Best Book Only Read in L2

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tarvos
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Re: Best Book Only Read in L2

Postby tarvos » Sun Apr 23, 2017 9:05 am

I've read so many good books in L2 I've lost count... but one of my favourites surely was Kafka's Die Verwandlung. Another one which I really liked was Zweig's Schachnovelle, Dovlatov's Kompromiss and Tolstoy's Anna Karenina.

Oh and everything Amélie Nothomb has ever written.

For emk: Have you read La Horde du Contre-vent by Alain Damassio? You might like that one.
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Re: Best Book Only Read in L2

Postby Arnaud » Sun Apr 23, 2017 10:17 am

tarvos wrote:For emk: Have you read La Horde du Contre-vent by Alain Damassio? You might like that one.
His conferences on YouTube are also interesting ("science-fiction et politique" and "un monde sans machines" are the two that I watched, the others are repetitive...)
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Re: Best Book Only Read in L2

Postby emk » Sun Apr 23, 2017 10:26 am

tarvos wrote:For emk: Have you read La Horde du Contre-vent by Alain Damassio? You might like that one.

I've started it a couple of times, but honestly the payoff is a little slow for me. It's obviously a very well written book. But ever since I became a parent, I do better with finishing books that, like Déchronologue, start with fire and destruction and an interesting narrator on page 1, than I do with books that start slowly. Maybe someday.

I do have to admit that Fred Vargas is a whole lot fun, though.
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Re: Best Book Only Read in L2

Postby aaleks » Sun Apr 23, 2017 2:46 pm

I’m afraid that among books I’ve read in L2 is no book that fits both criteria. But probably I just confuse “best” and “great”. So I’ll write a little about Labyrinth by Kate Mosse. The book is based on historic events (maybe no more than Alexandr Duma’s books did, but it’s just a fiction after all). The story is not too banal although a reader could predict some events and probably ending of book too. What I don’t like about this book is that there are too many brutal scenes to my taste.

And I think I can mention the Harry Potter books here too, since I’ve never read it in Russian and I doubt I ever will. The reason is that it seems Harry has a magically bad luck with Russian translations or Russian translators. From what I’ve read on Internet it looks like a new translation of the books isn’t much better than a previous one. Mostly Harry Potter’s fans complain about names of characters. For example, Severus Snape has been called “Злотеус Злей” :mrgreen: (back in English it might be translated as “Evildous Evil” or something like it). And there are other flaws in both versions of translation.
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Re: Best Book Only Read in L2

Postby Arnaud » Sun Apr 23, 2017 6:43 pm

I would have thought that Snape is as close to Snake as Злей is close to змей...Well I'm neither english nor russian :?
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Re: Best Book Only Read in L2

Postby aaleks » Sun Apr 23, 2017 7:16 pm

Arnaud wrote:I would have thought that Snape is as close to Snake as Злей is close to змей...Well I'm neither english nor russian :?

It's an interesting thought. And your guess probably is closer to the truth than mine :)
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Re: Best Book Only Read in L2

Postby kanewai » Wed Apr 26, 2017 8:00 pm

Il deserto dei tartari was great! I don't think it's a book I would have ever picked up if I wasn't studying Italian, but I kept seeing it on 'best of' lists & gave it a try.

I read a lot, so I have a long list of 'best books only read in L2.' I'll try to be selective here:

Italian: I'm currently reading La storia del nuevo cognome, the second volume of Elena Ferrante's Napoli Quartet, and I can see why her books are so well known. You really feel like you are seeing the life of the rione from the inside, and her two main characters are vividly drawn. There's a lot of tension between those who speak Italian and those who speak dialetto, and I think this would be hard to capture in English. Primo Levi's two books on surviving the holocaust, Se questo e uomo and La tregua, are absolutely amazing & I wish they were as widely read in the US as The Diary of Anne Frank. Maybe they are more widely read in Europe and Israel? Italo Calvino is brilliant, of course. Cosmicomiche is a series of science fiction stories where the main characters are abstract mathematical concepts set over the course of the history of the universe. It's surreal, but somehow powerful and emotional at the same time. I don't know how he pulled it off, and I can't imagine that this translates well into any other language.

French: There are so many here. Marguerite Yourcenar: Mémoires d'Hadrien pretends to be a letter from the Emperor Hadrian to Marcus Aurelius. It's a beautiful novel, and I don't understand why it isn't more famous. Boris Vian: L'écume des jours is a surreal jazz-age romance. Victor Hugo: Notre-Dame de Paris reads like a movie, and would make an awesome HBO series. Jean Genet:  Notre-Dame-des-Fleurs was written from prison, and is set in the gay underworld of Paris. It is more graphic and blunt than anything modern that I've ever read. There's a lot of argot, and I needed a dictionary to work through it. It would make an awesome movie or series too, though it would probably be banned in most countries. André Gide's short novels deal a lot with sexual and sensual awakenings, but the language is softer and more romantic. Jean Giono is great also, and his books have very warm humanist and ecological themes - though he wrote decades before the modern ecological movement. Émile Zola wrote thick, socially aware epics that are gripping, but also really, really long. And then there's Proust. I'm more than half-way though À la recherche du temps perdu. Some of the language is stunningly beautiful. A lot of the writing is stunningly tedious. I don't know what to make of it overall. Maybe one decade I'll finish it & will have an opinion on whether it's really the best novel of all time or not.

Spanish: I'm just starting to read novels in Spanish, and so far nothing has made my 'best of' list, though Mario Vargas Llosa's Travesuras de la niña mala was really enjoyable and worth the read. I read somewhere that it is one of Madonna's favorite books, so there's that.
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Re: Best Book Only Read in L2

Postby Voytek » Wed Apr 26, 2017 8:30 pm

https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Padre_Rico,_Padre_Pobre

You all have to read this book. :) Unless you don't want get rich or die trying. :P
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Re: Best Book Only Read in L2

Postby Hank » Sat Apr 29, 2017 11:57 pm

For me it was the Apocalipsis Z series by Manel Loureiro. It's pretty much The Walking Dead in Spain. I think I'm the only person on the forum that liked it, though.
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Re: Best Book Only Read in L2

Postby Voytek » Sun Apr 30, 2017 7:34 am

The Female Brain by Louann Brizendine

In English, of course. :)
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