Not being a native speaker, I could post my entire library I guess, but some palatable highlights with available translations would be :
Life : A User's Manual, Georges Perec
A very strange "puzzle book" that works as a series of interconnected stories, a full narrative with its own sub-narratives, an experiment in building stories out of details and creating long form continuity and a single tale disguised as several smaller ones. It's very difficult to describe.
It's one of the better, possibly one of the best examples of a post-modern novels in large part thanks to Perec's approach. The french post-modern and deconstructivist scenes were quite political to say the least, plenty of its actors saw their artistic work as much more significant than it actually was (especially in theatre, which is ironic because that particular part of the scene was also the least accessible and thus the one with the smallest overall cultural impact, Brecht, Ionesco and Beckett had already been there). Perec was not having any of this and has a more "parnassian" attitude. He focused on a more playful type of writing and challenged the typical structures and contents of a novel not out of a sense that it's a political message, but because reading should be FUN and needlessly intellectual novels without that much substance are the opposite of that. Hence a lot of his novels being puzzles or games of hide and seek between reader and writer.
Thanks to its structure as a long chain of smaller events, as well as the fact that it's written in a more modern language, it's a very easy read. Highly recommended, possibly my favourite novel.
A Dish of Spices, Joris-Karl Huysmans
Incredible poetic prose. A series of descriptive poems from the late 1800s that will give you a better idea of the day to day urban life of the time than any history book ever could. If you think poetry is too stiff and codified and its form and "flowery language" isn't for you, this may very well change your mind entirely. I can only hope the translation does it justice.
in a lot of ways, Huysmans might be the last of the french romantic writers. The movement had started by shaking up the norms of theatre and it arguably ended with Huysmans and Corbière dismantling the norms of poetry by writing prose that was more aesthetic and meaningful than the work of the academic poets of the era.
The Consolations of the Forest: Alone in a Cabin on the Siberian Taiga, Sylvain Tesson
Exactly what it says on the tin : as he was feeling in a creative dead-end, Tesson isolated himself in a siberian cabin, nearly all alone for six months, with as few means of communication with the outside as possible. This is his journal during these six months relating both the very practical issues of surviving the siberian winter, the conclusions from reading the stack of books he took with him, the description of the effects prolonged solitude is having on him... It's a very honest journal and a sobering read.
