Orpheus Lost [Audio CD]

Janette Turner Hospital (Author), Edwina Wren (Narrator)

Book Description

Publication Date: June 2008

In this powerful and passionate new novel, Janette Turner Hospital tackles head-on questions of national security, art, terrorism, and love.

Leela is a mathematician who has escaped her Southern hometown to study in Boston. She meets an Australian musician, Mishka, and from the moment she first hears him play his music grips her; they quickly become lovers. Then one day Leela is picked up off the street and taken to an interrogation center somewhere outside the city. There has been an explosion in the subway; terrorism is suspected. The interrogator—an old childhood friend—now reveals to her that Mishka may not be all he seems. In this compelling reimagining of the Orpheus story, Leela travels into an underworld of kidnapping, torture, and despair in search of her lover. Janette Turner Hospital, whose works are "richly imbued with a highly lyrical and luminous quality" (San Diego Union-Tribune) again shows her genius, interweaving a literary thriller with a story of passion and the triumph of decency in confusing and dangerous times.

--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Bewitched by the haunting violin she hears in the subway under Harvard Square, MIT mathematician Leela-May Magnolia Moore falls in love at first listen with mysterious musician Mishka Bartok. This ambitious but flawed romantic thriller is a post-9/11 reworking of the Orpheus myth by one of Australia's most acclaimed novelists. The nightmare begins with a series of terrorist bombings, overlapping with disappearances by Mishka. Leela starts tailing her lover, only to be snatched off the street and interrogated by members of a shadowy private security force. Their leader: none other than Cobb Slaughter, the former Special Forces op who has loved/loathed her since their blighted childhoods in the South Carolina hamlet of Promised Land. Is Cobb simply tormenting Leela for his own sadistic pleasure, or could the Australian-born Mishka really be a terrorist? Hospital (Due Preparations for the Plague) sends the anguished Leela across three continents searching for answers, but extended flashbacks and florid prose slow the pace. Despite the novel's timely, provocative premise, it unfortunately isn't only Orpheus who goes astray. (Oct.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From The New Yorker

When Leela-May Magnolia Moore, a graduate student studying the mathematics of music, hears Mishka Bartok playing his violin in the Harvard Square station, she follows him up the stairs to the crowded street and loses her heart. Previously, Hospital’s interest in coincidence has been fruitful; her 2003 novel, "Due Preparations for the Plague," in which the children of the victims of a downed transatlantic flight discover that the passenger list wasn’t arbitrary but rigged, was distinguished by an ability to render both the experience of extreme grief and the suspenseful mechanics of a conspiracy plot. Here the many plot twists (is Mishka the illegitimate son of a Lebanese terrorist?) seem forced rather than fated, and Leela’s reveries about Mishka and his eerie Orphic playing add to the mishmash.
Copyright © 2007 Click here to subscribe to The New Yorker --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Audio CD
• Publisher: Bolinda Publishing (June 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1921334754
• ISBN-13: 978-1921334757
• Product Dimensions: 6.2 x 6.9 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 10.9 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (8 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #8,248,123 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Discover books, learn about writers, read author blogs, and more.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

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
(TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (VINE VOICE)    (HALL OF FAME REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)   

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
(VINE VOICE)    (TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)   

Amazon Verified Purchase

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
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

Amazon Verified Purchase

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.