Five Seasons

By A.B. Yehoshua

Book Overview

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.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0156010895
• ISBN13: 9780156010894
• Release Date: October 2004
• Publisher: Harpervia
• Length: 355 Pages
• Weight: 0.85 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.0" x 5.5" x 8.4"

Customer Reviews

AB Yehoshua in Close to Top Form

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.