Orpheus Lost - Rilegato

Hospital, Janette Turner

Rilegato

ISBN 10: 0676979424 ISBN 13: 9780676979428

Casa editrice: Knopf Canada, 2007

Riassunto

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

From the moment Leela’s ear catches the first few bars of music in between the roar of subway trains, she’s entranced by its haunting beauty. Letting the music reel her in, in perfect fifths, it’s at the end of the inbound platform that she finds Mishka Bartok, singing Che farò senza Euridice and accompanying himself on the violin. He’s surrounded by a cluster of commuters, but hardly seems to notice they are there until he stops playing. Despite Mishka’s reluctance to talk, Leela discovers that he’s a graduate student at Harvard, studying composition. She’s a mathematician at MIT, researching the math of music. Their connection is immediate, and that night they embark on a steamy love affair.

Living together in Boston, Leela and Mishka pursue their mutual passions — both academic and carnal — in a fog, as if the outside world does not exist. They have both distanced themselves from their families — Mishka from his mother and grandparents in Australia, Leela from her father and sister back in Promised Land, South Carolina. Both recoil from the reality of the city streets, where terrorists attack American civilians and a subway bombing under Harvard Square comes dangerously close to tearing their world apart. But that is ultimately the effect of the bombing, when Leela is grabbed off the street, thrust into a dark car, and taken to an interrogation room. There, she is questioned about the recent attacks by a masked man who tells her he’s a member of a private security force. He also asks directly about Mishka — who often visits an Arab café and a mosque that are under surveillance, and socializes with known instigators... all signs that he’s a terrorist, or at least aiding those responsible for the subway bombing.

When Leela’s captor removes his mask at last, Cobb stands before her: the person she was perhaps closest to as a teenager back in Promised Land. Since leaving the army, after a long stint in the Middle East, he’s been involved in paramilitary work. Cobb knows from experience that photographs can be disastrously misinterpreted, but in his eyes, Mishka is guilty. Against her instincts, Leela thinks back to Mishka’s many unexplained disappearances, often around the time of such attacks. It’s then that she realizes the mystery and intensity at the heart of their relationship could be hiding much more than she’d thought.

Mishka disappears again the next day, and doubt erodes Leela’s love as she embarks on her own investigation to find him and unravel the mystery of his life. Little does she know that her search will lead her across the globe and into an underworld of kidnapping, torture and despair.

With this compelling re-imagining of the Orpheus story, Janette Turner Hospital again shows her genius, interweaving a literary thriller with a story of passion and the triumph of decency in confusing and dangerous times. It is at once a love story on a grand scale that spans America, Australia and the Middle East, and an exploration of how ghastly side effects of terrorism can wreak havoc on individual lives.

Su questo libro

Recensione

“A rich, wise, alarming novel, energized by Hospital’s masterful suspense. . . . Leaves readers feeling hope and grief and a terrible sense of urgency about our own lives at this fragile moment in history.” — The Boston Globe

“No book by this nervy, dynamic Australian-born author is ever anything less than intricate and deeply disquieting. . . . Lushly orchestrated, Orpheus Lost answers our grief and fear with an emotional expressiveness more visceral than words, with the candor of music — and of myth.” — The Los Angeles Times

“Turner Hospital’s language is sensuous and vivid, especially when she’s getting inside her characters’ heads. Sometimes their perceptions are expressed in simile and metaphor, but just as often we are immersed in their dreams or illusions. We get a keen sense of how strong dreams can be, and how thin the line is between illusion and reality.” — The Winnipeg Free Press

“It must be a great challenge for an author to take a Greek myth and rewrite it in a modern context. It must be doubly satisfying, therefore, when the finished story is as good as Janette Turner Hospital’s latest book Orpheus Lost.” — Bookseller and Publisher (Australia)

“Turner Hospital has become such a master of the drama of fiction [and] has managed to engage with the terrible matter of terrorism in a way that is not only serious but, in the narrative sense, engrossing.” — Australian Literary Review

“Janette Turner Hospital is writing fiction that is literary in quality and formal design and in the ambition it displays but will also keep you on the edge of your chair or reading past your bedtime.” — The Age (Melbourne)

“Hospital shows her dazzling skill at thriller writing. [She is] a master-planner who never falters for an instant. Nor do the pace and intensity let up. . . . A consummate, nail-biting example of a myth retold for modern times.” — Australian Book Review

“One of the most powerful and innovative writers in English today.” — The Times Literary Supplement (U.K.)

L'autore

Born in 1942, Janette Turner Hospital grew up on the steamy subtropical coast of Australia in the northeastern state of Queensland. She began her teaching career in remote Queensland high schools, but since completing her graduate studies she has taught in universities in Australia, Canada, England, France and the United States.

Turner Hospital’s first published short story appeared in The Atlantic Monthly, where it won an Atlantic First citation in 1978. Her first novel, The Ivory Swing (set in the village in South India where she lived in 1977), won Canada’s $50,000 Seal Award in l982. She lived for many years in Kingston, Ontario, and in 1986 she was listed by The Globe and Mail as one of Canada’s “Ten Best Young Fiction Writers.” Since then she has won a number of prizes for her eight novels and three short story collections, and her work has been published in twelve languages. Three of her short stories appeared in Britain’s annual Best Short Stories in English in their year of publication and one of these, “Unperformed Experiments Have No Results,” was selected for The Best of the Best (l995), an anthology of the decade.

The Last Magician, Turner Hospital’s fifth novel, was listed by Publishers Weekly as one of the twelve best novels published in the U.S. in 1992 and was a New York Times Notable Book. Oyster, her sixth novel, was a finalist for Australia’s Miles Franklin Award and for Canada’s Trillium Award, as well as being one of The Observer’s Best Books of the Year in the U.K. and a New York Times Notable Book.

Due Preparations for the Plague won the Queensland Premier’s Literary Award in 2003, the Davitt Award from Sisters in Crime for “best crime novel of the year by an Australian woman” and was shortlisted for the New South Wales Premier’s Christina Stead Award. In 2003, Turner Hospital received the Patrick White Award for lifetime achievement.

Orpheus Lost is Janette Turner Hospital’s most recent novel, and was published in 2007 to widespread acclaim. Speaking of the story’s genesis, she commented: “I’ve always been intensely interested in examining ordinary human beings, people without political agendas, who are suddenly caught up in the fist of history and crisis. If someone happens to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, what happens to their lives from that point onwards? How do they negotiate life, history, politics thereafter?” Turner Hospital holds an endowed chair as Carolina Distinguished Professor of English at the University of South Carolina.

Su questa edizione

• Editore: Knopf Canada
• Data di pubblicazione: 2007
• ISBN 10: 0676979424
• ISBN 13: 9780676979428
• Rilegatura: Copertina rigida
• Numero di pagine: 368