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 will be featuring works of Chilean literature. This aligns with my current literary journey; I have commenced a journey across the vast landscape of American literature. Here are some other works of Chilean 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 Japanese Lover
Author: Isabel Allende
Translators (from Spanish): Nick Caistor and Amanda Hopkinson
Publisher: Atria Books
Publishing Date: November 2015
No. of Pages: 322

Synopsis: 

In 1939, as Poland falls under the shadow of the Nazis and the world goes to war, young Alma Belasco’s parents send her overseas to live in safety with an aunt and uncle in their opulent mansion in San Francisco. There she encounters Ichimei Fukuda, the son of the family’s Japanese gardener, and between them a tender love blossoms. Following the Japanese attacks on Pearl Harbor, the two are cruelly pulled apart as Ichimei and his family – like thousands of other Japanese-Americans – are declared enemies and forcibly relocated to internment camps run by the United States government. Throughout their lifetimes, Alma and Ichemei reunite again and again, but theirs is a love that they are forever forced to hide from the world.

Decades later, Alma is nearing the end of her long and eventful life. Irina Bazili, a care worker struggling to come to terms with her own troubled past, meets the elderly woman and her grandson, Seth, at San Francisco’s charmingly eccentric Lark House nursing home. As Irina and Seth forge a friendship, they become intrigued by a series of mysterious gifts and letters sent to Alma, and learn about Ichimei and his extraordinary secret passion that has endured nearly seventy years.

Sweeping through time and spanning generations and continents, The Japanese Lover explores questions of identity, abandonment, redemption, and the unknowable impact of fate on our lives. Written with the same attention to historical detail and keen understanding of her characters that Isabel Allende has been known for since her landmark first novel, The House of the Spirits, The Japanese Lover is a profoundly moving tribute to the constancy of the human heart in a world of unceasing change.

Title: The Skating Rink
Author: Roberto Bolaño
Translator (from Spanish): Chris Andrews
Publisher: New Directions
Publishing Date: 2009 (1993)
No. of Pages: 182

Synopsis: 

Rife with political corruption, sex, jealousy and frustrated passion, The Skating Rink is a darkly atmospheric chronicle of one summer season in a seaside town on the Costa Brava, north of Barcelona.

The story revolves around the beautiful figure-skating champion Nuria Marti. When she is suddenly dropped from the Olympic team, a besotted admirer builds a secret ice rink for her in the ruins of an old mansion outside of town. What he doesn’t tell her is that he paid for it using embezzled public funds, but such a betrayal is only the beginning, and the skating rink soon becomes a crime scene.

Told in short, suspenseful chapters by three alternating male narrators – a corrupt and pompous civil servant, a beleaguered yet still romantic itinerant poet, and a duplicitous local entrepreneur – The Skating Rink is a wholly engrossing tale of murder and its motives.

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 Third Reich
Author: Roberto Bolaño
Translator (from Spanish): Natasha Wimmer
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Publishing Date: 2011
No. of Pages: 277

Synopsis: 

On vacation with his girlfriend, Ingeborg, the German war games champion Udo Berger returns to a small town on the Costa Brava where he spent summers of his childhood. Soon they meet another vacationing German couple, Charly and Hanna, who introduced them to a band of locals – the Wolf, the Lamb, and El Quemado – and to the darker side of life in a resort town.

Late one night, Charly disappears without a trace, and Udo’s well-ordered life is thrown into upheaval; while Ingeborg and Hanna return to their lives in Germany, he refuses to leave the hotel. Soon he and El Quemado are enmeshed in a round of Third Reich, Udo’s favorite World War II strategy game, and Udo discovers that the game’s consequences may be all too real.

Written in 1989 and found among Roberto Bolaño’s papers after his death, The Third Reich is a stunning exploration of memory and violence. reading this quick, visceral novel, we see a world-class writer coming into his own and exploring for the first time the themes that would define his masterpieces The Savage Detectives and 2666.

Title: Island Beneath the Sea
Author: Isabel Allende
Translator (from Spanish): Margaret Sayers Peden
Publisher: Harper
Publishing Date: 2010
No. of Pages: 457

Synopsis: 

Born on the island of Saint-Dominigue, Zarité – known as Tété – is the daughter of an African mother she never knew and one of the white sailors who brought her into bondage. Though her childhood is one of brutality and fear, Tété finds solace in the traditional rhythms of African drums and voodoo loa she discovers through her fellow slaves.

When twenty-year-old Toulouse Vamorain arrives on the island in 1770, it’s with powdered wigs in his trunks and dreams of financial success in his mind. But running his father’s plantation, Saint Lazare, is neither glamorous nor easy. Although Valmorain purchases young Tété for his bride, it is he who will become dependent on the services of his teenaged slave.

Against the merciless backdrop of sugarcane fields, the lives of Tété and Valmorain grow ever more intertwined. When the bloody revolution of Toussaint Louverture arrives at the gates of Saint Lazare, they flee the brutal conditions of the French colony, soon to become Haiti, for the raucous, free-wheeling enterprise of New Orleans. There Tété finally forges a new life, but her connection to Valmorain is deeper than anyone knows and not easily severed. With an impressive richness of detail, and a narrative wit and brio second to none, Allende crafts the riveting story of one woman’s determination to find love amid loss, to offer humanity though her own has been so battered, and to forge a new identity in the cruelest circumstances.