Five Quarters of the Orange, 2 Cassetten [Audiobook] [Englisch] [Gebundene Ausgabe]

The great strength of "Five Quarters of the Orange" is Harris' unflinching honesty about childhood--its capacity for treachery and cruelty. Graphic images of Framboise's war against the life of the nearby river underline this theme. After a village girl is bitten and killed by a venomous snake, Framboise nets a dozen snakes, crushes their skulls and leaves them to rot on the river banks.

At the heart of the novel, as in the novelist's early work "Chocolat," is a complicated relationship between mother and daughter. Framboise's mother Mirabelle mistakenly applies the same techniques to child rearing that she applies to growing fruit trees. Prune them severely and they will flower. She discovers too late that children don't respond well to constant scolding and deprivation.

Mirabelle is also plagued by olfactory hallucinations. Prior to her terrible migraines, she thinks she smells oranges. In scenes which make the book worth reading by themselves, Framboise gets revenge on her mother by planting a cut up orange near the stove so that the scent fills the house. These scenes of nine-year-old vindictiveness are where Harris reveals her true genius.

"Five Quarters of the Orange" isn't just another war novel, however. It's also a mystery. Why does Framboise disguise her identity when she returns to her childhood village after an absence of 50 years? A scandal hangs over her head from that earlier time, so many decades ago. A scandal so flagrant she is sure she would never be accepted back into her community if they knew exactly who she was. This unknown scandal, which is gradually unfolded through flashbacks, provides most of the novel's suspense.

To dwell only on the horrors of "Five Quarters of the Orange" would be to do the book an injustice, though. Though Harris' genius shines most truly in her portrayal of how war compromises even the innocent, this book is also rich in charm and whimsy--the same kind of graceful good humor that made the author's previous book "Chocolat" such a big hit and the subsequent movie so well reviewed. Scenes of the grotesque give way to moments of gentle slapstick.

People who are tired of conventional treatments of the elderly in literature will especially enjoy the episode in which the elderly Framboise and her aging neighbor get the better of a 20-something hoodlum terrorizing Framboise's creperie. Their shared triumph sparks an autumnal romance that cannot fail to delight even the most cynical readers. Even for someone like Framboise with skeletons in her closet, it's never too late to make a clean breast of things, never too late to fall in love.

Five Quarters actually has several viewpoints, all from the same character, Framboise. We enter her mind as a nine year old child during the war in France and as a middle-aged widow returning unknown to her birthplace. Finally we enter her mind as a sixty-four year old woman making peace with the past and falling in love. This is a prodigious feat for any author to pull off. While not having reached all these ages yet I still received a strong feeling of what it would be like at that point in life.

The story itself is riveting and the book is one of the few that I have read recently in one sitting. There are villains and heroes, but neither are comic book characters. There are multiple nuances to every main character in the book so you cannot pigeonhole any one of them. The second world war and its effect on a small village in France, and specifically one family, is the main story. There is a mystery here to be unravelled slowly, and savored as the children savored the forbidden oranges of the title. While not exactly a story of the war its presence, in the form of German soldiers, is the catalyst for events that affect the village for generations.

A very enjoyable and thought provoking book. I cannot wait to read Ms. Harris' other novels.

On one level it's about the naive wartime collaboration of children and its consequences, but more importantly it's an exploration of mother-daughter relationships and how they shape the lives of multiple generations. This is a theme Harris first dipped into in Chocolat, but here the events and the emotions are sharper and more raw, and ultimately more revealing.

As with her two most recent novels, food and wine are woven into the story. The discovery by Framboise of her mother's cookbook, with its secrets and emotions never revealed during her mother's life, is the vehicle that forces her to confront and to put to rest the events that have dominated her life.

Harris continues to amaze, and Five Quarters is clearly her most fully realized writing. Though I found myself disliking Framboise more than a few times, the story has a depth and feeling that is hugely satisfying. Don't miss it.