Orpheus Lost [Hardcover]

Janette Turner Hospital (Author)

Product Details

• Hardcover: 368 pages
• Publisher: Alfred a Knopf Canada; First edition (2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0676979424
• ISBN-13: 978-0676979428
• Product Dimensions: 8.6 x 5.8 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (8 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #8,623,486 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars "Obsession is its own heaven and its own hell.", October 7, 2007

By 

Luan Gaines "luansos" (Dana Point, CA USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Orpheus Lost: A Novel (Hardcover)

Set in Boston in the near future, terrorism come to the states in random bombings of innocent citizens, paranoia has increased exponentially. Suspicion replaces curiosity, those of Middle Eastern descent of particular interest. Terrorism stalks the national stage, infecting cities, although Harvard Square teems with students and life goes on, albeit more circumspect. Applying her lover of numbers to music, MIT mathematician Leela Moore has escaped her southern roots in Promised Land, South Carolina, sister and Pentecostal Bible-quoting father left behind. Entering the subway under Harvard Square, Leela is arrested by the haunting melody played by a young violinist, a classical interpretation of the Orpheus legend ("Che faro senza Euridice").

Michael Barton is lost in his own world, his music piercing the air. Hypnotized, Leela follows. Their meeting is electric, Michael (Mishka) and Leela enraptured lovers, music the language of their love, the mournful notes of his violin and Persian oud rich with tenderness and passion. They live together, but Mishka's frequent absences are troubling- there is much Leela doesn't know about her lover- but he leaves notes, gone to the Music lab or the Café Marrakesh.

A subway bombing sets everyone on edge, none more so than Cobb Slaughter, ex-military turned mercenary who monitors suspicious activity in the city. Bonded since their South Carolina childhood, Cobb has embraced his obsession with Leela, who seduced and taunted him all his life. Now Cobb has intimate photographs of Leela and the violinist, Mishka entering the Café Marrakesh, in the company of a radical student. Much has changed in this brave new world, isolation and interrogation part of the modern lexicon. Leela is warned, shocked to see Cobb after all these years, refusing to accept the coldness in his eyes.

Casting the intimate relationships of these three protagonists on a stage crowded with politics and war, Hospital injects paranoia and danger, real and imagined, creating conflicts that seduce the reader to complicity. The past reaches out to each, Leela and Cobb's long history and troubled relationships with their fathers, Mishka's unusual childhood, magical, poignant and filled with music, his father a far more complicated issue. In chapters filled with the grieving chords of Mishka's violin and dream sequences that explore the characters' deepest fears, the world intrudes, harsh and swift, Mishka lost in a netherworld where honor bows to expediency. Reliving the Orpheus myth, Leela is the anguished traveler, from Boston to Australia to Baghdad.

In a tragic opera of obsession and unfettered passion, Leela bridges the troubled psyches of the two men, tortured by unbearable possibilities: "What will I do without that which I cannot do without?" Hospital's wonderfully nuanced characters stumble through a terrifying landscape, retreating to the past for comfort, finding solace in music, in love and in redemption, Orpheus at end of his quest. Luan Gaines/ 2007.

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Love in the Time of Terrorism, October 17, 2007

By 

H. F. Corbin "Foster Corbin" (ATLANTA, GA USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Orpheus Lost: A Novel (Hardcover)

I always think the novel I've read last by Janette Turner Hospital is her best, but her latest, ORPHEUS LOST, may indeed be the one. She writes again about what she has covered before: fanatical religions, global terrorists, the relationship between music and mathematics, a story that takes place in many locales-- in this instance, Boston; Promised Land, a small town in South Carolina; Queensland; Sydney; Beirut; Baghdad. Ms. Hospital takes the Orpheus myth and turns it on its ear. Leela (Leela-May Magnolia Moore), the child of a widowered crazed Pentecostal from a small town in South Carolina who is now a graduate student in math at MIT, one day hears Mishka Bartok, an Australian, who is also a graduate student but in music at Harvard, playing otherworldly beautiful music on the violin (the aria "Che faro senza Euridice" from Gluck's opera ORPHEO ED EURDICE) in the Boston subway. They become lovers that day. "He has the eyes of Orpheus, Leela thought. He has the eyes of Orpheus at the moment when Eurydice is bitten by the snake or perhaps when he has lost her for the second time, when she is pulled back into the underworld, forever beyond reach." For a season these two characters enclose themselves in their own cocoon, but their world is soon shattered by suicide bombers who now are blowing themselves up in Boston and other major U. S. cities.

With the first line of this novel, "Afterwards, Leela realized, everything could have been predicted from the beginning," Ms. Hospital, joining the likes of Camus, Melville and Toni Morrison, all masters of brilliant first lines, sets the tone for this finely wrought and suspenseful story, describing characters and situations with sparse but evocative language. The character Cobb as a boy had "skittish intensity" while Leela is full of "controlled intensity." She tells her former dissertation supervisor that Southerners are "unfailing courteous, especially when angry." One character's laughter "rose like a dandelion puff."

Ms. Hospital writes eloquently about three different characters, Leela, Mishka and Cobb, all so different but ultimately so much alike. Even though they wander far away from the places of their childhood, they are never really very far from those spots. In their memory, homing they forever go. Ms. Hospital has written previously of her own love for Queensland, where she grew up, in the short story "Litany for the Homeland"-- "Wherever I am, I live in Queensland." When she writes about Australia in this novel, her prose literally sings. The novel for all its bleakness-- and there is enough of that to spare-- is ultimately about hope, reconciliation, forgiveness, the power of both music and love.

ORPHEUS LOST has to be as good as any novel I've read this year, perhaps the best. Since Ms. Hospital now lives in the U. S. in South Carolina, can't we claim her, along with Peter Carey, another brilliant transplanted Australian writer, both as an American and Southern writer?

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars An elegy of loss, November 14, 2007

By 

K. L. Cotugno (San Francisco, CA USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Orpheus Lost: A Novel (Hardcover)

With each book, Janette Turner Hospital amazes the reader with her unique ability to write thrillers that expand the scope of possibility as well as illuminate. In haunting prose, she sets her tales in diverse locations and incorporates detail that stretch a reader's comprehension. This book in particular challenges one to make a connection between mathematics and music in a way that makes it impossible to never look at, say, a violin in quite the same way again. She weaves a story on methods for coping with unimagniable pain of loss on so many levels, seamlessly incorporating the war on terrorism and the Holocaust, and makes it work through the magic and healing properties of music. Her following is far too small to account for the prodigious talent on display on her every page.