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, I am featuring works of female European writers. This is in commemoration of Women’s History Month and International Women’s Day celebrated every March 8. As I have embarked on a new literary journey this month, in particular, European literature, I am featuring works of female European writers. Here are some works of female European writers I have on my perpetually growing reading list.

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: Persuasion
Author: Jane Austen
Publisher: Vintage Classics
Publishing Date: 2008 (1818)
No. of Pages: 249

Synopsis: 

Eight years ago Anne Elliot bowed to pressure from her family and made the decision not to marry the man she loved, Captain Wentworth. Now circumstances have conspired to bring him back into her social circle and Anne finds her old feelings for him reignited. However, when they meet again Wentworth behaves as if they are strangers and seems more interested in her friend Louisa. With humour, insight and tenderness, Jane Austen tells the story of a love that endures the tests of time and society.

Title: The Censor’s Notebook
Author: Liliana Corobca
Translator (from Romanian): Monica Cure
Publisher: Seven Stories Press
Publishing Date: 2022 (2017)
No. of Pages: 476

Synopsis: 

A window into the intimate workings of censorship under communism, this novel begins with a seemingly non-fiction frame story – an exchange of letters between the author and Emilia Codrescu, the former chief of the Secret Documents Office in Romania’s feared State Directorate of Media and Printing, the government branch responsible for censorship. Codrescu was once responsible for the burning and shredding of censors’ notebooks and the state secrets in them, but prior to fleeing the country in 1974 she stole one of these notebooks. Now, forty years later, she makes the notebook available to Liliana for the newly instituted Museum of Communism.

The work of censor – a job about which it is forbidden to talk – is revealed in this notebook, which discloses the structures of this mysterious institution and describes how these professional readers and ideological error hunters are burdened with hundreds of manuscripts, strict deadlines, and threatening penalties. The Censor’s Notebook asks whether literature has the power to keep alive personal and political truths in an age when censorship is pervasive.

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.

Title: Dear Dickhead
Author: Virginie Despentes
Translator (from French): Frank Wynne
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Publishing Date: 2024 (2022)
No. of Pages: 292

Synopsis:

I read your post on Insta. You’re like a pigeon shitting on my shoulder as you flap past. It’s shitty and unpleasant. Waah, waah, waah, I’m a pissy little pantywaist, no one loves me so I whimper like a Chihuahua in the hope someone will notice me. Congratulations: you’ve got your fifteen minutes of fame! You want proof? I’m writing to you.

Oscar is a B-list novelist in his forties. He used to be an alcoholic and a cokehead, but now he keeps himself busy by ranting on social media. When Rebecca, an actress whose looks he insulted, sends him an angry email, they strike up a combative correspondence-at the very moment when Oscar is accused of sexual harassment by his former publicist. What ensues is a battle royale between the sexes, and a romp through Paris during the aftershocks of a cultural earthquake.

Virginie Despentes, the celebrated author of King Kong Theory, has written her most daring book yet: a Dangerous Liaisons for our time. Dear Dickhead is a flame-throwing novel about a culture that makes men and women sick, and about how the search for feeling leaves us addicted to what makes us feel. The result is a provocative and unmissable look from the author hailed by The Guardian as France’s “rock’n’roll Zola.”

Title: Transit
Author: Anna Seghers
Translator (from German): Margot Bettauer Dembo
Publisher: New York Review Books
Publishing Date: 2013 (1951)
No. of Pages: 252

Synopsis:

Anna Seghers’ Transit is an existential, political, literary thriller that explores the agonies of boredom, the vitality of storytelling, and the plight of the exile with extraordinary compassion and insight.

Having escaped from a Nazi concentration camp in Germany in 1937, and later a camp in Rouen, the nameless twenty-seven-year-old German narrator of Seghers’s multilayered masterpiece ends up in the dusty seaport of Marseille. Along the way he is asked to deliver a letter to a man named Weidel in Paris and discovers Weidel has committed suicide, leaving behind a suitcase containing letters and the manuscript of a novel. As he makes his way to Marseille to find Weidel’s wife, the narrator assumes the identity of a refugee named Seidler, though the authorities think he is really Weidel. There in the giant waiting room of Marseille, the narrator converses with the refugees, listening to their stories over pizza and wine, while also gradually piecing together the story of Weidel, whose manuscript has shattered the narrator’s “deathly boredom,” bringing him to a deeper awareness of the transitory world the refugees inhabit as they wait and wait for that most precious of possessions: transit papers.

Title: The Misunderstanding
Author: Irène Némirovsky
Translator (from French): Sandra Smith
Publisher: Chatto & Windus
Publishing Date: 2012 (1926)
No. of Pages: 160

Synopsis:

Yves Harteloup, scarred by the war, is a disappointed young man, old money fallen on hard times, who returns for the summer to the rich, comfortable Atlantic resort of Hendaye, where he spent blissful childhood holidays. He becomes infatuated by a beautiful, bored young woman, Denise, whose rich husband is often away on business. Intoxicated by summer nights and Yves’ intensity, Denise falls passionately in love, before the idyll has to end and Yves must return to his mundane office job.

In the mournful Paris autumn their love founders on mutual misunderstanding, in the apparently unbridgeable gap between a life of idle wealth and the demands of making a living, between a woman’s needs and a man’s way of loving. As Denise is driven mad with desire and jealous suspicion, Yves, too sure of her, tortures himself and her with his emotional ambivalence. Taking her sophisticated mother’s advice, Denise takes action… which she may regret forever.

With a sharp satirical eye and a characteristic perception for the fault lines in human relationships, Irène Némirovsky’s first novel shows sure signs of the brilliant novelist she was to become.