Five Seasons (Harvest Book) [Paperback]

A. B. Yehoshua (Author), Hillel Halkin (Translator)

Book Description

Series: Harvest Book | Publication Date: October 4, 2004

In the autumn, Molkho's wife dies and his years of loving attention are ended. But his newfound freedom is filled with the erotic fantasies of a man who must fall in love. Winter sees him away to the operas of Berlin and a comic tryst with a legal advisor who has a sprained ankle. Spring takes him to Galilee and an underage Indian girl. Jerusalem in the summer presents him with an offer from an old classmate to seduce his infertile wife. And the next autumn it is Nina (if only they spoke the same language!), whose yearning for her Russian home leads Molkho back to life.
Five Seasons is a finely nuanced, unabashedly realistic novel that provides immense reading pleasure.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

If not as kinetic and intricate as A Late Divorce , the author's daring treatment of nine frenzied days in the life of a troubled Israeli family, Yehoshua's latest novel reconfirms his status as a shrewd analyst of domestic ordeals. Neatly and leisurely divided into "five seasons" following the death of the protagonist's wife of 30 years, this is a genuine and elegant portrait of a widower, Molkho, a middle-aged Sephardi, like his creator, and his heartfelt grief and painfully awkward readjustment to life as a single person. A passive, frugal civil servant obsessed with bodily functions and malfunctions, who diligently and celibately cared for his wife through a long illness, Molkho is a straight man, vulnerably ripe for absurd romantic entanglements. He is variously infatuated with or fancied by the barren, fey cast-off wife of a "born-again" Orthodox Jew; an aggressive lawyer, who is senior to him on the bureaucratic ladder; an Indian girl in a development town; and a Russian emigre Molkho helps to repatriate. Although much here is universally applicable, Yehoshua continues to advance his vision of Israel as the necessary, if chaotic and problematic, receptacle of the scattered remnants of world Jewry.
Copyright 1988 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Library Journal

Among contemporary Israeli novelists, none infuses realistic fiction with a more subtle mixture of comedy and pathos than Yehoshua. Molkho, the middle-aged, newly widowered protagonist, earns easy ridicule: He is an unimaginative petty bureaucrat, a cultural philistine, and a conversational dullard, and his misadventures with women in Israel, Paris, Vienna, and Berlin are hilarious. Confronted with the challenge of freedom, Molkho is hobbled by his stultifying ordinariness. But in the five seasons following the autumn of Molkho's wife's death, the reader's mockery, leavened by compassion and understanding, transforms (without a trace of sentimentality) to affection, even, perhaps, love. Molkho may be a clod but in him each of us will find common clay. Arthur Waldhorn, City Coll., CUNY
Copyright 1988 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 372 pages
• Publisher: Mariner Books (October 4, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0156010895
• ISBN-13: 978-0156010894
• Product Dimensions: 7.8 x 5.3 x 1.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,982,383 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

11 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars AB Yehoshua in Close to Top Form, October 11, 2004

By 

Rachel Safier "www.theregoesthebride.com" (DC) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Five Seasons (Harvest Book) (Paperback)

AB is a hit or miss author. A Late Divorce stands as one of my favorite books of all time. AB was pitch-perfect in capturing Israel & domestic life among the less-than-perfect family. Liberated Bride was AB at his worst: slow as molasses with a tangent everywhere. I couldn't get through it. Five Seasons is beautiful. Very little happens, but it doesn't matter. It takes a fine writer to portray a lazy Shabbat afternoon so simply and grief so utterly. There is little verbal poetry in AB; he prefers to explain, line by line, the making of a meal or a long drive to the North. But when he hits it--as he does here--you are in Israel & in the mind of one person as he gets through life. And that is poetry of a unique kind.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A Subtle Portrait of Grief, December 24, 2009

By 

Valerie J. Saturen (Tacoma, WA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Five Seasons (Harvest Book) (Paperback)

This engrossing and somewhat strange novel centers on Molkho, an Israeli bureaucrat whose wife has died after a long battle with cancer. In the five seasons that follow, Molkho copes with his mixed emotions and searches for love through a series of infatuations.

Yehoshua's writing style is uniquely realistic, providing even some of the most mundane details of the protagonist's life. He paints an equally detailed portrait of Molkho's psychology, which is full of contradiction, nuance, and ambivalence. Molkho tentatively enjoys his newfound freedom after years of tending to his dying wife, but clearly feels the emptiness of her absence. He reacts to the objects of his infatuation with muted, yet rapidly shifting emotions. Sometimes, he behaves in ways that seem strange but make sense in the context of his grief: in one scene, his nostalgia for a newly ended era in his life drives him to snoop around the nursing ward of his mother-in-law's retirement home. While there, he recalls with a mixture of wistfulness, melancholy, and pride the endless hours he spent at his wife's bedside.

Yehoshua uses some subtle and interesting devices to convey Molkho's progress as his numbness thaws and he begins to reenter the world of the living. During much of the novel, even the characters most intimate to Molkho have no names; his children are "the high school student," "the college student," and "the soldier." Yet as the story progresses, names appear and Molkho's world seems to come alive again.

FIVE SEASONS is probably not for everybody. Some readers will likely find Yehoshua's detailed yet stark writing tedious. However, I found the novel enjoyable and absorbing. It is an intimate depiction of a character who is both ordinary and complex.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The Israeli Everyman, August 12, 2009

By 

Eric Maroney (Trumansburg, NY) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Five Seasons (Paperback)

A.B. Yehoshua has accomplished something quite extraordinary in Five Seasons in the character of Molkho. Buffeted by life, Molkho tries to pick himself up and begin again. That existence confounds does not deter him, for he keeps going. Yehoshua has made Molkho a hero without making him heroic. This is a man who works at a mid-level bureaucratic job in the Israel government; he is not an intellectual (a self-confession), does not read books except on rare occasions, but is deeply moved by music and the experience of its rapture which he repeatedly turns to find the deeper meanings of life. He is naturally curious and humane, caring deeply for those around him with genuine emotion untouched by sentimentality or mere self-service.

Five Seasons counts as one of Yehoshua's most profound books and steers clear of the literary experimentation of some of his other work. All in all, Five Seasons has the depth and range of a masterpiece.