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

Since there is still no prompt this week, I opted to feature works of Scandinavian literature, following my previous features of French, German, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, and Russian literature. This aligns with my pivot toward European literature, following my initial focus on works of Asian literature for the first half of the year. Without ado, here are works of Russian literature I am looking forward to.

5OnMyTBR is a bookish meme hosted by E. @ Local Bee Hunter’s Nook where you choose 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 Morning Star
Author: Karl Ove Knausgård
Translator (from Norwegian): Martin Aitken
Publisher: Penguin Press
Publishing Date: 2021 (2020)
No. of Pages: 666

Synopsis: 

One night in August, Arne and Tove are staying with their children in their summer house in southern Norway. Their friend Egil has his own place nearby. Kathrine, a priest, is flying home from a Bible seminar, questioning her marriage. Journalist Jostein is out drinking for the night, while his wife, Turid, a nurse at a psychiatric care unit, is on a night shift when one of her patients escapes.

Above them all, a huge star suddenly appears blazing in the sky. It brings with it a mysterious sense of foreboding.

Strange things start to happen as nine lives come together under the star. Hundreds of crabs amass on the road as Arne drives at night; Jostein receives a call about a death metal band found brutally murdered in a Satanic ritual; Kathrine conducts a funeral service for a man she met at the airport – but is he actually dead?

The Morning Star is about life in all its mundanity and drama, the strangeness that permeates the world, and the darkness in us all. Karl Ove Knausgård’s astonishing new novel, his first after the My Struggle cycle, goes to the utmost limits of freedom and chaos, to what happens when forces beyond our comprehension are unleashed and the realms of the living and the dead collide.

Title: A Time for Everything
Author: Karl Ove Knausgaard
Translator (From Norwegian): James Anderson
Publisher: Archipelago Books
Publishing Date: 2016 (2004)
No. of Pages: 499

Synopsis: 

In the sixteenth century, Antinous Bellori, a boy of eleven, is lost in a dark forest and stumbles upon two glowing beings, one carrying a spear, the other a flaming torch… This event this decisive in Bellori’s life, and he thereafter devotes himself to the pursuit and study of angels, the intermediaries of the divine. Beginning in the Garden of Eden and soaring through to the present, A Time for Everything reimagines pivotal encounters between humans and anegls: the glow of the cherubim watching over Eden; the profound love between Cain and Abel despite their differences; Lot’s shame in Sodom; Noah’s isolation before the flood; Ezekiel tied to his bed, prophesying ferociously; the death of Christ; and the emergence of sensual, mischievous cherubs in the seventeenth century. Alighting upon these dramatic scenes – from the Bible and beyond – Knausgaard’s imagination takes flight: the result is a dazzling display of storytelling at its majestic spellbinding best. Incorporating and challenging tradition, legend, and the Apocrypha, these penetrating glimpses hazard chilling questions: can the nature of the divine undergo change, and can the immortal perish?

Title: Summer Light, and then Comes the Night
Author: Jón Kalman Stefánsson
Translator (from Icelandic): Philip Roughton
Publisher: HarperVia
Publishing Date: 2021
No. of Pages: 246

Synopsis: 

A profound and playful masterwork of literature from one of Iceland’s most beloved authors.

In a secluded Icelandic village of only four hundred inhabitants, where the summer brings infinite light and the winter brings eternal night, life appears unremarkable. Yet, sometimes in small places, life becomes bigger. A new road to the capital city of Reykjavik has change on everyone’s minds…

There is the beautiful, elusive Elisabet, who cuts a surprisingly svelte path at the Knitting Company. Neighbours Kristin and Kjartan, who seem ordinary but for their explosive passion that bewilders even themselves (and ignites the spectacular revenge of Kjartan’s wife). Timid Jonas takes on the role of town policeman when his imposing father passes away. And then the most successful businessman in town abandons his Range Rover and gorgeous wife in exchange for Latin books and stargazing.

Winner of the Icelandic Literature Prize and longlisted for France’s Prix Médicis étranger, Summer Light, and Then Comes the Night ponders the beauty and mystery of life and our deepest existential questions. Unexpected, warm, earthy, and humorous, Stefánsson explores the dreams and desires of these everyday people and reveals the magic of life in all its progress, its limitations, its ugliness, and, ultimately, its beauty.

Title: The Prophets of Eternal Fjord
Author: Kim Leine
Translator (from Danish): Martin Aitken
Publisher: Liveright Publishing Corporation
Publishing Date: 2015 (2012)
No. of Pages: 559

Synopsis: 

From the swarming streets of Copenhagen to the frozen villages of Greenland, The Prophets of Eternal Fjord is a grand, magisterial story of epic proportion. Earning rave reviews and scores of readers across the world, Kim Leine’s masterpiece – sweeping across the sea in a whaler and scurrying, panicked, from the Great Fire of 1795 – arrives on American shores erupting with pathos, lust, faith lost and found, and a cast of characters clinging to life amid persecution and calamity.

Idealistic, foolhardy Morten Falck, the hapless hero, is a newly ordained priest sailing to Greenland in 1787 to convert the Inuit to the Danish church. He’s rejected the prospect of a sleepy posting in a local parish and instead departs for the forsaken Sukkertoppen colony, where he will endeavor to convert the locals A town battered by unremittingly harsh winters and simmering with the threat of dissent, it is a far cry from the parish he envisioned; natives from neighboring villages have unified to reject colonial rule and establish their own settlement atop Eternal Fjord. A bumbling and at times terrifically destructive mix of Shakespeare’s Falstaff and Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Arthur Dimmesdale, he’s woefully ill prepared to confront this new sect. Torn between his instinctive compassion for the rebel congregation perched atop Eternal Fjord and his duty to the church, Falck is forced to decide where he belongs. His exploits in this brutal backwater include an accidental explosion after a night curled around a keg, a botched surgery, a love affair with a solitary and fatalistic widow, and an apprenticeship with an eager young scholar that ends in tragedy.

Based on authentic events in the 1780s and ’90s, The Prophets of Eternal Fjord moves from the quiet rooms of the Copenhagen bourgeoisie to the stark, hardscrabble village of the Fjord where Falck finds himself – surprisingly – at home. Leine’s textured, earthy prose evokes the sting of the cold, the itch of the wool, and the burn of the roughest swig of aquavit. In gritty detail, Leine reveals the corrosive effects of colonial rule – both on the colonized, bite=terly ground down as they are, and on the colonizers, compromised and corrupted by their baseless power.

In rich, Dickensian descriptions, Leine charts the tragic events that intertwine seemingly disparate lives, illuminating the brutal and tender impulses of those seeking redemption and the shifting line between religion and mysticism. The Prophets of Eternal Fjord is a visceral panorama of a fragile colony caught in the throes of history, making the American debut of a major international writer.

Title: My Friends
Author: Fredrik Backman
Translator (from Swedish): Neil Smith

Synopsis: 

Most people don’t even notice them—three tiny figures sitting at the end of a long pier in the corner of one of the most famous paintings in the world. Most people think it’s just a depiction of the sea. But Louisa, an aspiring artist herself, knows otherwise, and she is determined to find out the story of these three enigmatic figures.

Twenty-five years earlier, in a distant seaside town, a group of teenagers find refuge from their bruising home lives by spending long summer days on an abandoned pier, telling silly jokes, sharing secrets, and committing small acts of rebellion. These lost souls find in each other a reason to get up each morning, a reason to dream, a reason to love.

Out of that summer emerges a transcendent work of art, a painting that will unexpectedly be placed into eighteen-year-old Louisa’s care. She embarks on a surprise-filled cross-country journey to learn how the painting came to be and to decide what to do with it. The closer she gets to the painting’s birthplace, the more nervous she becomes about what she’ll find. Louisa is proof that happy endings don’t always take the form we expect in this stunning testament to the transformative, timeless power of friendship and art. (Source: Goodreads)

Title: Paradise Rot
Author: Jenny Hval
Translator (from Norwegian): Marjam Idriss
Publisher: Verso
Publishing Date: 2018 (2009)
No. of Pages: 148

Synopsis: 

Jo is in a strange new country for university and having a more peculiar time than most. In a house with no walls, shared with a woman who has no boundaries, she finds her strange home coming to life in unimaginable ways. Jo’s sensitivity and all her senses become increasingly heightened and fraught, as the lines between bodies and plants, dreaming and wakefulness, blur and mesh.

This debut novel from critically acclaimed artist and musician Jenny Hval presents a heady and hyper-sensual portrayal of sexual awakening and queer desire.