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Summary
Summary
The novels of Joanne Harris are a literary feast for the senses. Five Quarters of the Orange represents Harris's most complex and sophisticated work yet -- a novel in which darkness and fierce joy come together to create an unforgettable story.
When Framboise Simon returns to a small village on the banks of the Loire, the locals do not recognize her as the daughter of the infamous Mirabelle Dartigen -- the woman they still hold responsible for a terrible tragedy that, look place during the German occupation decades before. Althrough Framboise hopes for a new beginning. She quickly discovers that past and present are inextricably intertwined. Nowhere is this truth more apparent than in the scrap book of recipes site has inherited from her dead mother.
With this book, Framboise re-creates her mother's dishes, which she serves in her small creperie. And yet as she studies the scrapbook -- searching for clues to unlock the contradiction between her mother's sensuous love of food and often cruel demeanor -- she begins to recognize a deeper meaning behind Mirabelle's cryptic scribbles. Whithin the journal's tattered pages lies the key to what actually transpired the summer Framboise was nine years old.
Rich and dark. Fire Quarters of the Orange is a novel of mothers and daughters of the past and the present, of resisting, and succumbling, and an extraordinary work by a masterful writer.
Author Notes
Joanne Harris was born in Barnsley, Yorkshire, England on July 3, 1964. She studied Modern and Mediaeval Languages at St Catharine's College, Cambridge. While working as a teacher for fifteen years, she published three novels: The Evil Seed (1989), Sleep, Pale Sister (1993) and Chocolat (1999), which was made into a film starring Juliette Binoche and Johnny Depp. Her other works include Blackberry Wine, Five Quarters of the Orange, Coastliners, Holy Fools, The Lollipop Shoes and Runemarks. She also co-wrote two cookbooks with cookery writer Fran Warde: The French Kitchen and The French Market.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (6)
Publisher's Weekly Review
If Harris's previous novel, Chocolat, was an adorably sweet morsel of French village lore, then this, her third, is a richer, more complex dessert wine. Still using her arsenal of culinary metaphors, quirky characters and slightly surreal incidents, Harris presents a complicated but beautiful tale involving misfortune, mystery and intense family relations. Framboise Dartigen, a feisty yet sensitive girl, grew up in a gossip-ridden hamlet on the banks of the Loire called Les Laveuses. Striving for attention and power, nine-year-old Framboise (or Boise, to her family) took to playing nasty tricks on her headstrong, mentally vulnerable mother, Mirabelle, who had a weakness for oranges. And it was not the usual affliction Mirabelle actually experienced "spells" (akin to epileptic fits) if she even smelled the fruit. But despite Framboise's girlish pranks, Mirabelle's maternal instinct was strong. When her children befriended German soldiers who were in the village during the World War II occupation, things went awry, and mother and children were forced to flee. As Framboise tells the tale, she's in her 60s and has returned to Les Laveuses, posing as a widow named Franoise Simon. When the caf she owns is reviewed in a national food magazine, her cover is blown and the past resurfaces. Harris has constructed a multilayered plot, punctuated with scrumptious descriptions of French delicacies and telling depictions of the war's jolting effects on one fragile family. This intense work brims with sensuality and sensitivity. (May) Forecast: Given Chocolat's brilliant success in print and on screen, this book will have no trouble attracting attention. Whether the previous book's readers are ready for this more serious novel is questionable, however. Harris, who lives in England, will make appearances in six U.S. cities in early June. (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Booklist Review
The past isn't gone, or even past, in this wrenching narrative, where every sensation is perfectly delineated, from the poisonous prick of childhood guilt to the swoon of surrender before a ripe berry tart--sensation as talisman. Writing from the restored Loire farmhouse where she grew up and lives under an assumed identity, 65-year-old Framboise recounts her life. Memories of the World War II Resistance remain, and her family's name is still despised. The story of why unfolds like a crab-apple blossom, and the tart, living fruit puckers the memory even while it nourishes. Framboise is too like her silent, taut mother, whose migraines are always preceded by the scent of oranges. Framboise uses that knowledge in the terrible way of children, to wrest a bit of freedom and control even though that means meeting with the German soldier who has enchanted her siblings and herself. That story weaves itself around the tale's present, where Framboise tries to divine her mother's notebook of recipes and jottings as if she were reading entrails. She tries to keep those luscious recipes and cryptic phrases from the hands of a dissembling nephew, for they protect secrets she is keeping, even from herself. There's not a moment of slackness in the perfectly wrought prose: light, heat, cold, softness, and, above all, the texture and shape and scent of bread and cake, fruit and wine, thyme and olive--all of these come off the page like the musk of desire. Darker than Chocolat (1999), Harris' first novel, and without a trace of the sentimentality that softened Blackberry Wine (2000), Harris' latest will strike the readers as a far more complex vintage. --GraceAnne A. DeCandido
School Library Journal Review
Adult/High School-Framboise Dartigen relates this story from her point of view as a nine-year-old and as a woman in her 60s. She spent her childhood in a Nazi-occupied French village with her widowed mother and siblings. Knowing that the scent of oranges brought on her mother's severe migraines, Framboise was clever enough or devious enough to hoard orange peel for her own advantage. During their unsupervised play, the children met a young Nazi soldier and were captivated by his charm and the black-market gifts that he gave them. Years later, Framboise, now a widow herself, returns to the village on a quest for the truth about her family's role in a tragic event for which her mother bore the blame and was forced by the townspeople to flee. Framboise inherited her mother's journal, and soon learns that the past and the present are intertwined. Harris has woven a dark, complex story of a dysfunctional family in stressful times. As in the author's Chocolat (Viking, 2000), mother and, later, daughter are gifted cooks whose love of food and cooking shows in the wonderful descriptions of bread, cake, fruit, wine, olives, etc. A picture of life in an occupied territory emerges in which collaborators, resisters, enemies, friends, and family members live in the same area, going about their daily routines. Harris's fans will not be disappointed; her attention to detail, vivid description, and strong characterization are all in this book, too.-Carol Clark, formerly at Fairfax County Public Schools, VA (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Guardian Review
Five Quarters of the Orange by Joanne Harris 432pp Doubleday pounds 12.99 First Chocolat , then Blackberry Wine , now oranges. If the next is called Walnut , Joanne Harris will have the full dessert. A preoccupation with food makes her list of child characters in this latest bulletin from the French countryside read like an index to a recipe book: Cassis, Reine-Claude, Framboise, Pistache, Noisette, Peche and Prune (Blackcurrant, Greengage, Raspberry, Pistachio, Hazelnut, Peach and Plum - guaranteed to be bullied). The heroine, Framboise, tells a twin-track story of a village up the river Loire from Angers. Long ago in the war, she and her brother and sister were involved in a little innocent collaboration (more black market than death squads) that went horribly wrong. From trading scraps of information for Gauloises, they spiralled through witnessing German rumpy-pumpy in the village bar (with one dead body on the pavement) to fleeing the parish pursued by a mob who were convinced that the children's mother had informed on the apparent slaying of a German soldier by the Resistance. Of course, nothing is quite what it seems. Thirty years later, the now-widowed Framboise returns incognito to her birthplace, restores the burnt-out farmhouse, opens a sensationally successful creperie and kicks off another saga. This time, her nephew and his wife, a failing food writer, are out to get a piece of her culinary action by inducing her to share with them her inheritance: a book of grandmother's recipes intertwined with gnomic musings on the events of the war years. So the device of the struggling caterer, first used in Chocolat , is brushed off for Anjou. Nephew plots to smother her trade; old woman fights back. She wins in the end, though not without yielding the secrets of her past to her neighbours. Harris writes at length. The story has (just) enough action to avoid tedium and induce some sort of tension, but the pace is jog rather than sprint and the relief at getting to the end is that of arrival, not understanding. The apparent charm of the author - Chocolat was a runaway success - seems to lie in her evocation of a French never-never land where things may occasionally turn nasty, but saccharine always flows. Her big problem is her plotting. She is not especially cerebral, and developments hinge on events rather than emotions, so those events have to ring true to be believed. They don't. Take granny's recipes, for instance. We are told that the hopeless food-writer would kill for them, that they made the reputation of Framboise's creperie, that Paris restaurant critics were bouleverses by their glory. But cuisine bourgeoise , which is what she cooked, has no secrets: everyone knows the rules for clafoutis or greengage tart. All the stupid niece-in-law had to do was go out and buy Tante Marie in the Kitchen Or consider the heroine, in the first part of the yarn a nine- year-old Anjou peasant with the emotional precocity of a 1990s teenager (and, what's more, already menstruating). This waif creates devious stratagems to induce migraines in her mother (this is where the orange of the title comes in); pursues a pike of mythic dimensions with the determination of a great white hunter; and falls for a German soldier (with not a lot of puppy in the love). What a monster - yet still a wonder in the author's eyes. Underpinning the action is food. Presumably this is what sold Chocolat , too: food equals good. (But nouvelle cuisine equals highly unreliable.) You must be all right if you can make rillettes, stuff a pike, and get your jams and jellies to set. This seems a crushingly simple view of life. Not all good cooks are lovely people, and those who use cooking to make themselves martyrs to the cause of love and affection are usually odious manipulators. But I suspect that this is Harris's secret weapon. Every reader of a cookery column is in reality plotting his or her glorification on the altar of domestic bliss, and this novel reinforces the notion. Caption: article-orange.1 First Chocolat , then Blackberry Wine , now oranges. If the next is called Walnut , [Joanne Harris] will have the full dessert. A preoccupation with food makes her list of child characters in this latest bulletin from the French countryside read like an index to a recipe book: Cassis, Reine-Claude, Framboise, Pistache, Noisette, Peche and Prune (Blackcurrant, Greengage, Raspberry, Pistachio, Hazelnut, Peach and Plum - guaranteed to be bullied). Of course, nothing is quite what it seems. Thirty years later, the now-widowed [Framboise] returns incognito to her birthplace, restores the burnt-out farmhouse, opens a sensationally successful creperie and kicks off another saga. This time, her nephew and his wife, a failing food writer, are out to get a piece of her culinary action by inducing her to share with them her inheritance: a book of grandmother's recipes intertwined with gnomic musings on the events of the war years. So the device of the struggling caterer, first used in Chocolat , is brushed off for Anjou. Nephew plots to smother her trade; old woman fights back. She wins in the end, though not without yielding the secrets of her past to her neighbours. - Tom Jaine.
Kirkus Review
An overwrought and often contrived tale with one too many characters named after food. When elderly widow Françoise Simon returns to the sleepy village on the Loire where she grew up, shes grateful that no one recognizes her after all these years as Framboise Dartigen, daughter of a woman suspected of collaboration during WWII. Framboise sets up a small crêperie and keeps her silence, whiling away the time by studying the immense scrapbook her mother, Mirabelle, left to her. This crumbling but fascinating volume is crammed with recipes, clippings, and handwritten notes in a peculiar code, which she gradually deciphers. Framboise is forced to relive her own central role in the long-ago scandal as the youngest of three children who eagerly take small luxuries like chocolate and silk stockings from the occupying German soldiers, offering in exchange information that can be used to blackmail the villagers. Framboise befriends Tomas Liebniz, youngest and best-looking of the soldiers, and confides her desire to catch Old Mother, an enormous pike lurking in the depths of the Loire. He provides fishing tackle and advice, as well as a means of getting around her disapproving mother. Mirabelle suffers from excruciatingly painful migraines, which can be triggered by the scent of oranges. Tomas gives one to the nasty little girl, who saves the peel and uses its pungent smell to repeatedly incapacitate her mother. Only morphinenow impossible to obtaineases the pain, and despite her hatred for the Germans who shot and killed her husband, Mirabelle too turns to clever Tomas, who procures it for her. After his accidental death by drowning and a bloody shooting rampage by German soldiers, the Dartigens face the wrath of the townsfolk . . . . Harris (Chocolat, 1999) is capable of elegantly sensual writing, but Five Quarters degenerates into melodrama all too soon. Author tour
Library Journal Review
Tragedy, revenge, suspicion, and love are the ingredients for the latest offering from the author of the acclaimed Chocolat. Framboise Dartigen recounts what happened in her tiny village of Les Laveuses during the German occupation and why after carrying the secret for more than 55 years she hid her identity upon returning. Beset by wartime privations, the people of Les Laveuses were a mixture of resistance fighters, collaborators, and financial opportunists. When a German soldier died mysteriously, townspeople were executed, and Framboise's mother was tortured and driven out by her neighbors, who believed that she had collaborated. Only her children knew the truth, and now Framboise, the sole survivor, has come back to claim the family farm and run a little crperie featuring her mother's recipes. In the album she inherited from her mother are not only her recipes and mementos but also clues to what really happened so long ago. Like the oranges whose fragrance so tortured Framboise's mother, the ending is bittersweet, and readers will love it. Highly recommended. [Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 1/01.] Susan Clifford Braun, Aerospace Corp., El Segundo, CA (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Excerpts
Excerpts
Five Quarters of the Orange Chapter One When my mother died she left the farm to my brother, Cassis, the fortune in the wine cellar to my sister, Reine-Claude, and to me, the youngest, her album and a two-liter jar containing a single black Périgord truffle, large as a tennis ball, suspended in sunflower oil, that, when uncorked, still releases the rich dank perfume of the forest floor. A fairly unequal distribution of riches, but then Mother was a force of nature, bestowing her favors as she pleased, leaving no insight as to the workings of her peculiar logic. And as Cassis always said, I was the favorite. Not that she ever showed it when she was alive. For my mother there was never much time for indulgence, even if she'd been the type. Not with her husband killed in the war, and the farm to run alone. Far from being a comfort to her widowhood, we were a hindrance to her with our noisy games, our fights, our quarrels. If we fell ill she would care for us with reluctant tenderness, as if calculating the cost of our survival, and what love she showed took the most elementary forms: cooking pots to lick, jam pans to scrape, a handful of wild strawberries collected from the straggling border behind the vegetable patch and delivered without a smile in a twist of handkerchief. Cassis would be the man of the family. She showed even less softness toward him than to the rest of us. Reinette was already turning heads before she reached her teens, and my mother was vain enough to feel pride at the attention she received. But I was the extra mouth, no second son to expand the farm, certainly no beauty. I was always the troublesome one, the discordant one, and after my father died I became sullen and defiant. Skinny and dark like my mother, with her long graceless hands and flat feet, her wide mouth, I must have reminded her too much of herself, for there was often a tightness at her mouth when she looked at me, a kind of stoic appraisal, of fatalism. As if she foresaw that it was I, not Cassis or Reine-Claude, who would carry her memory forward. As if she would have preferred a more fitting vessel. Perhaps that was why she gave me the album, valueless then except for the thoughts and insights jotted in the margins alongside recipes and newspaper cuttings and herbal cures. Not a diary, precisely. There are almost no dates in the album, no precise order. Pages were inserted into it at random, loose leaves later bound together with small, obsessive stitches, some pages thin as onionskin, others cut from pieces of card trimmed to fit inside the battered leather cover. My mother marked the events of her life with recipes, dishes of her own invention or interpretations of old favorites. Food was her nostalgia, her celebration, its nurture and preparation the sole outlet for her creativity. The first page is given to my father's death--the ribbon of his Légion d'Honneur pasted thickly to the paper beneath a blurry photograph and a neat recipe for black buckwheat pancakes--and carries a kind of gruesome humor. Under the picture my mother has penciled Remember--dig up Jerusalem artichokes. Ha! Ha! Ha! in red. In other places she is more garrulous, but with many abbreviations and cryptic references. I recognize some of the incidents to which she refers. Others are twisted to suit the moment's needs. Still others seem to be complete inventions, lies, impossibilities. In many places there are blocks of tiny script in a language I cannot understand. Ini tnawini inoti plainexini. Ini nacini inton inraebi inti ynani eromni. Sometimes a single word, scrawled across the top or side of the page seemingly at random. On one page, seesaw in blue ink, on another, wintergreen, rapscallion, ornament in orange crayon. On another, what might be a poem, though I never saw her open any book other than one of recipes. It reads: This sweetness scooped like some bright fruit plum peach apricot watermelon perhaps from myself this sweetness It is a whimsical touch, which surprises and troubles me. That this stony and prosaic woman should in her secret moments harbor such thoughts. For she was sealed off from us--from everyone--with such fierceness that I had thought her incapable of yielding. I never saw her cry. She rarely smiled, and then only in the kitchen with her palette of flavors at her fingertips, talking to herself (so I thought) in the same toneless mutter, enunciating the names of herbs and spices-- cinnamon, thyme, peppermint, coriander, saffron, basil, lovage --running a monotonous commentary. See the tile. Has to be the right heat. Too low, the pancake is soggy. Too high, the butter fries black, smokes, the pancake crisps. I understood later that she was trying to educate me. I listened because I saw in our kitchen seminars the one way in which I might win a little of her approval, and because every good war needs the occasional amnesty. Country recipes from her native Brittany were her favorites; the buckwheat pancakes we ate with everything, the far breton and kouign amann and galette bretonne that we sold in downriver Angers with our goat's cheeses and our sausage and fruit. She always meant Cassis to have the farm. But Cassis was the first to leave, casually defiant, for Paris, breaking all contact except for his signature on a card every Christmas, and when she died, thirty years on, there was nothing to interest him in a half-derelict farmhouse on the Loire. I bought it from him with my own savings, my widow money, and at a good price too, but it was a fair deal, and he was happy enough to make it then. He understood the need to keep the place in the family. Now, of course, all that's changed. Cassis . . . Five Quarters of the Orange . Copyright © by Joanne Harris. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved. Available now wherever books are sold. Excerpted from Five Quarters of the Orange by Joanne Harris All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
