- At least one book published before 1900
- At least one work of nonfiction
- At least two books translated from another language, preferably different languages
- At least half of the books I read will be by women or people of color (This doesn't feel very ambitious, but it does feel realistic, sadly.)
It all started in late August when I booked a trip to Mexico City and decided I wanted to read some Mexican literature in preparation. I was disappointed in myself for only having read one Mexican novel, Like Water for Chocolate, and for the fact that besides Laura Esquivel and Carlos Fuentes, I couldn't really name any Mexican novelists. It's a big country, right next door, that in many ways shares a history and culture with the U.S., and which I had visited 3 times, so how could I know so little about its literature? So I turned to Twitter and to friends and asked for recommendations and a handful were forthcoming. I ended up reading 4 additional Mexican novels (as well as a short biography of Leon Trotsky) prior to my trip. Over Labor Day weekend, I was visiting my friend Daniel in San Francisco and talking with him about this and wondering what is "The Great Mexican Novel" and then I asked, "And, well, what is The Great Cape Verdean Novel?" and he asked, "What is The Great Papua New Guinean Novel?" and then I was off.
There are all kinds of (big!) problems with this undertaking. Such as:
- What is a country?
- How do I decide what author/what book is from what country?
- Why novels (or fiction generally)?
- If I seek out "The Great X-an Novel," what are the chances I'll end up just reading a bunch more white men?
I tackled the first question first and created a spreadsheet of all the countries in the world, as defined by the U.S. State Department. This list is pretty good and up-to-date and includes the Palestinian Territories and Taiwan, which I wanted to be sure to include in my reading. But as I went about my research, I found the helpful Wikipedia page on Caribbean literature and I got to Martinique, an island in the Caribbean that is an "insular overseas department" of France, which is the birth place of Frantz Fanon, and home to the great Caribbean poet Aimé Cesaire and the novelist Patrick Chamoiseau, whose novel Texaco won the Prix Goncourt in 1992. It felt unjust to leave out a place with such a strong literary history, so I added Martinique to my list, along with the other French overseas departments: French Guiana, Guadeloupe, Mayotte, and Réunion. (Earlier this year - before starting this project - I read Alejo Carpentier's Explosion in a Cathedral, which is largely about the French Revolutionary era in Guadeloupe, and this likely affected my decision as well.) Later, I struggled with and decided in favor of adding the various countries of the United Kingdom. I suppose by my logic I should also add Puerto Rico and Guam. So, my list now stands at 213 countries (or "countries") and is subject to change.
After I had my list of countries, I started filling it in with books I had already read and I quickly realized that who and what books are from where is also not simple. I got as far as Algeria - the 3rd country, alphabetically - and wondered, can I count Camus? I wrote a note to myself, "Consider Assia Djebar or Ahlam Mosteghanemi or Kamel Daoud. Ponder Camus." Then I got to Austria and tried to remember, is Elias Canetti Austrian? Then thought, No! He’s Swiss. But it’s much more complicated than that: Canetti was born in Bulgaria (I thought, Yes! Bulgaria!) and raised there and in Austria, Switzerland, Germany, and England. He spent his early adult life in England and his last 20 years in Switzerland. With several Austrians already on my to-read list, I decided maybe I didn't need an Austrian anyway, but for what country can I count Canetti? He wrote in German, largely about Vienna, so it hardly seems fair to claim him for Bulgaria. Or maybe he has no nation.
Apart from the questions of political and social geography, there is the problem of choosing the novel as the representative form. The bias inherent in selecting to consume written fiction from every country became apparent almost immediately, when Daniel and I had our conversation about Cape Verdean and Papua New Guinean novels. Later in this same conversation, I thought about the Senegalese novelist and filmmaker, Ousmane Sembène, who switched from writing to film-making to reach a wider audience in his home country. The novel is a western form, and the elevation of fiction writing as a privileged form comes from a western bias. Aside from the decision to include some memoir, drama, and book-length poems in my reading, I don't really have a fix for this problem. It's a problem that's at the very root of my project, and I think the best I can do is acknowledge it and be conscious of it as I read.
Finally, there is the problem of White Men. I started off with the question "What's the great X-an novel?" but starting off with that question is likely to bias my reading list in favor of white men, even in some places where whites are a minority of the population. If, for instance, I accept Camus for Algeria, and J.M. Coetzee for South Africa, and José Luandino Vieira for Angola, that's three white men as representative writers in Africa and that's a problem. Of course, I don't have to read those writers or to call them representative of those countries. The whole idea that a writer or a novel is representative of a country is something I have to grapple with in this project.
Of course, the problems listed above aren't the only ones I face. There are problems of language, translation, and availability. But I also don't have to solve any of the problems with this project right away. Even if I read only books from countries I haven't read before, it would take me about 5 years to to get through my list of countries at my current rate of reading, and I don't intend to limit my reading to this project. I've been saying this is kind of a rest-of-my-life project and that may well be true. Since coming up with this concept in September, I've only read books from 3 countries I hadn't read before (though I've read books from 14 countries so far this year).
So, here is the place where I ask for your help. Do you have books or authors that you think I should read? You can look at my spreadsheet and see what I have so far. You'll see there are a lot of holes. Blue indicates I have not yet read a book from that country, bold indicates that I already own the book I intend to read. In case you're wondering, for the countries I've already read, I decided to list the first book I'd ever read from that country as the representative book.
Finally, I want to acknowledge that there's no such thing as a new idea in the world. Not long after deciding to do this, I was not surprised to discover someone had already done it - and recently! Ann Morgan read books from 196 countries (she used the UN member states list, with some adjustment) and wrote a book and blogged about the experience. Her own explanation is here.
