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Orfeo: A Novel [Kindle Edition]

Author: Richard Powers | Language: English | ISBN: B00DX5XAA6 | Format: PDF, EPUB

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A New York Times Bestseller



The National Book Award–winning author of The Echo Maker delivers his most emotionally charged novel to date, inspired by the myth of Orpheus.

"If Powers were an American writer of the nineteenth century…he'd probably be the Herman Melville of Moby-Dick. His picture is that big," wrote Margaret Atwood (New York Review of Books). Indeed, since his debut in 1985 with Three Farmers on Their Way to a Dance, Richard Powers has been astonishing readers with novels that are sweeping in range, dazzling in technique, and rich in their explorations of music, art, literature, and technology.

In Orfeo, Powers tells the story of a man journeying into his past as he desperately flees the present. Composer Peter Els opens the door one evening to find the police on his doorstep. His home microbiology lab—the latest experiment in his lifelong attempt to find music in surprising patterns—has aroused the suspicions of Homeland Security. Panicked by the raid, Els turns fugitive. As an Internet-fueled hysteria erupts, Els—the "Bioterrorist Bach"—pays a final visit to the people he loves, those who shaped his musical journey. Through the help of his ex-wife, his daughter, and his longtime collaborator, Els hatches a plan to turn this disastrous collision with the security state into a work of art that will reawaken its audience to the sounds all around them. The result is a novel that soars in spirit and language by a writer who “may be America’s most ambitious novelist” (Kevin Berger, San Francisco Chronicle).

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• File Size: 871 KB
• Print Length: 385 pages
• Page Numbers Source ISBN: 0393240827
• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company (January 13, 2014)
• Sold by: Amazon Digital Services, Inc.
  
• Language: English
• ASIN: B00DX5XAA6
• Text-to-Speech: Not enabled
• X-Ray:
  Enabled
• Lending: Not Enabled
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #10,341 Paid in Kindle Store (See Top 100 Paid in Kindle Store)
  • #73
    in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Literature & Fiction > Literary Fiction > Mystery, Thriller & Suspense
• #73
  in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Literature & Fiction > Literary Fiction > Mystery, Thriller & Suspense

Reading a Richard Powers novel is always an experience. Powers is one of the world's most creative and cerebral writers. His novels contain surprising, dextrous and often amazingly imaginative connections between a dazzling array of ideas from poetry, music, culture, science and technology. The metaphors and allusions he weaves can leave readers stupefied. This is only my second Powers book but I can attest that reading a book by this remarkable author is never easy and sometimes exhausting, but always rewarding.

Powers's latest novel amply evidences all these qualities. The main storyline is about a music composer doing biotechnology in his garage as a hobby who flees from the authorities after they misunderstanding his tinkering. But this main story is almost a byline and the real purpose is to explore Peter Els's life and especially the river of music that has been his constant companion. Along the way we are treated to expansive, creative, several pages-long descriptions of famous music pieces like Mozart's Jupiter symphony, Mahler's Kindertotenlieder and Messiaen's Quatuor pour la fin du temps. Classical music aficionados will find these descriptions a treat and will gaze upon Powers's prodigious musical knowledge with wonder. Some of the renditions - like an exquisite unpacking of Steve Reich's eerie, haunting "Proverb" in a scene set in a college cafe - are mesmerizing. In fact it's worth listening to the relevant pieces either during or after the reading (there are two Spotify lists of the music on Powers's website).

If you are a music-lover, read this book for its extraordinary insight into the mind of a musician. At least listen to its sound-track. For, as he proved in THE TIME OF OUR SINGING, Richard Powers is peerless in his ability to recapture music through words. As he looks back over the life of American composer Peter Els -- fictional but so possible -- he tells his story as much through the music he listens to as by what he writes or does himself. He fills many pages at a time with the sound of masterpieces, some familiar, some obscure, all miraculous. I knew most of the pieces that first awaken Els to music, so I could hear them in my head: Mozart's Jupiter Symphony, Mahler's Kindertotenlieder, Messaien's Quartet for the End of Time. But Powers treats them with a depth of perception and breadth of reference that I know will send me back to my CDs to hear them again through his ears. His account of the genesis and performance of the Messaien in a German POW camp especially, though based upon a source that he gladly acknowledges, is twenty-five pages of sheer wonder.

Halfway through the novel, Powers mentions a piece I hadn't heard in many years: Terry Riley's In C, arguably the seminal work of American minimalism. So I found a recording on You Tube and played it as I read on, and kept doing this until the end, with composers such as Shostakovich, Harry Partch, or Peter Lieberson. The most striking was an almost hallucinatory sequence in which Els, on the run from the FBI, is in a college-town cafe. A piece is playing on the sound system: Proverb, Steve Reich's exploration of a text by Wittgenstein. I did not know this at all, so stopped to put it on.

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