Customer Reviews

Five Seasons (Harvest Book)

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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.

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.

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.