Hello, readers! Welcome to another #5OnMyTBR update. The rule is relatively simple. I have to pick five books from my to-be-read pile that fit the week’s theme.

This week’s theme: Child

5OnMyTBR is a bookish meme hosted by E. @ Local Bee Hunter’s Nook where you chose five books from your to-be-read pile that fit that week’s theme. If you’d like more info, head over to the announcement post!

Title: W or The Memory of Childhood
Author: Georges Perec
Translator (from French): David Bellos
Publisher: The Harvill Press
Publishing Date: 1996 (1975)
No. of Pages: 164

Synopsis: 

Written in alternating chapters, W or The Memory of Childhood tells two parallel tales whose meaning lies in their fragile intersection, or in the silence beyond their ending. Gaspard Winckler, an eight-year-old deaf-mute, is lost in a shipwreck somewhere off Cape Horn. Another person, also called Gaspard Winckler, is apparently trapped into searching for him. The story of W, an island state based on the rules of sport, seems to be the only trace of what he found. There are no survivors.

What this disturbing book has to say is not quite said in the story of W and is not quite said in the rediscovered fragments of a wartime childhood. Perec’s unpretentious language, persistent self-criticism and attention to detail lead the reader inexorably towards the horror that lies at the origin of the pot-war world and at the crux of the author’s identity. Combining fiction and autobiography in a quite unprecedented way, Perec allows no easy escape from this story, or from history. W or the Memory of Childhood is as much a milestone in autobiography as Stendhal’s Life of Henry Brulanrd and Sartre’s Words.

Title: Young Gerber
Author: Friedrich Torberg
Translator (from German): Anthea Bell
Publisher: Pushkin Press
Publishing Date: 2012 (1958)
No. of Pages: 349

Synopsis: 

Young Kurt Gerber embarks hopefully on his last year at school, facing the all-important final exam. However, he soon clashes with his sadistic new form teacher, Professor Kupfer, known to his students as “Lord God Kupfer” – with tragic consequences.

Based in part on the story of ten pupils who committed suicide in a single week in Vienna in the winter of 1929, this classic of European literature is powerful and timeless tale of classroom angst.

Title: Blues for a Lost Childhood
Author: Antônio Torres
Translator (from Portuguese): John Parker
Publisher: Readers International
Publishing Date: 1989 (1986)
No. of Pages: 201

Synopsis: 

It’s another hot, sleepless night in Rio, punctuated by the sounds of Jazz, TV, and gunshots from the cafes and shanties. In the narrator’s drink-bruised mind, a nightmare begins with a parade of coffins and a cascade of memories. Here lies all the fascinating and convulsive history of Brazil during the past twenty-five years.

One figure stands out: Calunga, the iconoclast, idealist, joker and fixer, who breaks his way out of the stagnant “Backlands” of his boyhood to become a big-city journalist. Defeated by the city and his own weakness, he is reclaimed by the land. Only his irony remains.

In his sixth novel, Antônio Torres creates a collage of Brazilian life: through its legends, poetry, popular songs and through the narrator’s hallucinations, fantasies and flashbacks as well as snippets from newspapers and the media.

A novel of innovative structure and great psychological depth, Blues for a Lost Childhood was chosen Novel of the Year by Brazilian PEN.

Title: Lost Children Archive
Author: Valeria Luiselli
Publisher: Vintage Books
Publishing Date: 2019
No. of Pages: 350

Synopsis: 

In Valeria Luiselli’s fiercely imaginative novel, a mother and father set out with their two children, a boy and girl, driving form New York to Arizona in the heat of summer. As the family travels west, through Virginia, to Tennessee, across Oklahoma and Texas, their bonds begin to fray: a fissure is growing between the parents, one the children can almost feel beneath their feet.

Through sons and maps and Polaroid camera’s lens, the children try to make sense of both their family’s crisis and the larger one engulfing the news: the stories of thousands of kids trying tor cross the southwestern border into the United States but being detained – or getting lost in the desert along the way.

A breathtaking feat of literary virtuosity, Lost Children Archive is timely, compassionate, subtly hilarious, and formally inventive – a powerful, urgent story about what it is to be human in an inhuman world.

Title: The Snow Child
Author: Eowyn Ivey

Synopsis: 

A bewitching tale of heartbreak and hope set in 1920s Alaska, Eowyn Ivey’s THE SNOW CHILD was a top ten bestseller in hardback and paperback, and went on to be a Finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.

Alaska, the 1920s. Jack and Mabel have staked everything on a fresh start in a remote homestead, but the wilderness is a stark place, and Mabel is haunted by the baby she lost many years before. When a little girl appears mysteriously on their land, each is filled with wonder, but also foreboding: is she what she seems, and can they find room in their hearts for her?

Written with the clarity and vividness of the Russian fairy tale from which it takes its inspiration, The Snow Child is an instant classic. (Source: Goodreads)