This reflective novel from one of Israel's most celebrated novelists and author of "A Late Divorce" and "The Lover" describes a civil servant's attempts to come to terms with the death of his wife through cancer. --This text refers to an alternate Hardcover edition. 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. 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.