Orpheus Lost

by Janette Turner Hospital

Book Overview

In this compelling reimagining of the Orpheus myth, Leela, a young mathematician, encounters gifted Australian musician Mishka performing in the subway. The connection is immediate; a steamy love affair ensues. Insulated by their love, the pair ignores the anxious urban landscape. But when Leela is picked up off the street and taken to an interrogation center and an explosion rocks the subway, the fabric of their bond--and their very identities--begins...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0393334147
• ISBN13: 9780393334142
• Release Date: October 2008
• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
• Length: 380 Pages
• Weight: 0.70 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.0" x 5.5" x 8.2"

Customer Reviews

A weaving tale of obsession, love and atonement .

Other reviewers have hit the nail on the head with their reviews, so I will just add that this is a beautifully written novel that I found hard to put down. 2 weeks after finishing it, I find myself still thinking about this thriller.....It is a great thought-provoking read . Highly recommended !!

An elegy of loss

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.

Love in the Time of Terrorism

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?

"Obsession is its own heaven and its own hell."

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 ques

"I play music, I compose it, I don't do anything else. I mean, I don't know how to have coffee with

(4.5 stars) With symbolism from the Orpheus myth reverberating throughout her novel, Australian author Janette Turner Hospital pulls out all the stops, creating a psychologically intense study of the relationship between Michael "Mishka" Bartok, a PhD candidate at Harvard who is the son of Hungarian Jews now living in rural Australia, and Leela-May Moore, a PhD candidate at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Mishka, a gifted violinist, singer, and more recently, a player of the oud, a lute-like instrument from the Middle East, has never known his father, knowing only that he is an oud-player from Lebanon. Leela is the daughter of a Pentecostal preacher from tiny Promised Land, South Carolina. When Leela meets Mishka for the first time, he is playing his violin in the subway, "the underworld of the Red Line" between Harvard Square and Boston's Park Street Station. Mesmerized, she quickly becomes his lover, sharing his musical life. Enrapt by their young love, Mishka and Leela pay scant attention to terrorist acts which have occurred in New York, Washington DC, Los Angeles, and Atlanta. When a suicide bomber attacks the Prudential Tower in Boston, however, their lives change, becoming chaotic when a bomb explodes on the MBTA Red Line. Mishka has been away from home on both occasions, "playing in the Music Lab," he says. As the novel moves back and forth between the lives of Mishka and Leela in Cambridge and their childhoods in Australia and South Carolina, the reader comes to understand what motivates them and how they are tied to the mysteries of their pasts. Mishka, yearning to learn more about his father, has made connections with the Middle Eastern community and the mosque in Harvard Square. Leela's past comes back to haunt her when she is subjected to harsh questioning about Mishka by an intelligence service run by Cobb Slaughter, a former friend from Promised Land. As the tension ratchets up, the reader becomes totally involved in the conflict between reality and illusion. The Orpheus myth is turned upside down when Mishka fails to come home and Leela must find and rescue him from "the underworld." Hospital is a writer with rare gifts for creating suspense and a compelling narrative. The clear Orpheus symbolism is enhanced by frequent references to the music of Gluck and other western composers who have celebrated the Orpheus myth. Filled with rich action scenes related to contemporary issues, wonderful images, and themes dealing with illusion and reality, the ways our pasts govern our present, the importance of our parents in the shaping of our lives, and the prices we are willing to pay for love, Orpheus Lost captures the nightmarish present, relates it to individual pasts, and forecasts the "costly dues" that one must pay for one's "heart's desire" in the future. n Mary Whipple Due Preparations for the Plague Oyster Dislocations: Stories (Norton Paperback Fiction)