Kundera is pure delight, "L'Insoutenable" is one of the most memorable books I've read between 16-20 (this one read after a fervent sale pitch by the teacher whose opinion on "good writers" you don't agree with. I forgot to mention before his advice came with a whole lot of passionate opinions about who he thought were great writers - a list you'd fully agree with!).. I don't like all that much where Kundera has gone with L'immortalité and haven't read his more recent ouput.




I adore Eco's books. Eco's novels have to hold the record for the number of books they've inspired me to read afterward.

I enjoy Viktor Pelevin, a Russian writer who has been translated into English, although there is a bit of a pop-philosophy feel to his books that keeps me ambivalent about whether or not he's really a good writer or not.



... And I also had a Burgess phase. He was brilliant.



I rather enjoyed Grass decades ago (well 2 decades ago, I'm just 42...) or at least some aspects of his work, but I completely agree on Steinbeck and the sisters. I would add to the list Hemingway, and Miller. I liked the few De Lillo I've read, and I had a lot of fun reading John Irving as a youth, but overall my relatively low interest in American culture has tended to make me stay away from modern American writers in general or made them low priority, except for my occasional ventures in genre fiction. The American writer I've loved the most (at some point anyway) and read the most is probably Burroughs (Kérouac we rather consider an expatriated local writer, so he doesn't count...). Woody Allen, though I wouldn't say his writing ouput is what stands out.

I've enjoyed Marquez, but not as much as some.



I haven't read Fitzegerald, and I would rate what I read by Huxley more as brilliant in terms of ideas and vision than in form, but otherwise it's not a bad list at all. I have not ventured anywhere as far as you in Russian literature, but I've loved Pasternak, and Dostoevsky in the mid-90 French translation was a real rediscovery after the laborious experience with him in college (the older ones are really bad, the translators sought to "enhance" him by giving him a style close to Tolstoy's). Mann is pure genius.

My own list would forcibly include many more French (or Francophonie) writers beside Flaubert who is maybe the best of them all or at least in the top three: Maupassant (from Flaubert's circle, though a more minor writer), Camus, Zola, Boris Vian, MacOrlan, Raymond Queneau, Alfred Jarry., Romain Gary/Emile Ajar Laferrière, Anne Hébert, Réjean Ducharme, Tremblay (those four I consider the true world-class great writers Québec produced so far, of those Ducharme is the most unique/brilliant, to my taste), Malouf, Kadra among more recent ones.

For the stage? Ionesco, Beckett, Racine, Molière, Stringberg, Mueller. More recently Mouawad. I'm not a big reader of plays, though.

The very old writers? I've loved François Villon, Marie de France, loved Tristan et Iseult far more than I did Arthuriana (Malory puts me to sleep, De Troyes mysticim is a major irritant), Rabelais of course. On the english side Swift, more than De Foe. Dickens. Perreault's and Lafontaine's French is lovely. I have a fondness for Saint-Simon and a deep admiration for his brilliant handling of language.



Joyce can get irritating. Salinger is OK, I guess. Dumas for me falls more in the "guilty pleasure" category ("guilty" because they're long books and I should spend my very limited time reading new stuff than occasionally re reading Dumas.. same thing for Jordan and co., incidentally) than that of the great writers. A good writer considering the constraints he worked under, a great storyteller and one whose characters took a life of their own, but "great writer" I'm not sure. It's hard to put him in that category, in the greater picture of French literature in particular (I sometimes half think people love to label him a classic mostly because it's one old writer they find easy and interesting enough to read). Dumas's French is nice, musical - and the grammars feature quite a few Dumas quotes, but his French remains very academic and conventional for his time - Dumas's genius such as it is lays elsewhere.

As for those I've had troubles with despite their reputation, the "classics" among them would certainly include Proust (his descriptive passages alone must fill the space of 2-3 WOT books if not more - and his paragraph long sentences are annoying) and Claudel, Sainte-Beuve. Voltaire's Candide kind of bores me. A lot of Hugo bored me, though his French is great(his poetry I just can't stand). Balzac is another I take only in small doses. I just can't stand Céline. Sand wrote well but bores me. Another I find most forgettable is Sade (That the term sadism was coinded will never make him one the great writers IMO). It tends to annoy me when I see Verne raised to the status of "great writer" by some (it's rarely done by the French). The worshipping of Druon as some sort of "great writer" by some is annoying (the man himself is even more, though!) - his writing is laborious and academic (and a total reactionary, wanted to be a new Flaubert in the days of the likes of Camus, ended up being a sub-Dumas at best) and though his storytelling is entertaining for young people (I liked him well enough at 13, just couldn't stand his writing when I tried to reread him a few years ago), there's also more historical falsehoods in Les Rois Maudits than in Dan Brown- I think the next time someone argues back to me "I think you're wrong about this or that, it's not how it happened, read Les Rois Maudits) I'm gonna bite him (at least most people today know better than to take a Dumas novel as a history book.. aside from their wild beliefs about figures like Mazarin or Richelieu anyway...).

The whole "Nouveau Roman" movement bored me, Alain Robbe-Grillet in particular. Sartre was a very significant philosopher, but I find his fiction pretty much forgettable, his writing style even more. I could also add quite a few of the French darlings of the last decade - too much about style, not enough about storytelling, IMO.