Does your country have a national book and do you like it?

34 comments

1. I don’t think we do in the UK or England specifically for me.

   I’d say our national authors are probably Shakespeare and Dickens but there isn’t one book.

   Shakespeare is a weird one because he wrote plays, not books. They’re a bit weird when read, especially with the older English.

   Dickens is nicer to watch an adaptation of than to read but his books give fascinating insight into the time him lived in.

2. I think Goethes ‘Faust’ and Thomas Manns ‘Buddenbrooks’ are germanys equivalent of the great american novel.

3. We don’t have such a book in Greece. I would assume that 3 books which every Greek knows are the Bible and Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, but they aren’t national books in any case.

4. For Ukraine, Taras Shevchenko as an author is probably the best fit – half of literature curriculum is filled with him. He was slave who was bought from slavery by Russian nobles who found out about his painting talent. But he then went on to become author of lengthy poetry and argued for liberation of Ukrainians. For doing so, he was sentenced by russia to be sent to Kazakhstan to serve in the army and conquer Kazakhs 🙁

5. The Kalevala is a 19th-century compilation of epic poetry, compiled by Elias Lönnrot from Karelian and Finnish oral folklore and mythology, telling an epic story about the Creation of the Earth, describing the controversies and retaliatory voyages between the peoples of the land of Kalevala called Väinölä and the land of Pohjola and their various protagonists and antagonists, as well as the construction and robbery of the epic mythical wealth-making machine Sampo. ([source](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kalevala))

6. We have this “national epic” thing. I was about to say it’s Mickiewicz’s Dziady because of how much attention is given to them in school but the internet says it’s actually his other work Pan Tadeusz (Sir Tadeusz). For younger generations they are at best a source of memes.

7. [Note: this is for the Dutch-speaking part of Belgium. There are no books that are particularly popular in the whole country, except comic books.]

   *De leeuw van Vlaanderen* (The lion of Flanders) by Hendrik Conscience is undoubtedly the most influential book in Flemish history.

   This book was published in 1838, shortly after the creation of Belgium. It’s a historical novel set in 1302, during a battle in which Flemish troops achieved an unexpected victory against the French army. The story is strongly influenced by the upcoming movement of romantic nationalism.

   There are actually two ways in which it’s important. In literary history, it was the first major piece of literature written in Flemish* since the 16th century. It gave Conscience the nickname “The man who taught his people to read”. Secondly, it had an enormous political impact – it helped shape the young Flemish Movement, which would later transform Belgium from a unitary to a federal state. Nowadays, the official Flemish holiday is the 11th of July, which is when the battle in the book happened.

   ​

   (*Flemish is somewhat anachronistic here, but I’m referring to books written in Dutch in the regions that are now Belgium.)

8. La Divina Commedia (The Divine Comedy) by Dante Alighieri is unanimously considered Italy’s national epic, it’s really hard to read and appreciate for native speakers cause the dated Florentine dialect and the poetic speech makes for a really exhausting reading session. We tend to appreciate the book when we get older.

9. I would say ‘Ulysses’ by James Joyce. It is a notoriously hard read, but very good. Currently listening to an audio version with chapter by chapter commentary.

10. For Belarus I’d say works of Vasil Bykau, and for Russia, Tolstoy, Pushkin and Dostoevsky for sure (valid for Belarus as well), soo many great books that is hard to point one specific. but many people would agree that The Brothers Karamazov is possibly one of the most influential books

11. Goethes Faust is *the* book everyone has to read in school.

    It’s a great book with a beautiful story. But a bit hard to read in part since it’s 200 years old.

    There are many more classics but I personally would say Nathan der Weise by Lessing is the second national book. It perfectly encapsulates the Enlightenment and somehow foresees the very dark times to come.

    Germanic mythology also had a very strong cultural influence, my favourite is the Hildebrandslied, though the Nibelungen had a bit more influence.

12. We don’t have one as far as I’m aware but our Sagas are famous worldwide though it’s not exactly a book in the traditional sense.

    Independent People by H.K Laxness would probably be voted as our national book should we want one.

13. National book? Really? Does this exist?

    Well, according to your description you might say the *«Tirant lo Blanc»* might be ours. It’s a 15th century chivalry romance, supposedly one of the first European novels worth this name, and still one of the best.

    To read it, first you need it to be in a modern edition using current characters, so no «Comteſſa» but «Comtessa» and no «cauallers» but «cavallers». Also, better if the orthography is adapted to the current one, so «Com lo Rey de Anglaterra ſe caſa ab la filla del rey de França: e en les bodes foren fetes molts grans feſtes» becomes «Com el Rei d’Anglaterra es casa amb la filla del rei de França: i en els bodes foren fetes moltes grans festes». If so, if you know about middle ages uses and costums, and vocabulary and so on, it’s readable.

    Anyway, a few years ago it was adapted to current Catalan. So, for example, all the chivalry vocabulary was simplified. Nowadays nobody knows, for example, all the names of a knight armour pieces, so maybe not so correct words will be used, but more comprehensible ones. This version is 100% readable and enjoyable but your everyday Catalan reader.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tirant_lo_Blanch

14. for Belgium

    “The Sorrow of Belgium” (Flemish: Het Verdriet van Vlaanderen) by Hugo Claus

    “The Sorrow of Belgium (Dutch: Het verdriet van België) is a 1983 novel by the Belgian author Hugo Claus (1929–2008). The book, widely considered Claus’s most important work and “the most important Flemish/Dutch-language novel of the twentieth century”, is a Bildungsroman which explores themes around politics and growing up in Flanders around World War II. It has been described as “one of the great novels of postwar Europe”

    One of the greatest books of the 20th ever written

15. I believe mein Kampf should be mentioned, since it were much was *the* national book for some time. But it does not qualify when it comes to being a good book

16. For Ireland I’d say James Joyce’s Ulysses captures the spirit of Dublin at least in a timeless manner and is definitely considered our country’s greatest contribution to the world of English language literature. 

17. In Poland there is separate genre called national epic, and this is usually the most important book for the identification, history and independence of a nation/ethnic group. In Poland everyone associates it with Pan Tadeusz by Adam Mickiewicz (although there could be few other books that would fit to that description). To be honest I don’t even remember if I read it, it was probably a school reading. Of course it’s pretty old book, not particularly easy or attractive to read, but everyone knows this title.

    BTW I cant see it on English wikipedia, but on Polish one there is list of national epics of some countries, I wonder how accurate it is. Link to translated page (yea, i know probably translation of titles won’t be the best):
    [https://pl-m-wikipedia-org.translate.goog/wiki/Epos_narodowy?_x_tr_sl=pl&_x_tr_tl=en&_x_tr_hl=pl&_x_tr_pto=wapp](https://pl-m-wikipedia-org.translate.goog/wiki/Epos_narodowy?_x_tr_sl=pl&_x_tr_tl=en&_x_tr_hl=pl&_x_tr_pto=wapp)
    (remember that it’s not alphabetical order in English)

    And if I wanted just to find something more modern and popular around the world it probably would be The Witcher series or something from Olga Tokarczuk since she won Nobel Prize in Literature few years ago.

18. I’m not sure.

    Maybe Le Petit Prince, but it seems a bit odd as I wouldn’t consider it a masterpiece.

    And when I investigate a somewhat more classical literature, I don’t know which I should pick.

    The hunchback of Notre Dame ? Proust ? Sartre or Zola ? Daaamn, you pick for us guys, and then we’ll brag about it with a terrible accent and complain that you butchered it when you (again) make a movie adaptation.

19. UK so it’s hard: Shakespeare, Dickens, Austen etc so no one national book. National books are for ‘young’ countries or newly created countries to create a sense of nationality. We’re none of these plus being a group of countries. Scotland would say Sir Walter Scott. Wales has the Mabinogion. Ireland, when still part of UK can’t claim James Joyce as he deliberate left to escape nationality to write.

20. I reckon many folk would know our National Poet for Auld Lang Syne. We don’t have an official National Book or Author, but there are plenty of titles that might take the unofficial spot. Scottish authors are responsible for a good few old classics. Eg. Treasure Island, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie and the Sherlock Holmes stories. And there are plenty of well-loved novels written by Scots and set in Scotland such as Irvine Welsh’s Trainspotting and Alasdair Gray’s Lanark.

21. I wouldn’t say the Great American Novel is America’s variation of “national books” that a lot of comments in this thread have mentioned. It’s more of a zeitgeisty book that captures the spirit of American society in a particular era (Roaring Twenties, Reconstruction Era, Cold War etc.). The books mentioned in other comments in this thread tend to be the most famous books or national epics in their countries, which I wouldn’t put in the same category as the Great American Novel.

22. Well, Edinburgh was the 1st UNESCO World Literature City.

    This city as everything from Wind in the Willows, Sherlock Holemes, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, Rebus and Harry Potter. (I know HK is English but it was written here)

    For the country, I’d say A Scots Quair by Lewis Grassic Gibbon.

    Trainspotting might be a close second.

23. I’m not Czech but I live here, and I know that *Babička* (Grandma) is required reading for students. Never read it myself though 👀

    I’ve heard it’s somewhat boring

24. For Estonia, it would probably be the “Truth and Justice” pentalogy by A.H. Tammsaare. I read four of the five books when I was younger, the fifth one I couldn’t make. (generally I hear that most people have not read all of them because some of them just don’t work for them). The pentalogy is is set in the late 19th and early 20th century, and although some people like to mock it as one farmer trolling another one for five books, that is a bit inaccurate. That is kinda the first book, of two neighbouring farmers, one having a very rigid mindset and the other being very tricksterish, and their conflicts. The main character is actually the rigid farmers son, who is a child in the first novel. The second novel is a school novel where he is basically in secondary school in a city. It has some quite fun characters, most notably the morally flexible schoolmaster Maurus. The third is set to the 1905 uprising, and has revolutionary themes. In the fourth one, the main character is an adult and the focus is on his marriage troubles. The last novel is him going back to the countryside. I generally quite liked the books, the middle three perhaps more. They are not particularly hard to read, I think.

25. So, we have a few that might fit the criteria:

    Beowulf (oldest work in an English language)

    Canterbury Tales (oldest work in English that you could struggle through)

    The Complete Works of Shakespeare (he is the most famous playwright after all)

    King Arthur and the Round Table (specifically Le Morte d’Arthur, which is in actually in English, Arthur is one of the most enduring English fables)

    Lord of the Rings (best selling English language series)

26. For Portugal it’s Camões. He picked up all the classical myths and created one for Portugal in his epic The Lusiads (Os Lusíadas). It’s mandatory reading at school. It sounds boring when you’re 15, but it’s actually quite an easy read with very inventive language. You will also find lots of sentences or aphorisms people use in their daily lives come from the poem. His statue is in one of Lisbon’s main squares and if you’ve been there you will recognise it.

    In the last decades there have been a push to make Pessoa our national writer by some critics. For sure he was a genius and born to write, but he only left one book finished and it’s not his best (and it’s actually a sort of “dialogue” with The Lusiads)

27. Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy could qualify as one but I’ll have to reread it to give you an own opinion.

28. We’re don’t but some candidates are The Emigrants (sv. Utvandrarna) novel series by Vilhelm Moberg or The Long Ships (sv. Röde Orm) by Frans G. Bengtsson.

29. The official national book is Adam Mickiewicz’s “Sir Thaddeus” – a collection of polish traditions and description of nobles’ rural life.

    The main story is about a nobleman (Jacek Soplica) who dishonours himself by killing his former friend (by whom he was previously wronged) and indirectly helping Muscovites in the process. Soplica takes on a new identity of a priest and tries to find redemption by helping his country, abandoned son and his friend’s family. The story ends on a happy note, with Napoleon marching into Lithuania

    There are also Adam Mickiewicz’s other works:

    “Forefathers’ Eve” – a poetic drama depicting old syncretic pagan-christian ritual of “Dziady” (summoning uneasy souls and helping them achieve heaven), but also showing Poland as the Christ of Nations that died for humanity’s sins, but will eventually get resurrected. These books are heavily influenced by the failed November Uprising.

    “Konrad Wallenrod” – story about a Lithuanian boy abducted and raised by the Teutons, who eventually learns abour his actual nationality and, after killing the teutonic knight von Wallenrod, steals his identity and dedicates his life to infliltrating the Order. The story ends with Konrad deliberatly leading the german army into a trap, which saves Lithuania from the Order’s invasion. Konrad then kills himself after realising that there is no coming back to his previous, happy life. The story is meant to inspire Poles to abandon knightly, honourable ideals and resist by all means necessary to destroy the Tsardom from within

    There are also other notable works (Słowacki’s “Kordian”, Sienkiewicz’s “With fire and sword” or “Deluge”, Wyspiański’s “The Wedding” or, a more recent one, Olga Tokarczuk’s “Professor Andrews in Warsaw”, which, in my opinion, is a perfect, amazing depiction of Poland, especially its absurdity, from a foreigner’s perspective. It’s also a good description of the 1981 Martial Law. I don’t know if it’ll have the same effect on a non-polish person, but I still highly recommed reading it since it’s just 10 pages long and is available [online](https://www.visegradgroup.eu/pl-olga-tokarczuk/olga-tokarczuk-professor#:~:text=The%20short%20story%2C%20Professor%20Andrews,before%20martial%20law%20was%20introduced)), but I don’t have time to cover them all. I personally like most of them, even though they are probably despised by other people of younger generations (being forced to read them at school for grades instead of enjoyment tends to have that effect). I feel like they are essential to understand polish culture, history and mentality.

30. **For Turkiye, it is hard to choose from. We have many influential works.**

    —

    * **lexicographical: [Dîvânu Lugâti’t-Türk (Compendium of the languages of the Turks)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D%C4%ABw%C4%81n_Lugh%C4%81t_al-Turk)**

    *The Dîvânu Lugâti’t-Türk is the first comprehensive dictionary of Turkic languages, compiled in 1072–74 by the Turkic Kara-Khanid scholar Mahmud Kashgari who extensively documented the Turkic languages of his time.*

    —

    * **political: [Kutadgu Bilig (knowledge that brings happiness)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kutadgu_Bilig)**

    *It is an 11th century work written by Yusuf Balasaguni for the prince of Kashgar, which is considered to be the first political treatise and the first allegorical and didactic work of our literature.*

    —

    * **spiritual: [Mesnevi-i Manevi (spiritual poem written in rhyming couplets)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Masnavi)**

    *It has been viewed by many commentators as the greatest mystical poem in world literature. The Mesnevi is a series of six books of poetry that together amount to around 25,000 verses or 50,000 lines. It is a spiritual text that teaches Sufis how to reach their goal of being truly in love with God. He began dictating the first book around the age of 54 around the year 1258 and continued composing verses until his death in 1273.*

    —

    * **epical: [Book of Dede Korkut (Elder “Korkut”, the name of the narrator)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Book_of_Dede_Korkut)**

    *The epic tales of Dede Korkut are some of the best-known Turkic destans (epic stories) from among a total of well over 1000 recorded epics among the Turkic and Mongolian language families. Dede Kokurt himself is a semi-mythical sage, glorified and sanctified in the ancient epics of the Oghuz Turks, who knows the customs and traditions of steppe life very well, protects the tribal organization, and is the narrator of the stories in the book.*

    —

    Since you asked for *a national* book, I tried to name the most influential and important works of our history where you can find them inside THE book. Just, I cannot choose which one of them should be THE ONE, all of them can be considered as our national books.

    Also, important to mention, as written in the description for Dede Korkut, we have many more epic stories (called destans). Dede Korkut is the oldest one known we have, so I chose that one as the most important one. But there are other famous ones, [see this list](https://tr.wikipedia.org/wiki/T%C3%BCrk_edebiyat%C4%B1nda_destan)

    —

    **Also, bonus content.** There are also 2 important figures in our history which may have had a greater influence than all of those mentioned books above. But they are not like captured inside 1 book, but like in many books/stories/poems.

    —

    * **poetical: [Yunus Emre ((1238–1320) was a Turkish folk poet and Sufi who greatly influenced Turkish culture.)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yunus_Emre)**

    *Yunus Emre has exercised immense influence on new formed Turkish literature, which was a combination of Persian and Arabic languages from his own day until the present, because Yunus Emre is, after Ahmed Yesevi and Sultan Walad, one of the first known poets to have composed works in the spoken Old Anatolian Turkish of his own age and region rather than in only Persian or Arabic. His diction remains very close to the popular speech of the people in Central and Western Anatolia. This is also the language of a number of anonymous folk-poets, folk-songs, fairy tales, riddles (tekerlemeler), and proverbs.*

    —

    * **humorous: [Nasreddin Hoca ((1208–1285) is a character in the folklore of the Muslim world from the Balkans to China, and a hero of humorous short stories and satirical anecdotes)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nasreddin)**

    *Nasreddin appears in thousands of stories, sometimes witty, sometimes wise, but often, too, a fool or the butt of a joke. A Nasreddin story usually has a subtle humour and a pedagogic nature*

    —

    PS: If we would just consider the republican period of our history, then easily [Atatürk’s Nutuk (The Speech)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nutuk) would be the one. It took thirty-six hours (on a 6 day span) to be read by Atatürk from 15 to 20 October 1927.

31. For the Netherlands, it might be the Discovery of Heaven ( De ontdekking van de hemel) by Harry Mulisch.

    It’s beautifully written and loved it when I read it but I’m not sure I would still like it 20 years after my first read, since I don’t like the semi-religious messages and inherited guilt, despite being on point for the post-war generation.

32. I believe many European countries have a national epic, not sure if that’s what you’re looking for. Example Germany has Das Niebelungenlied, Finland has Kalevala and England is Beowulf. They’re supposed to represent the spirt of a particular country based on the values held by characters in the stories.

    The US doesn’t really have something similar but you could argue the Constitution technically serves a similar purpose (besides being the law of the land). Or Moby Dick lol

33. Hard to pick since we don’t have a lot of classic books in our school curriculum, but I’ll go with Pelle Erobreren by Martin Andersen Nexø or Lykke-Per by Henrik Pontoppidan. Modern Danish literature is way more popular when it comes to novels. Pre 20th century are mostly poems and fairy tales that people know.

34. Not a book, however HC. Andersen’s litterature is quite importent and every child has to read some of those in school. It does help that a lot of them a quite good short stories with fantastical elements written in such a way that they don’t feel that old (one thing HC. Andersen pioneered was to use non-academic danish meaning the stories still quite readble well today).