Hello, readers! It is Monday again! As it is Monday, welcome to another #5OnMyTBR update. The rule is relatively simple. I must pick five books from my to-be-read piles that fit the week’s theme.

This week’s theme: City Setting

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: Käsebier Takes Berlin
Author: Gabriele Tergit
Translator: Sophie Duvernoy
Featured City: Berlin
Publisher: New York Review of Books
Publishing Date: 2019
No. of Pages: 277

Synopsis: 

Berlin, 1930: Käsebier is the name on everyone’s lips. “Cheese” and “beer” is what it literally means, an unglamorous name for an unglamorous man who used to perform on a shabby stage for laborers, secretaries, and shopkeepers. Until the press showed up.

Because now Käsebier is a star. Margot Weissmann, patron of the arts, hosts champagne breakfasts for him; Muschler the banker will build a theater in his honor; Willy Frächter, a parvenu writer, is making a mint off Käsebier books and trinkets. All the while, the journalists who catapulted Käsebier to fame watch the churning monstrous commercial machine in amazement – amused and not a little aghast at what they have unleashed.

In Käsebier Takes Berlin, the journalist Gabriele Tergit wrote a searing satire of the excesses and follies of the Weimar Republic. Chronicling a country on the brink of fascism and a press on the edge of collapse, Tergit’s novel caused a sensation when it was published in 1931. As witty as Kurt Tucholsky and as trenchant as Karl Kraus, Tergit portrays a world too entranced by fireworks to notice its smoldering edges.

Title: NW
Author: Zadie Smith
Featured City: London
Publisher: Penguin Books
Publishing Date: 2013 (2012)
No. of Pages: 401

Synopsis: 

This is the story of a city. The northwest corner of a city. Here you’ll find guests and hosts, those with power and those without it, people who live somewhere special and others who live nowhere at all. And many people in between.

Every city is like this. Cheek-by-jowl living. Separate worlds.

And then there are the visitations: the rare times a stranger crosses a threshold without permission or warning, causing disruption in the whole system. Like the April afternoon a woman came to Leah Hanwell’s door, seeking help, disturbing the peace, forcing Leah out of her isolation….

Zadie Smith’s brilliant tragicomic novel follows four Londoners – Leah, Natalie, Fo, and Nathan – as they try to make adult lives outside of Caldwell, the council estate of their childhood. Depicting the modern urban zone – familiar to town dwellers everywhere – NW is a quietly devastating tale of encounters, mercurial and vital, like the city itself.

Title: The Yacoubian Building
Author: Alaa Al Aswany
Translator (from Arabic): Humphrey Davies
Featured City: Cairo
Publisher: Harper Perennial
Publishing Date: 2006 (2002)
No. of Pages: 255

Synopsis: 

All manner of flawed and fragile humanity reside in the Yacoubian Building, a once-elegant temple of Art Deco splendor now slowly decaying in the smog and bustle of downtown Cairo: a fading aristocrat and self-proclaimed “scientist of women”; a sultry, voluptuous siren; a devout young student, feeling the irresistible pull toward fundamentalism; a newspaper editor helplessly in love with a policeman; a corrupt and corpulent politician, twisting the Koran to justify his desires.

These disparate lives careen toward an explosive conclusion in Alaa Al Aswany’s remarkable international bestseller. Teeming with frank sexuality and heartfelt compassion, this book is an important window on to the experience of loss and love in the Arab world.

Title: The Black Book
Author: Orhan Pamuk
Translator (from Turkish): Maureen Freely
Featured City: Istanbul
Publisher: Vintage International
Publishing Date: July 2006
No. of Pages: 461

Synopsis: 

Galip is a lawyer living in Istanbul. His wife, the detective novel-loving Ruya, has disappeared. Could she have left him for her ex-husband or Celal, a popular newspaper columnist? But Celal, too, seems to have vanished. As Galip investigates, he finds himself assuming the enviable Celal’s identity, wearing his clothes, answering his phone calls, even writing his columns. Galip pursues every conceivable clue, but the nature of the mystery keeps changing, and when he receives a death threat, he begins to fear the most.

Title: Ice
Author: Vladimir Sorokin
Translator (from Russian): Jamey Gambrell
Featured City: Moscow
Publisher: New York Review of Books
Publishing Date: 2007 (2002)
No. of Pages: 321

Synopsis: 

Moscow has been hit by a wave of brutal murders. The victims are of both sexes, from different backgrounds, and of all ages, but invariably blond and blue-eyed. They are found with their breastbones smashed in, their hearts crushed. There is no sign of any motive.

Drugs, sex, and violence are the currency of daily life in Moscow. Criminal gangs and unscrupulous financial operators run the show. But in the midst of so much squalor one mysterious group is pursuing a long-meditated plan. Blond and blue-eyed, with a strange shared attraction to a chunk of interstellar ice, they are looking for their brothers and sisters, precisely 23,000 of them. Lost among the common heart of humanity, they must be awakened and set free. How? With a crude hammer fashioned out of the cosmic ice. Humans, meat machines, die under its blows. The hears of the chosen answer by uttering their true names. For the first time they know the ecstacy of true life.

For the awakened, the future, like the past, is simple. It is ice.

What is Ice? A gritty dispatch from the front lines of the contemporary world, a gnostic fairy tale, a hard-boiled parable a New Age parody, a bitingly funny fantasy in the great Russian tradition that begins with Gogol and continues with Nabokov, a renegade fiction to set beside those of Philip K. Dick and Michel Houellebecq, and the most ambitious and accomplished novel yet by Vladimir Sorokin, the stylistic virtuoso and master of provocation who, in the words of The Moscow Times, is “the only living Russian author who can be called a classic.”