For my 3rd pick, under the category of European Literature, jammies' Fahrenheit 451 picks the
Gormenghast novels by
Mervyn Peake.
The books follow the life of Titus Groan, heir to the 77th Earl of Gormenghast, a realm dominated by a vast, crumbling castle of ancient provenance and exacting ritual. Titus' world is full of strange, obsessive characters, whose personalities seem pinched down with cold secrets and passionless pastimes, and his struggles against his fated path of Earldom in a dead world and against the expectations of tradition and duty play out against the various madnesses of these odd creatures.
The mood is entirely Gothic and the prose both dense and slow-moving - somewhat like willingly submitting yourself to imprisonment - yet once submitted the incredible amount of detail becomes both engrossing and utterly fascinating. The novels have been described as "fantasy", but are more properly termed surreal - nothing magic happens, but the world and the people in it are skewed off the axis of reality as we know it.
The novels are also remarkable in that the protagonist is not particularly likeable, and is not even all that central to the story for long stretches of the work. Indeed, the first novel starts as he is born, and he acts more as a catalyst to what happens until he is an adolescent, well into the second novel. It is also odd in that his enemy, Steerpike, is motivated much like Titus is himself - both wish to transcend the limitations of their birth (Steerpike as a kitchen boy, Titus as the heir to Gormenghast) and act in the world by their own right and not according to their assigned place.
How these two battle against each other and against their kismet makes for a great, albeit unfinished (the series was to go on 'till Titus' death, but the death of the author precluded such an ending) work that has few stylistic kin.