UNESCO Representative Literature

So I read an issue of The New Yorker and an issue of OK Magazine and the latest Vanity Fair. I also just finished the Bengali novel Kalindi, which is an ordinary soap opera set in rural India; Kawabata's The Lake and A Thousand Cranes; the Turkish novel Gemmo; and the first Dutch fantasy/sci-fi novel, A Short Account of a Remarkable Aerial Voyage and Discovery of a New planet, by Willem Bilderdijk. Gemmo has a wonderful and eponymous central character, a woman who enters a tournament and fights men until one defeats her to choose a husband, instead of being sold off to the highest bidder by her father. Bilderdijk left me cold, and I thought about the unusual choices that are made by committees choosing the most representative untranslated novels for UNESCO. Kawabata, the first Japanese Nobel prize winner, has that element in his aesthetic that is common to contemporary Japanese literature: a sort of slightly off-center taste for pain and suffering, as if that was a proof of love. Perverse in its way, The Lake shows the seamier side of a petty criminal's emotional life. Equally perverse but admirably sparse and euphonious in its writing, A Thousand Cranes is the sordid story of two suicides caused by a spoiled but evidently desirable young man of callous predisposition.