What Is the Great Italian/Great European Novel?

Does the genre exist over here? And if it doesn't (I don't think it does), why is that? Tell me what you think in the comments!

My recent video on the Great American Novel:

The books mentioned in this video, with links to buy them on Amazon (yep I'm an affiliate):

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[waschbear]

I can only talk about german literature and I cannot think of the one german novel. There are, as you said, novels that excellently depict certain lifestyles that existed through the ages/classes, but not one novel that tries to encompass all, as far as I know.
IMO America has (or maybe had, but stuck to it) a strong need to identify itself and what it is that defines them, because the country is so relatively new and their respective "original" nationalities still so fresh. Maybe that led to a identity crisis of sort and the great american novel is one of the answers to the question "what are we now?".

Love the channel, keep up the good work :)

[DimitrisRebelYell]

I Promessi Sposi is such a beautiful book! The way the plague in Milan is shown is hair-raising.
In Greece we don't have a Great Novel either. I would suggest War and Peace for Russia or Les Misérables for France,   Günter Grass's Danzig Trilogy for 20th century Germany, maybe?... (I haven't read it). Finally, there's a Hungarian set of books, written 80 years ago, The Transylvania Trilogy by Miklós Bánffy... it's supposed to be GREAT! Maybe it fits.

[bookreview]

I think this GREAT XXX NOVEL is an American thing, I couldn't point to a German novel either. I always think the Americans have a greater need to be great and also define themselves than other nations. I think it has to do with Americans trying to build their own identity, which Europeans don't have to do, we have a long and rich history. America has pioneering, wars, racism and hatred in a very short amount of time and they are still young and trying to find a common identity for a people that is basically made up of immigrants that each bring their own traditions to the table.

[sheamcc]

Funny enough for the great Irish literature I'd point more towards our gothic tradition than those of Joyce because right now I feel our conflict is with preserving our past while trying to live in the 21st century

[qbjgept]

Great German Novel? The Magic Mountain comes to mind.

[rofsrer]

Thomas Bernhard has tried (or had, since he's already dead) to write the great austrian novel. I haven't read most of his books, but from what I can tell based on reviews whose author's opinions I deeply respect Bernhard did write the Great Austrian Novel. I'm pretty sure, also, that Ulysses is the Great Irish Novel. As for Europe as a whole, given its age, I'd say there are a lot of Great European Novels. Robert Musil's The Man without Qualities and Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain and perhaps also Celine's Journey to the End of the Night can be called as the Great European Novel of the 20the Century, or the Great European Modernist Novel.
I agree with you in that USA's age and history has influenced writers to try to write an absolute American novel. The only other place I can think of that tries to do the same in order to understand itself is Latinamerica (IMO, the Great Latin American Novel is either One Hunded Years of Solitude, Pedro Páramo or 2666, by the way). Both (North and South America) being colonized at the same time (but differently), both adopting a new identity, both fighting for independence also around the same time, they may have more in common than one thinks.

[tomlabooks]

For Italy, maybe Vasco Pratolini, with his “Una storia italiana”, trilogy starting with Metello?

[UnseenGlasses]

Maybe Balzac's 90-something part La Comédie humaine could be the The Great French Novel? I don't know enough about France or Balzac to really comment on that, though.

I think it might be worth considering whether or not more artists in Europe have tried to encapsulate their country through other mediums. There is a great section in Susan Sontag's On Photography where she discusses various attempts to catalog all of a nation's people through photography, such as German photographer August Sander's People of the 20th Century. She also starts off the section by talking about Walt Whitman who probably holds the title of The Great American Poet.

[hanscastorp]

I absolutely agree with you that there is no such thing as a Great European Novel. But like always the Russians are a different case here and would be more complicated matter to discuss. "War and Peace" actually should have been translated into "War and Society" (at least the German translator of the novel wrote a remark saying so). So if you really want to search for a Great European Novel and acknowledge Russia as a European country.. i think you have the best chances when only accepting one novel and no cycle.
But many novels together can paint a accurate moral image of a society or country. And if you desperately want to name one author that embodied that principle, in my opinion it would be Balzac with his "Human Comedy". His intention really was to grasp all aspects of french life at the time. But of course it isn't one book but a cycle.
Another one that comes to my mind would be a Great South American Novel. I never read it but Marquez' "One Hundred Years of Solitude" would at least meet the external criteria.

[browngirlreading]

I totally agree with you. To say there is on great American novel or French novel, etc. is impossible. If that existed what a bore reading would be.

[auhsojonalos]

For me this 'great xxx novel' is for those countries who have been oppressed by colonization. Like in the Philippines, we do have Noli Me Tangere and El Filibusterismo which is the magnum opus of Filipino literature but we have yet to find a voice in post colonial Philippines. No significant novel after the 1800s have captured the Filipino psyche.

[tonybennett]

If I had to nominate any novel from the UK, it would have to be one that I would proudly recommend, so I would concur with your suggestion of Middlemarch, as it combines some of the weight of Dickens with the sheer humorous readability of Austin. A great recent Scottish novel is Lanark by Alistair Gray.

A recent European novel that I finished earlier this month is Confessions by Jaume Cabre, so broad in its scope that it could already be termed a great work.

Finally, I know that The Betrothed gets rather overdone in Italy, but here it's one of the least widely read of the great European novels, which is an enormous pity, and I try to right that whenever I can, sadly, to little avail. I think people might think it will be too heavy and difficult, but it's not. Just like Middlemarch, it's a stonking good read.

[StunDamage]

Thinking about my country's marginal literature, I don't think there's a Great Bulgarian Novel either. There are somewhat sprawling novels in the canon, but all of them are deeply rooted in certain events rather than life in general (a classic like "Under the Yoke" is mostly about Turkish usurpation and the resistance to it, then there's "Doomed Souls", which is about expats in Spain and the civil war there. It's pretty similar to "For Whom the Bell Tolls" and is no more of a Great (-) Novel). You can somewhat make the case for Dimitar Dimov's "Tobaco" being a Great Bulgarian Novel, but even that is a stretch. And I doubt a GBN is going to come up soon, since our recent novelists (all 5 ot them) are into pretty specific postmodern stuff.
However, you raised the question of a Great British Novel and I'd like to mention Ford Madox Ford's "Parade's End", which is kind of a cheat since it is a quartet, but nowadays it's mostly sold in a bundle so I can get away with it. I think that books deserves way more recognition than it gets today.
Generally speaking, European culture goes way further in time than American and it's very apparent even in everyday life, so we don't have as strong an urge to define ourselves with an all-encompasing novel. Still, i'd like to end the post with a curiosity: there's an incredibly ambitious Mexican book which essentially tries to be a Great American AND European novel at the same time. "Terra Nostra" by Carlos Fuentes. It is pretty fascinating, even if the goal is arguably impossible.

[barkbark]

Lets talk about turkey
I think it is really interesting to see how the "great turkish piece of literature" changed throughout time while turkish/ottoman culture was changing drasticly.

1st Phase: Ottoman/Religious
I think firstly the most important piece of turkish literature in the medieval times was Rumi's Mesnevi. An islamic masterpiece of art - though not a novel - written in the turkish city of Konya as far as i know.

2nd Phase: Kemalism/ Imitating western Europe
In this phase, the french novel was an extremely popular genre of literature. The most famous novel of that time is probably "forbidden love" (aski memnu) . This book was even made into a popular famous series with the same name.

3rd Phase: Turkey as an european and an oriental nation
One of my favorite Crimebooks: "My name is Red" from Orhan Pamuk plays wonderfully with typically "oriental" (platonic love between men, falling in love with god, old persian classics...) as well as typically "western" (individualism, science...) themes. Pamuk is the only nobel prize winner for literature in turkey.

4th Phase: Turkey under Erdoğan
Its interesting to see how turkish literature will change under Erdoğan. Probably the authors will get more rebellious and demonstratively multicultural. An example of this change is for example "the bastard of istanbul" from elif shafak having armenian history in turkey as a main topic.

Hope this comment makes any sense and doesn't have mistakes :D

[radekstepienzhr]

About "Great Polish Novel", unfortunately there's probably no such thing, because in times of "Great Novels" polish writers used this genre for political reasons, writing to sustain culture of nation divided between three states: Tzar's Russia, Austro-Hungarian Empire and Germany. That's how we got the "national novels" by Nobel Prize Winners: Henryk Sienkiewicz (trilogy "Fire and Sword", "The Fludge" and "Pan Wołodyjowski") and Władysław Reymont ("The Paesants" and "The Promised Land" - those two are as close as it gets to "great polish novel") and Nobel Prize Nominee, Stefan Żeromski ("The Early Spring").
However due to huge theatre impact in polish culture, we can say we have our "Great Polish Drama Literature". Most important dramas, "Great Polish Dramas", are "The Forefathers Eve" by Adam Mickiewicz and trilogy "The Wedding", "The Liberation" and "Acropolis" by Stanisław Wyspiański, but you can also count in "Un-Divine Comedy" by Zygmunt Krasinski and "Samuel Zborowski" by Julius Słowacki.

[gijsvanengelen]

The first book that comes to mind is Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain (Der Zauberberg), which I really think is the great European novel of its particular time. In my opinion, Louis Paul Boon's Kapellekensbaan is the great European novel about The Cold War, but apparently the English translation (On Chapel's Lane) doesn't really work. It's not uniquely American to think of certain books as "the great ... novel" by the way, because the Russians do that a lot as well (I think). A lot of good candidates for that category of course: Dead Souls, War and Peace/Anna Karenina, The Brothers Karamazov, Fathers and Sons... In The Netherlands people tend to think of The Discovery of Heaven as the great Dutch novel, which is insane. I would say Hermans' Beyond Sleep or Karakter by Bordewijk are good ones, or even Rituals by Cees Nooteboom.

[Dr_Manhattan_]

La vita in tempo di pace -Francesco Pecoraro

[brabra]

What do you think of Pirandello, isn't he worth talking about in foreign literature? I don't get why he does not receive that much recognition abroad. IMHO he is much "bigger" than Calvino. Not to say that Calvino he's not worth it; on the contrary, he is, but I'm surprised he's not even mentioned in Guardian's list of the 100 greatest novels of all time.

[WaltsComicBookChannel]

It might be true that there's not that one, unifying Italian/German/etc NOVEL in Europe, but there was, especially in Eastern Europe, the national/folk poets phenomenon. I know it's a distant cousin, but something about it is similar: the desire to trap that quintessential "thing" about a certain culture/way of life/soul/people's psychology in a piece of literature. People more educated than me could be able to tell if any of the modern European novelists/poets carry on that tradition, consciously or unconsciously. In a depressing, almost perverse way Houellebecq comes to mind.

[DanielDagris]

Any thoughts on Elena Ferrante's Neapolitan quartet as a candidate?