate links).

• Harry Potter
• Voyage au bout de la nuit
• One hundred years of solitude
• The Lord of the rings
• L’étranger
• Belle du seigneur
• Les misérables
• Mémoires d’Hadrien
• Pride and prejudices
• The unbearable lightness of being
• Foundation
• Crime and punishment
• Madame Bovary
• Le rouge et le noir
• The Brothers Karamazov
• La peste
• War and peace
• The grapes of wrath
• Les liaisons dangereuses
• Bel-Ami
• Anna Karenina
• The name of the rose
• Germinal
• To kill a mocking bird
• The three musketeers
• Kafka on the shore
• La vie mode d’emploi
• Lolita
• Wuthering heights
• Mort à crédit
• The picture of Dorian Gray
• Life and fate
• Chess story
• La chartreuse de Parme
• L’œuvre au noir
• The idiot
• L’assommoir
• The road
• Le père Goriot
• The trial
• Don Quixote
• Notre-Dame de Paris
• Illusions perdues
• The sound and the fury
• La condition humaine