National novels: an overview

A BRITISH NOVEL

Scandal somewhere among the roiling hills of Nincompoopshire because a noble lady past the suitable age to marry wishes to marry a young man of the common people, yet everyone feels obliged to attend the wedding. Upper and lower classes both dread the wedding date – what should everyone wear? How will the region live past this scandal? Is the bride-to-be, in fact, already pregnant? What will the vicar think! The wedding is canceled when the best man trips and sprains his ankle, to the relief of everyone.

A GERMAN NOVEL

A young woman is declared insane and moved to a sanatorium. A diverse cast of intriguing and artistic characters populates it and no one seems to be actually suffering from mental illness other than not fitting in with the rational, money-seeking and authoritarian ways of society. Someone does drugs. The young woman experiences disappointing sex. The sanatorium’s head doctor is secretly a Nazi.

AN AUSTRIAN NOVEL

A shy middle-aged man lives alone. He gets a visit from a young woman who says she’s his daughter. Against all odds, they end up in an incestuous affair. Wracked with guilt, the man visits a Jewish soothsayer, who advises him to take solace in philosophy. The man instead kills his daughter with an axe and then hangs himself. The local lord opens an inquiry which finds out the woman was, in fact, his sister and not his daughter. Also the lord has hooves and no face.

A FRENCH NOVEL

A young man moves to Paris from the countryside, full of hope. He begins an affair with the wife of a courtier but marries a simple weaver girl. He enlists in the Grande Armée and returns home a broken man, disillusioned about life, and invests every last penny in a paint studio despite not knowing how to paint. The courtier’s wife bequeaths her fortune to him when she dies, but by then he is dead himself so his simpleton of a wife ends up with the money. He is buried on the Père Lachaîse cemetary.

A RUSSIAN NOVEL

A wretched old man travels to Moscow to visit his estranged son, who has grown rich as a doctor and has become part of the local bourgeoisie, yet feels ashamed of his rural upbringing. An evil mercenary posing as a captain in the army points the old man in the wrong direction so he ends up in Saint Petersburg instead, believing it to be Moscow. He is arrested there for loitering and thrown in jail, where he is visited by a saintly man who looks exactly like his son. It’s not his son. The old man dies in horrible pain.

AN IRISH NOVEL

A poor family splits up. The eldest son moves to France and returns as a misunderstood artist with syphilis. The youngest son goes to America and joins a crime family in New York. He is gunned down in an altercation with the police. The sole surviving daughter mysteriously disappears on the Irish Sea while on a fishing trip with grandfather, who may or may not be an old dockside prostitute. At least one character is named Siobhàn. You simply cannot trust perfidious Albion.

AN AMERICAN NOVEL

A rugged frontierman pursues his dreams and travels West, meeting a colourful cast of freaks, deadbeats and music bands along the way. Local people think he’s a queer. His romantic ideals never quite match reality but he gets pussy all the fucking time. He goes back home and kills his dad with a shotgun, then sets out to marry his ambiguously inappropriate aged bride near the Mexican border. The ending is open and tense, like the Great Plains.

A DUTCH NOVEL

A outwardly perfectly happy middle-class family is still reeling from the death of their mother. The fresh widower seeks depressing sex and solitude while the children rebel against their stiff middle-class upbringing by developing socialist sympathies and treating civil society like it’s some kind of dark joke. Numerous oblique references to colonial misadventures make clear everyone is traumatized in different ways. It rains every day and the jokes aren’t that funny.

A BELGIAN NOVEL

A rural boy comes of age by secretly watching an orgy between his disgusting family members. He grows up feeling shameful arousal for upper-class symbols like a free-standing home, a nice car and reading dirty French novels. Every character is rather grotesque but therein lies their humanity. At the end, the boy settles for a practical marriage with his practical best friend. Together they dream of horses and their malformed children attending university one day.

A NORWEGIAN NOVEL

A middle-aged man describes the minutiae of his disappointing, everyday boring life while expressing deep regret he never became an artist. He muses about the mountains and despises the backwards ways of his farming village. When he is finally ready to pursue his dream at the age of 49, the village has the biggest harvest yet. He treks into the mountains and drinks himself into a stupor. The real troll was in his mind all along. Also cheese.

A COLOMBIAN NOVEL

Dolores sets up a fruit stall and sells flowers. She also sells her body to the night. She catches the eye of a famous local general, who is unable to express his love the normal way and instead humiliates her by having her marry a banana. The banana holds lengthy philosophical discourses about the nature of family, religion and sex. The girl blinds the general in a surprise acid attack. The novel is an allegory for the rise and fall of a military junta.