What books have remained in your memory?

[kanewai]

One of my favorite "best of ... " lists was Le Monde's 100 Books of the Century. In 1999 the paper asked their readers which books have remained in your memory? I thought the results were far more interesting than surveys that ask about the "best" or "favorite" books. It was a list of books that had a personal impact on readers, and I think I want to read everything on the list.

As we move into our third Super Challenge, I'd like to ask the same question here: what are the books from the last challenges that have stayed with you?

(or if you haven't done a challenge, what books in a non-native language have stayed with you?)

I read tons, but these are the ones that have really stood out:

Émile Zola. Germinal. 1885. A novel centered around a miners' strike. It sounds like a dull topic, but it is full of action and violence and genuinely horrible scenes. One of the saddest chapters of any of the books I've read is here - and it centers around a horse that is being lowered into the mines for a life in the darkness. And one of the most horrifying is set during a riot when the women of the town take their revenge on a shopkeeper who has been sexually abusing their daughters.

Jean Genet. Notre-Dame-des-Fleurs. 1944. A 16-year old assassin gets swept up in the gay underground in Paris of the 1920s. The novel moves between reform schools to prisons to transvestite balls. It's a raw story, and unlike anything I've read.

Louis-Ferdinand Céline. Voyage au bout de la nuit. 1932. Céline hated the world, and I think I would have hated Céline. I definitely hated this book, even though I'm listing it here as one that has stayed with me. The author takes a tour of all the dark places in the world, from the military during WWI to colonial Africa to the factories of Detroit, finally ending in the slums of Paris. It's an ugly book, and hard to put down.

Victor Hugo. Notre-Dame de Paris. 1831. My sister-in-law says this is one of her favorite novels of all time. I enjoyed most of the novel, and definitely found it easier going than Les misérables. Mostly I thought it was really good, but not great - until the end. The last third is stunning. No spoilers, but everyone is a little bit of a hero, and everyone is a little bit of a villain. I have such a vivid image of the last couple scenes that I don't ever want to see a movie (unless I get to direct it), because they will obviously get Quasimodo and Esmerelda wrong.

Italo Calvino. Le cosmicomiche. 1965. It's a sci-fi / fantasy novel where the main characters are all abstract mathematical concepts. It works, and it's fabulous.

Primo Levi. Se questo è un uomo. 1947. La tregua. 1963. Levi writes about his time at Auschiwitz, and his long journey home. And even though I thought I knew about the Holocaust, I realize that I really knew nothing about what it would take to survive it.

[sillygoose1]

Les particules elementaires by Michel Houellebecq:

I read it during a dark time in my life, and it was bad for my motivation. But it was probably the blow of reality that I needed. The world isn't what it used to be and it's only going to continue to change via trends and the masses.

El juego del angel by Carlos Ruiz Zafon:

I feel lucky to have read this before La sombra del viento because it was meant to be a prequel. This book combines the best elements of 19th/20th century French literature and noir with a Barcelona twist. The imagery is stunning, the characters are great, and this was one of the only books that brought tears to my eyes at the end.

The Broom of the System by David Foster Wallace:

Mainly because this book made me laugh out loud quite a few times.

[Elenia]

I haven't read all that much in my target languages. But Sommarboken by Tove Jansson still sticks with me (in particular, the story 'The Tent'). Such a good book, and such good writing. It's a series of short stories about a family of three - Sophie, her father and his mother - who spend their summers on their island in the Finnish Archipelago.

[chokofingrz]

Haven't read that many, but Das Parfum by Patrick Süskind will probably stay with me forever. I found the meticulously flowery and detailed descriptive prose exquisite - even though with my B2-ish level I could barely understand 80% of it. Definitely the sort of book which is worth getting great at German in order to enjoy.

[Iversen]

I borrowed the French linguist Lucien Tesnière's "Éléments de syntaxe structurale" from our State Library during my study years, returned it to the library and then wanted to borrow it again when I was due to write my final thesis - and then somebody had stolen it or misplaced it in the book tower so I couldn't get it from there. And because the library hadn't officially acknowledged the loss of the book I couldn't just get them to order it from another library. That meant that I had to limit myself to using the notes I had made the first time I had the book, and this was a real problem as this book is THE central book in valency grammar - my preferred grammatical theory, and the one that in my opinion would solve most of the conceptual problems in generative grammar if you substituted it for the constituent structure grammar used by Chomsky by simple inertia because he had learnt it from Zellig Harris and his other teachers.

I'll never forget that book.

Btw. the same happened to me with a book by the Polish philosopher Roman Ingarden, but phenomenology, ontology and aesthetics can be studied without consulting that book (or even better: not studied). Depriving me of the 'Elements' by Tesnière just before I should write about a syntactic topic was like telling a dedicated Chomsky disciple that his beloved Syntactic Structures had disappeared for good from this world and never was to be seen again.

[tarvos]

There are way, way too many to name. I can't make a list and do all of them justice, it'd just be messy. If someone would ask me about my favourite musical artists, I couldn't give them an answer either - I mean, I used to cover things that were mostly pop, rock, maybe slightly folk or punk or blues, but only one or two of those artists would make a hypothetical top ten.

[Radioclare]

I didn't read it as part of a challenge, but the book which has influenced me the most is 'Der Vorleser' (The Reader) by Bernhard Schlink.

This is partly because it was the first book I ever read in a foreign language. Indeed, it was the first book I ever saw in a foreign language. It had never occurred to me that books existed in languages other than English (really!) until I was 19 and my German penfriend posted it to me as a birthday present. I can still vividly remember my amazement in opening it and thinking "wow, this is an entire book with all the words in German...!".

My German was nowhere near good enough to read a book at the time, but my friend had gone through and pencilled in the English translations of more difficult words for me. I think it must have taken me about three months to get to the end of it. I spent so long trying to read the first chapter that I know parts of it by heart "Als ich fünfzehn war, hatte ich Gelbsucht. Die Krankheit begann im Herbst und endete im Frühjahr. Je kälter und dunkler das alte Jahr wurde, desto schwächer wurde ich..." The first paragraph of the book ends with the phrase "...hörte ich eine Amsel singen" and I remember not knowing what an Amsel was (blackbird) and being devastated that I couldn't find the word in the little German pocket dictionary I had. These were the distant days before constant internet access was a thing, so I remember sneaking into the languages department in my university to borrow a proper German dictionary and look it up

I guess I was lucky that the book I was sent was one with such a powerful story, which lent me the motivation to get all the way through it at my painstakingly slow speed. For those who don't know it, it's about a 15 year old boy who is seduced by an older woman in her 30s, who turns out to have had a dark past during the Second World War. I don't want to spoil the plot but the book is essentially about the difficulties of the post-war generation of Germans in coming to terms with the things that were done by the generation above them and it's presented in a very clever way, by the way the protagonist witnesses the human side of a woman who may (or may not) have been responsible for some very dreadful things.

It's a complex book; the sort of book you can read again and again on many levels. I've read mine so many times that the pages have started falling out of the spine, so I've got a second copy now for when I want to read it. My original copy is kept for sentimental purposes, because I think of it as a book which changed my life

[chokofingrz]

I didn't read it as part of a challenge, but the book which has influenced me the most is 'Der Vorleser' (The Reader) by Bernhard Schlink.

Also my first ever proper read in German (around 12 years ago)! A good story, and it opened my eyes to the fact that you can enjoy something you don't fully understand.

[Montmorency]

Unwiederbringlich - Theodor Fontane

This is the story of marital breakup (more or less a taboo subject then, although Fontane wrote several books on the subject, including Effi Briest and L'Adultera) against an interesting historical background. It is set in Holstein when it was ruled by Denmark, in the phony peace period before the Prussian-Danish war (subject of the recent-ish Danish TV film "1864"). It seems that everyone knew that things were likely to change, although some people tried to kid themselves that they could remain the same: some wanted to stay with Denmark, others would not have minded becoming an independent German state, but didn't want to be taken over by Prussia. Fontane had been a war correspondent in the Prussian-Danish war, so he knew the situation well.

I initially slogged through the German with some difficulty, then got some help from google translate. Later on however, a new translation appeared (No Way Back (Angel Classics), using which I cheated unashamedly.

At the time, I was getting into Danish, so the Danish angle particularly appealed to me.