Starting with Tovaryšstvo ježíšovo (Society of Jesus) by Jiří Šotola. If you know czech you should read this book.
It is a Czech historical novel set around the Jesuit order and the tense religious, political, and moral atmosphere of early modern Bohemia. It is not just a story about history, but a sharp psychological and philosophical exploration of power, faith, obedience, doubt, and personal conscience. Šotola avoids simple heroes and villains, showing instead how people can be trapped by institutions, ideals, and their own ambitions, which makes the novel intellectually rich, unsettling, and still deeply relevant. It is stealthy allegory of how czech communist party worked and sucked fanatical individuals dry, but it can be generalized onto any ideological hierarchy and any fanatical believer in it. Knowing this the book is even crazier, becouse it was written in 1960s, the author did not expect communist regimes to fall. The book is hopelless and everything gets worse and worse, until it ends, just to begin again anew. It is also written in baroque language, which could be compared to Cormac McCarthy, but has it's own and far greater tradition in Czech literature.
>>25329554(OP) Striptease by argentinian writer Enrique Medina. It's about a strip theater in a basement and a detailed account of its shows and the public who turned the theater into their home and shelter. It may sound monotonous, but it's a page-turner and brilliantly written. The only untranslatable work in Spanish I've come across so far.
>>25329554(OP) I guess I'll add it to the stack. It has been hard to get into baroque literature, feels like it's 20 guys who all wrote the same thing because everything else was banned after White Mountain.
(How is it that Arne Novák reads fine, but Šváb's older Czech literature is the most marxist shit ever? Why is this in my recommended literature when it's all hussites were protogommunist hurr?)
And I guess I'll match you with another certified hood classic: Stone and Pain by Karel Schulz. Historical fiction, biography of Micheangelo in his wider historical context. The church and money, religion and art, idolatry and expression, the innate and the perceived. Art as a spiritual process. Also a very comfy read... if you are in the appropriate language.
>>25329624 Sadly he never finished it. Czechs are thoughever absolute masters of historical fiction. Pic related is completely autistic, you may like it, but it's pretty rare.
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Anonymous06/08/26(Mon)21:14:59
Nuh uh, NYRB/Wakefield/Deep Vellum/Sublunary, you ain’t getting my recs
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Anonymous06/08/26(Mon)22:00:14
>>25329554(OP) Interesting, this is translated into my language.
>>25329852 ...how many people are going to use AI to look for that particular kind of literature, really?
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Anonymous06/09/26(Tue)03:50:01
This board is so cucked or simply crawling with anglos.
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Anonymous06/09/26(Tue)04:09:52
>>25329610 i read the partial translation earlier this year. it won't appeal to enough people to ever be thought of as worth translating.
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Anonymous06/09/26(Tue)07:36:37
>>25329930 Somewhere halfway through Služebníci neužiteční Durych realizes he already filtered 99% of all readers and decides to filter the remaining 1%. The book is about jesuit missionaries in 17th century Japan, out of 800 pages it takes them 400 pages to reach Japan (200 pages out of those to get on a ship), when they reach Japan he goes full autismo about it, introduces tens of historical japanese characters and does full on sperg deep dive on early Tokugawa shogunate that only I guess Japanese reader would understand. Hilarious becouse A) it was written during 1950s when there were no weebs, B) it is written in form of czech that is basically never getting translated (too hard to translate for a book nobody would ever read).
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Anonymous06/09/26(Tue)08:41:57
Alastalon Salissa by Volter Kilpi. Kilpi has sometimes been referred to as "Marcel Proust of Finland" and i'm inclined to agree; brilliant writing, although it's a massive pleb filter. During the 800+ pages, approx. six hours pass in the book.
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Anonymous06/09/26(Tue)16:11:08
>>25330622 I'm pretty sure at least half of the people here are American.
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Anonymous06/09/26(Tue)16:15:34
Just translated it with DeepL or any AI
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Anonymous06/09/26(Tue)16:33:41
>>25331416 >reading AI slop cringe as fuck. Just read something else at that point.
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Anonymous06/09/26(Tue)17:04:22
>>25331453 >cringe as fuck. Just read something else at that point It's good enough nowadays.
I hate English so much. What is wrong with them? Anglos and amerimutts. Do terrible. Tell me why why we have to talk like them and read their ugly poetry and terrible novels. They don't think or speak like people. Your children are growing up now learning more about anglo degenerate and Anglo judaic worship more than their own literature
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Anonymous06/09/26(Tue)18:17:42
>>25331542 This resentful ESL creature really should learn that it is under no obligation to have anything to do with English speakers and English books. All that is needed is for it to crawl back to its enlightened place of origin and leave the 'anglo degenerates' to get on with their lives.
>>25334849 That's true about any language. The most important works of chinese literature have been translated though and there are probably more chinese books translated to english than many other languages, the language may be difficult, but becouse you can make career just out of knowing how to speak chinese, there will be far far more translators of chinese than translators of other languages.
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Anonymous06/11/26(Thu)15:17:27
>>25334891 It's an argentinian novel from 1976, of course it's going to have a go at the military junta. I don't know if that counts as woke or not.
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Anonymous06/11/26(Thu)15:34:28
Christ shut the fuck up about your zoomerspeak meme concepts already