Orpheus Lost – totally satisfying fiction
June 27th 2008 00:48
At present, I am personally congratulating myself for finally getting to an author that has been on my list to read for at least 4-5 years. Janette Turner Hospital, from all I’d read and heard is worth the intake and after finishing her latest, Orpheus Lost, I can confidently report on the affirmative … she is good!
Leela-May is a mathematical genius studying in Boston. Her compulsive need for numbers made her an unlikely candidate for life in her childhood town of Promised Land, South Carolina, so she headed north and her world became a series of lectures, degrees, grants and a steady stream of one night stands. Until she found Mishka Bartok, a busking subway musician who was her ultimate ‘insoluble equation’.
Mishka, a young Australian with a Harvard scholarship awoke a love in Leela that found her obsessed with discovering what lay beneath his multiple layers. Born to an Australian mother and never knowing his middle-eastern father, Mishka grew up in his grandparents home in the Daintree forests of Queensland learning the violin from his mysterious Uncle Otto. From their first meeting Leela and Mishka’s rapture sends them down a complex, near mythical path. But there are many others to be pulled into this rubic-style puzzle … all heading towards a conclusion that sends a timely message in today’s terrorist-phobic world.
Have I got you wondering?
Orpheus Lost is not just a love story, or a modern re-imagining of the Orpheus tale. It is a well constructed story that intertwines a cast of off-beat, (at times tragic) but believable characters with a multitude of society’s checks and balances. Rules and regulations which leave some of them floundering and others caught somewhere between hell and home. From South Carolina, Vietnam, Beirut, and as far away as the rainforests of the Daintree, Hospital has spun a sophisticated, contemporary story that left my fiction addicted brain more than satisfied.
With ‘plenty of food for thought’ and a feeling of being truly entertained, what more could you ask for after reading well written fiction?
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