I can read fluently in five modern languages apart from English: Italian, Spanish, French, Portuguese, Polish. Here is my vote:

Italian literature: Umberto Eco (Il nome della Rosa, Baudolino), Elsa Morante (Menzogna e Sortilegio, L'Isola di Arturo), Alberto Moravia (La Romana, Il Disprezzo, La Noia), Dino Buzzati (Il deserto dei Tartari), Italo Svevo (La Coscienza di Zeno).

French literature: Albert Camus (L'Etranger) Françoise Sagan (Bonjour tristesse, Dans un mois dans un an), Simone de Beauvoir (Tous les hommes sont mortels), Antoine de Saint Exupery (Le Petit Prince)

Latin-American literature: Isabelle Allende (La casa de los espíritus, Retrato en Sepia), Gabriel Garcia Marquez (Crónica de una muerte anunciada, El amor en los tiempos del cólera, Cien años de soledad), Mario Benedetti (Quién de nosotros)

Polish literature: Henryk Sienkiewicz (Trylogia)

Portuguese/ Brazilian: Paulo Coehlo (all his books)...

Ok, enough !

For Dutch literature I think "The Dark Room of Damokles", by W.F.Hermans, might be included.
For Czech literature: "The Good Soldier Schweik" (Jaroslav Hasek).
Japanese authors(Yukio Mishima?) seem to be underrepresented too.
Among French authors I did not find one of my own favourites:Fermina Marquez by Valéry Larbaud.
And what about Charles Decoster's "Légende d'Ulenspiegel"...?
And there are more, many more that might qualify in a top-100.
"The Royal Physician's Visit" by Per Olov Enquist ? Knut Hamsun's "Hunger"? ( I know Hamsun sympathised with the Nazis but so did Ezra Pound).

An absolutely fascinating thread!

I hope I can confine myself to German-language literature without giving offence (as I it's the foreign language I know best).

I suggest the following. Of these the first two have already made it in a big way outside the German-speaking lands.

1. Remarque: All Quiet on the Western Front.

2. Heinrich Mann: Professor Unrat. (The English title is usually rendered as "The Blue Angel" as it forms the basis of the famous movie)

3-4. I delighted to see Robert Musil: "The Man Without Qualities" mentioned. I'd add Musil's other well known novel: Young Törless (first published in 1906). Ostensibly a "formation novel", it is an astonishingly open (even X-rated) study in extreme bullying, sadism and group dymanics at a boarding school in Austria-Hungary for boys aged about 14-18 intending to proceed to military academy.

When Musil died in exile in Geneva in 1942, some commentators in Britain praised the novel to skies and apparently claimed the that the novel "prophesied" the horrors of Nazism. Though such comments should be treated with great caution, it's certainly highly perceptive and well worth reading. (When I first read the novel at age 18 in my final term at school I was thunderstruck: there, in spirit anyway, was my own school!)

4-5. Kafka: The Trial - and also The Castle.

I'm surprised that neither of these has yet been mentioned. Both are incomplete (but so is Musil's Man Without Qualities). The Castle, in particular, may strike some readers as rambling. Have these novels gone out of fashion?

6. Yes, The Tin Drum.

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Going further back in the history of German Literature there's also Goethe: The Sorrows of Young Werther (first published in 1774, revised in 1786). No, I'm not going to add it to the list, but in the 1770s it took literary Europe by storm and established Goethe as a cult figure. It's interesting that at the time, quite a number of suicides - and all kinds of immoral acts - were blamed on the book, in rather the same way as certain crimes are now attributed to videos and computer games.

Why mention Werther at all? some may ask. It almost certainly did more than any other work to put German Literature on the international map.

Oh yeah, speaking of German lit: Herman Hesse, especially "The Glass Bead Game".

Ahem, first post!
"The Cornerstone" Zoe Oldenbourg
"The House of the Spirits' Isabelle Allende
"Germinal" Emile Zola
"The Name of the Rose" and "Foucault's Pendulum" Umberto Eco
And for pure entertainment and humour, plus history - "Desiree" Annemarie Selinko

And I forgot, shame on me, the Kristin Lavransdatter trilogy by Sigrid Undset - wonderful!

Well since no one mentioned him so far - Fyodor Dostoyevsky - the greatest one ever for me, English or non English - pick the book really.

Then another great Russian - Mihail Sholohov with his Tihii Don or Quiet Don - Nobel Prize for that matter for this one. Amazing piece of literature.

Boris Pasternak - Doctor Zhivago; Leo Tolstoy - War and Peace; Alexandr Solzhenitsyn - One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich but also The Gulag Archipelago (Arkhipelag Gulag) - excellent work.

I highly recommend these to people who haven't read them.

I haven't read a non-English novel in its native language either, unfortunately. But some of my favorite translated works include the following:

Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka
A Doll's House by Henrik Ibsen (a play)
The Death of Ivan Illych by Leo Tolstoy (a novella)

I tried to read Crime and Punishment once, but I couldn't get through it. I plan to read Anna Karenina in the next year or so (and I had planned that before Oprah placed this title on her book club).

It's just "Perfume". I agree, it's a great book.

"One Hundred years of Solitude" has to be my favourite in any language!

"The Reader" by Bernard Schlink is another great story.

I wish that I could read another language fluently as what a world of literature would be opened up! Recently I had a walking holiday in the Crimean peninsula of Ukraine, and one English guy in our party, who spoke fluent Russian, bought a number of historical novels by Russian and Ukrainian authors. They were very good quality books, and very cheap, but of course all in Russian.
A number of years ago I had a close Iraqi friend, who was a professor of Islamic and Arabic history at a Scottish university. He had many historical, poetic and other beautiful looking books all in Arabic. He once said to me that anyone who can't read Arabic can only access a small part of the literary world - and I believe him.
Though I have read English translations of the literature of other nations, being able to read fluently in the original language must be an enormous asset.

Two of my absolute favourites are:

The Trial by Franz Kafka
The Perfume by Patrick Suskind

Doctor Zhivago and Anna Karenina are both worth reading [and not as "heady" as some other Russian works] I believe. I enjoyed The Red And The Black [Rouge et le Noir] by Stendahl. There are so many books I could say I enjoyed but the one that gave me the most enjoyment was by the Czech writer Jaroslav Hasek titled "The Good Soldier Svejk". It`s the best satire I`ve read to date and the first of four in the series.
Here is a "taste" for anyone that may find themselves wishing to read the book.

Oh Gosh I had also forgotten all about the Sigrid Undset books. I loved them about 45 years ago! Must re read.

In French, the only language I can read besides English:

Voltaire's Candide
Hugo's Les Misérables
Driss Chraibi's La Civilisation, ma mère! (beautiful story about a Moroccan family in the time leading up to independence)
Vercors' Le Silence de la mer (really more of a novelette; it was published by the French Resistance during World War II and concerns a French family forced to quarter a German soldier during the occupation)

I have not read nearly enough great works in translation, but one that I will remember till my dying day is Gabriel García Marquéz's Chronicle of a Death Foretold.

My vote goes to the Kristin Lavransdatter series by the Norwegian author Sigrid Unset, winner of the 1929 Nobel prize for literature.

Pär Lagerkvist, the great Swedish writer who won the Nobel Prize in 1951, wrote 5 somewhat linked novels that explore humanity's relationship to God from a decidedly modern European point of view--I'd call them honestly agnostic, with various characters doubting, loving, hating, but no one ignoring God. The series starts with the crucifixion, and follows several characters as they respond in different ways to that event.

I'm not sure I would call any of them the greatest non-English novel, but all are well worth reading. However, don't start with any of the last three: they will read like interesting but obscure poems if you haven't received the context from the first two. I've just reread "The Sibyl", and if you're only going to read one that (or "Barabbas") would be a good candidate. But reading all 5 in sequence is quite an experience! They are:

"Barabbas", 1950. (novel; play, 1953)

"Sibyllan" (The Sibyl), 1956.

"Ahasverus död" (The Death of Ahasuerus), 1960.

"Pilgrim på havet" (Pilgrim at Sea), 1962.

"Det heliga landet" (The Holy Land), 1964.


Also good on the subject is "Dvärgen" (The Dwarf), 1944. But it isn't linked to the 5.

You're all far too educated and well read for me to even make a suggestion! I would mention though, that when living in Libya, I had a good Iraqi friend who was Professor of Arabic and Islamic studies. He had held similar chairs at UK universties too. He often said that anyone who thinks they know anything about literature, but can't read Arabic, doesn't know what they are talking about as they are ignorant of much of the world's best literature.
Sadly, my Arabic reading ability is too limited for me to suggest any good novels.

I could kick myself for not thinking of this first--except that I had just reread "The Sibyl" and it's been a couple of years since I've read . . .

. . . "Silence" by Shusaku Endo. Truly great.

Endo is one of Japan's half dozen best novelists, and "Silence" is one of the rare Japanese novels that speak well to both Japanese and Western readers. (Example of what's more common: "Kokoro", by Natsume Soseki, is truly great in Japanese, but it's hard for Westerners to appreciate.)

hi all
drat, i forgot my favorite philosopher, plato, how i loved his dialogues. i would have liked to have socrates for a questioner so i could figure out where i was going with certain ideas.
then in middle life, i would love to have talked with the tao teh king author/s presumed to be(sorry not up on modern version of above) by lao tze.
although i don't remember reading any translation of leonardo da vinci, it would have been fascinating just watching the man (i'll assume i spoke perfect italian, chinese and greek of the times required). i loved dostoievski (Spelling?) did not care as much for tolstoy (sorry). liked mencius, will skip my opinions of the world's religious literature. in fact i'll close with

I just found in a used-book pile Malot's great children's book "Sans Famille". English translations have been printed under two different titles: "Nobody's Boy" and "The Adventures of Remi". This was a hugely influential book for me when I was 7 or 8, when I must have read it 10 times. It was successful enough so that it was reprinted for over 100 years, and translated into dozens of languages. The book was probably Malot's best seller during his life, which is saying a lot. It's success made him write "Nobody's Girl", which is still in print. (French title: En Famille.)

While "Sans Famille" doesn't count as a candidate for the greatest non-English novel, it certainly is a candidate for the most popular non-English novel for children. Anyone else know it?