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: No Prompt

Because there is still no prompt this week, I decided to feature translated works that I recently added to my growing reading list. This is in line with my goal of reading more translated works than works originally written in English. Without ado, here are some translated works that recently made it to my perpetually growing reading list.

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: The Mysterious Disappearance of the Marquise of Loria
Author: José Donoso
Translator (from Spanish): Megan McDowell
Publisher: New Directions
Publishing Date: 2025 (1980)
No. of Pages: 112

Synopsis: 

All of a sudden, Blanca Arias has it all. The nineteen-year-old daughter of a middling Nicaraguan diplomat posted to Madrid, she marries the equally young and passionate Marquess of Loria, heir to one of the largest fortunes in Spain. He then, as if on cue, dies of diphtheria, leaving Blanca single, free, and inconceivably rich.

A parodic paean to the literary erotica of 1920s Mardid, this luxurious and disturbing work details the sexual adventures of the marquise as her white-gloved chauffeur shuttles her from tryst to tryst. But it’s not all champagne and roses: Blanca’s mother-in-law, Casilda, is scheming with her gang of disinherited sycophants to take back “their” fortune. And once the mysterious Luna, a Weimaraner pup, infiltrates Blanca’s chambers, the story shapeshifts from an elegy to a glittering bygone era into something more savage: a psychological thriller and a profound investigation – what exactly hides beneath those surfaces that the rich are so busy gilding and polishing?

Elegantly translated into English for the first time by Megan McDowell and with an exciting introduction by the incomparable Gabriela Wiener, The Mysterious Disappearance of the Marquise of Loria is as exuberant as it is explicit. Irresistible!

Title: The Ruined Map
Author: Kōbō Abe
Translator (From Japanese): E. Dale Saunders
Publisher: Penguin Books
Publishing Date: 2020 (1967)
No. of Pages: 233

Synopsis: 

A private detective is hired to find a missing person, but nothing is normal about this case. Why has the beautiful, alcoholic wife of a vanished salesman waited over half a year to search for him? Why are the only clues a photo and a matchbox? As the investigator’s ever-more puzzling hunt takes him into the labyrinthine depths of the urban underworld, he begins to wonder if it is in fact he who is lost. An intoxicating blend of noir thriller and surreal dream, The Ruined Map questions identity itself.

Title: The Captain’s Daughter
Author: Alexander Pushkin
Translator (from Russian): Anthony Briggs
Publisher: Pushkin Press
Publishing Date: 2021 (1836)
No. of Pages: 252

Synopsis: 

Pushkin’s restless and creative genius laid the foundations for Russian prose. His stories among the greatest and most influential ever written, retain stunning directness and precision, more than ever in Anthony Brigg’s finely nuanced translations.

Upending expectations at every turn, Pushkin depicts brutal conflicts and sudden reversals of fortune with disarming lightness and sly humor These are stories of fateful chances: a stationmaster encourages his young daughter to ride to town with a traveller, only to lose her forever; a man obsessively pursues an elderly woman’s secret for success at cards, with bizarre results, in ‘The Queen of Spades’; and in The Captain’s Daughter, Pushkin’s great historical novella of love and rebellion in the era of Catherine the Great, a mysterious encounter proves fatally significant during a violent uprising.

Title: An Evening With Claire
Author: Gaito Gazdanov
Translator (from Russian): Bryan Karetnyk
Publisher: Pushkin Press
Publishing Date: 2021 (1930)
No. of Pages: 219

Synopsis: 

Two old friends meet nightly in Paris, after a separation of ten years. Trading conversational barbs and manoeuvring around submerged feelings, Claire and Kolya resume what fate interrupted. When their long-imagined romance at last becomes reality, Kolya is engulfed by memories of Russia, from a tragic and solitary childhood to the disorienting ordeal of civil war. As his haunting recollection takes place, so too does a portrait f lost youth set against the trauma of a vanished homeland.

Written when Gadzanov was just twenty-six, An Evening with Claire is the celebrated Russian master’s debut novel, and appears here in an elegant new translation by Bryan Karetnyk. Melancholic and lyrical, it is a powerful distillation of the quintessential émigré experience: caught between two worlds, belonging to neither.

Title: The New Sorrows of Young W.
Author: Ulrich Pledzdorf
Translator (from German): Romy Fursland
Publisher: Pushkin Press
Publishing Date: 2015 (1972)
No. of Pages: 139

Synopsis: 

Edgar W., teenage dropout, unrequited lover, unrecognized genius – and dead – tells the story of his brief, spectacular life.

It is the story of how he rebels against the petty rules of communist East Germany to live in an abandoned summer house, with just a tape recorder and a battered copy of Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther for company. Of his passionate love for the dark-eyed, unattainable kindergarten teacher Charlie. And of how, in a series of calamitous events (involving electricity and a spray paint machine), he meets his untimely end.

Absurd, funny and touching, this cult German bestseller, now in a new translation, is both a satire on life in the GDR and a hymn to youthful freedom.

Title: The Prisoner of Heaven
Author: Carlos Ruiz Zafón
Translator (from Spanish): Lucia Graves
Publisher: Weidenfeld & Nicolson
Publishing Date: 2012 (2011)
No. of Pages: 278

Synopsis: 

Barcelona, 1957. It is the week before Christmas in the Sempere & Sons bookshop. Daniel Sempere has married the love of his life, Bea, and they have had a son whilst their partner in crime, Fermin, is busy preparing for his wedding to Bernarda in the New Year. Just when it seems as if luck is finally smiling on them, a mysterious figure with a pronounced limp enters the shop. He insists on buying the most expensive volume on display – a beautiful illustrated edition of The Count of Monte Cristo – and then proceeds to inscribe the book with the words ‘For Fermin Romero de Torres, who came back from the dead and who holds the key to the future’.

Who is this man and what does he want of Fermin? The answer lies in a terrible secret that has lain hidden for two decades, an epic tale of imprisonment, betrayal, murder and love that leads back into the very heart of the Cemetery of Forgotten Books.

Title: The White Castle
Author: Orhan Pamuk
Translator (from Turkish): Victoria Holbrook
Publisher: Vintage International
Publishing Date: April 1998 (1990)
No. of Pages: 161

Synopsis: 

From the Nobel Prize-winning author: a dazzling novel that is at once a captivating treatise on the enigma of identity and the relations between East and West.

In the seventeenth century, a young Italian scholar sailing from Venice to Naples is taken prisoner and delivered to Constantinople. There he falls into the custody of a scholar known as Hoja – “master” – a man who is his exact double. In the years that follow, the slave instructs his master in Western science and technology, from medicine to pyrotechnics. But Hoja wants to know more: why he and his captive are the persons they are and whether, given knowledge of each other’s most intimate secrets, they could actually exchange identities. Set in a world of magnificent scholarship and terrifying savagery, The White Castle is a triumph of the imagination, as colorful and intricately patterned as a Turkish prayer rug.

Absurd, funny and touching, this cult German bestseller, now in a new translation, is both a satire on life in the GDR and a hymn to youthful freedom.