Books of the Century by Le Monde

> Starting from a preliminary list of 200 titles created by bookshops and journalists, 17,000 French participants responded to the question, "Which books have stuck in your mind?" (Quels livres sont restés dans votre mémoire?) As Le Monde journalist Josyane Savigneau aptly clarified in her article, the list is not meant to encompass the 100 most distinguished French literary works of the 20th century, but rather to reflect the emotional connections of the French populace.[1]

Limiting the poll to 200 books (if I'm understanding it right... the cited le monde page is paywalled), selected by the elite French-literati, who then polled sub-elite French-literati, is a questionable basis for a list of "books of the century", even in France. Numbers of votes for each book would've been nice, to see how unanimous the top selections were.

8/100, in any language, are from the last third of the century (after 1967). Of those, 4 are well-known in North America (Styron, Eco, Rushdie, Solzhenitsyn). Of those, only two, Styron and Rushdie, are originally in English.

The most recent -en- works prior to those two were Kerouac in 1957 and then Nabokov and Tolkien in 1955.

    year: number (fr/en/other)
    1900s: 7  ( 1 /  4 /  2)
    1910s: 4  ( 3 /  0 /  1)
    1920s: 20 ( 8 /  7 /  5)
    1930s: 12 ( 6 /  5 /  1)
    1940s: 19 (10 /  4 /  5)
    1950s: 20 (13 /  6 /  1)
    1960s: 12 ( 7 /  0 /  5)
    1970s: 4  ( 1 /  1 /  2)
    1980s: 2  ( 0 /  1 /  1)
    totals:    49 / 28 / 23

Given the chronological bias, and few postwar -en- works probably due to distribution and translation challenges, it's pointless to mention all of the American and even British classics they left out from later in the 20th century. English-language books from the 80s and 90s, particularly science fiction, might have barely reached mainstream French consciousness in 1999.

I personally think that the lifetime of the author is a bit odd, since it reduces the rewards towards those who are old or infirm. I agree the length is way too long though.

Remember that Disney was a major factor in lobbying for the longer copyright terms, and their 1959 film Sleeping Beauty was made 80 years after Tchaikovsky's ballet (a major source for the Film's soundtrack).

If we thus take 79 years as our measuring stick (And I still think that's a bit too long) 18 more books from the list would be in the public domain.

  Maybe if we take 25 as a typical beginning of career and 80 as a typical date of death for someone who lives to 25 we could settle on 55 years?  That would leave only 13 items on the list as still under copyright, and I believe that includes all works by living authors too.