Whatever Happened to World Literature?

The Guardian has published a clickbait list of the 100 Best Novels. The 100 best novels, that is, insofar as translation into English permits such a judgment. The list predictably suffers from “diversity, equity, and inclusion” (DEI) corruption; Toni Morrison’s Beloved is pretty good, but it ain’t the second-best novel ever published in English. Yet, what is astonishing about the list is how provincial it is. Only 22 of the 100 books were originally published in a language other than English. The putative cosmopolitans of the Guardian are far more smugly insular than their forefathers.

All such lists are ostentatious gimmicks, but even so, they have real value. A 100 Best Novels list alerts readers, particularly younger ones, about good books they might enjoy reading. They are, or should be, canon formation in the friendly sense, good-natured prompts to look for books that readers might not have known about otherwise. At their best, they softly inspire readers to find words that move and delight. At their worst, they waste readers’ time by sending them to meretricious ephemera and slowly castrate our culture by consigning past excellence to oblivion.

The Guardian’s list is of the second kind.

The Guardian assembled its list by canvassing “170 novelists, critics and academics … polled for their top 10, ranked in order, which we tallied to compile an overall 100.” The list’s provincial ignorance presumably is that of the entire Guardian literary culture. The Guardian preened itself for removing men and adding women to the list, for adding African women writing in English, but never noticed that they had lost Lady Murasaki and her pioneering The Tale of Genji, much less the absence of Selma Lagerlof and Sigrid Unset. Indeed, the unselfconscious abandonment of the actual literature of the world, the unconscious near-equivalence of the best books with the best English-language books, is the list’s most extraordinary characteristic. The Guardian’s list demonstrates brilliantly the narrow intellectual horizons of what passes for our literary elite.