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    Orfeo
    Orfeo
    Orfeo
    Audiobook13 hours

    Orfeo

    Written by Richard Powers

    Narrated by Christopher Hurt

    3.5/5

    ()

    About this audiobook

    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.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherRecorded Books, Inc.
    Release dateJan 20, 2014
    ISBN9781490604015
    Orfeo

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    Reviews for Orfeo

    3.5/5

    214 ratings28 reviews

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    • 2/5
      Music was described a lot in this book (ex. The oboes brought on ecstasy with their change to b flat). It goes on like that for pages sometimes. A mans life in music is mapped out in flashbacks. The rest of the book is him on the run from the authorities. The book just didn't hold my interest and I was glad when it was over.
    • 5/5
      A splendid novel! I'm 66 years old at the moment, so not too far off of our hero's age. And I feel like the promise of my youth has been quite unfulfilled. My ups and downs haven't been anywhere near as dramatic as Peter's, but I sure can sympathize! The spine of this book is probably the series of descriptions of great classical music, from maybe Mozart to Partch. I knew some of the pieces pretty well, some a passing familiarity, and some not at all. This is a great book to open the door to some top notch music!One of my long time hobbies has been alternative tunings and algorithmic composition. It was just great to see quite a bit of that world described here.
    • 4/5
      I enjoyed the great scope and range of Overstory, so I wanted to dip into Powers' earlier novels and found Orfeo first. Instead of trees and the natural world at the center of this one, it's music, but it is just as absorbing a tale, and now I'm going to have to be sure to look up more of Powers' books.
    • 3/5
      "A man. A man and his emotional history. A man and his emotional history and bioterrorism."

      I'll be honest: I came into this book expecting something far, far different from what it is. But that's not my fault. Reviewers, both professional and goodreading, hail Richard Powers as The Great American Novelist, a man the equal of Melville. He is an intellectual titan, unsparing in his pursuit of Art, who demands total commitment from his readers and then rewards them with genius.

      Well, not here. This is a book about a guy who feels guilt over the death of his father and tries to do What Dad Would Have Wanted, until he falls in Love with a Girl, who bumps him off the WWDHD? track and onto the Great Artist track. She dumps him, and he tries to create Great Art over this fact. He meets another girl, and marries her. Then he leaves her because he's committed to Art. Late in life he receives a shock, and goes on a road trip to apologize to his ex-wife and his daughter and to see his best friend one last time. Then he dies.

      Now, you'll note that none of the above features in the marketing/reviewing of the book. What does feature in the marketing is A Man and His Bioterrorism and the Orpheus myth. Certainly, that's there. But it's just kind of there, doing nothing. I suspect that twenty years from now the DIY DNA stuff will feel as dated as the references to twitter and flash mobs do already. The novel could easily have been written without that (even the ties between Els and Orpheus are obvious enough, as he 'turns back' and loses his wife. True, without the bioterrorism, he wouldn't have been torn apart by 'maenads' at the end).

      So I spent some time trying to work out exactly why everyone thinks this is an intellectual tour de force. Some unconvincing answers:

      i) People know so little about modern music that a (very good) chapter on Messiaen and a couple of references to Partch make it seem like a revelation of secret rites. Give Powers his due: writing ekphrasis of music is not easy, and though he doesn't exactly make it thrilling, he does a reasonable job. These chapters also form a kind of short history of twentieth century music: we move from a kind of prologue (Mozart's Jupiter) to Mahler's Kindertotenlieder, Messiaen's Quartet, a Cage nonsense-in, Reich's 'Proverb', and Lieberson's Neruda Songs. It's cool that someone wrote a novel about a modern composer.

      ii) There's science in there, though very little of it and there's no obvious reason for it being there.

      But I think there's a better justification for the book. This is the first Powers I've read, but I assume his reputation is not based on the Barnes & Noble front table realism you get here. I assume he has written dense, difficult books.

      And if so, this is Powers' Parmenides (Plato), his Sacred Fount (James): the book in which he looks back at what he's done, and notices some problems. Els wanted to create 'pure' music, in the twentieth century manner, but he could never quite manage it--people insist that his pieces are listenable, even marketable. But he makes peace with the idea that much difficult music may never gain a large audience, but also expects that difficulty, currently out of fashion (it is), will come back into style at some point.

      Difficult literature has a small audience, and will never have a large one. Books like 'Orfeo', on the other hand, could (if fortunate) gain a large readership. Is the tradeoff worth it? Els ended up pretending to have unleashed musically modified bacteria into the world, or actually releasing them, and gaining a massive audience by doing so: people love publicity. They do not love art.

      'Orfeo' replicates this exactly: it is not difficult, it is not great art, but it is about contemporary buzzwords. Voila, The Great American Novel. It is competent and buzzworthy, and it will sell. Unlike previous Great American Novels, however (Twain, Salinger), it is easy in a highly self-aware way. That's a small step forward. Worst case scenario, its readers will go buy a copy of the Quartet for the End of Time.

      ********************

      PS: This novel is, in other words, to nineteenth century Great Artist novels what Jeffrey Eugenides' 'The Marriage Plot' is to nineteenth century novels of Lurv, with the difference that Powers is a good writer and his book is worth reading, when you're on an airplane sometime. Don't expect profundity, though.

      PPS: Unless there's some profundity to be had in the musings on creating art for eternity and what that means in a post-religious world. In short, it seems to mean unifying art and nature, which will continue after humanity has ceased. I don't find that profound, but a more committed secular-scientist nature worshiping type of reader might, and there's something to be said for that.
    • 2/5
      I need my life revolves around music friends to read this and talk to me about it. Right now I am ambivalent about it but there is a ton here to talk about and think about.
    • 2/5
      Burdened with excessive detail, Orfeo drifts to a predictable, melodramatic conclusion Peter Els is a composer of new music, an old man, a adjunct professor who has been put out to pasture. When his dog, Orfeo, his only companion, dies suddenly he's so distraught he mistakenly calls 9-1-1. He abruptly ends the call which brings the police to his home only to find he's been passing his time cooking up variant biological strains in his kitchen laboratory.Is this crackpot a bioterrorist? When the authorities come to investigate, Els goes on the lam. Author Richard Powers has the narrative go back and forth between Els' past and the present until they converge. Gradually a picture emerges of the a man obsessed with music, music that sounds like noise to most people.I was never sure if Els was a genius, delusional, lazy or just stubborn, but his obsession manages to wreck every career opportunity and relationship he comes in contact with.As a protagonist Els is not sympathetic, he's frustrating. Powers burdens the story with extensive passages about experimental music and minute details on musical composition. It's excessive and redundant as are his passages of transcendence the composer feels when in the thrall of his muse. The plot seems to drift as if the author wasn't sure where to take it and the conclusion is as predictable as it is melodramatic.Throughout the book the author has inserted intrusive sentences presented in a different font and separated from the text by bold lines. I had no idea what the quotes were referring to, who they were by or what part they played in the story other than pulling me out of the reading experience.
    • 5/5
      Not sure the text entirely resolves the problem of putting the experience of music into words but a brave stab that kept me reading till the end and left me wondering about the legacy of the sixties and how we got to here. I didn't know this writer and I am glad I now do.
    • 4/5
      Having recently discovered Evan Dara and read his Lost Scrapbook, I was led to Richard Powers who was cited in a blurb. An ear for music -- and sounds of all kinds -- is not the only thing these two writers have in common. Orfeo is a novel of ideas, and in that sense the plot-line may be of secondary importance, which might explain some of the readers' reactions. As someone with absolutely no musical education (alas!), I can say that the accusation often leveled at the book that it aims at select readers versed in the technical vocabulary of composition is unjustified; I would say that rather the opposite is true: Powers opens up the world of music to those uninitiated and teaches us to listen more intently. One of the things I have enjoyed most about the novel were the sections of close-listening (i.e. like close reading applied to musical pieces: Mozart (Jupiter symphony), Gustav Mahler (Kindertotenlieder), Olivier Messiaen (Le Quatuor pour la fin du temps), Steve Reich (Proverb)... It's not so much that you can't get through this book without listening to those pieces: Powers' prose imparts infectious enthusiasm, you can't resist hearing those pieces for yourself the way the author hears them, which brings something new to compositions you might have listened to casually or perhaps even been obsessed with at some point, yet without possessing the perfect pitch or a musician's ear (on a personal note, this was the case for me with Shostakovich's third string quartet which, as a child, made me imagine a whole intricate story that I wrote down as a long poem in imitation of Polish romantics; that story, whether I wanted or not, had become for me indissociable from the piece; and yet, reading Orfeo, I managed to hear the piece anew). The narrative follows an elderly composer, Peter Els, from the moment he dials 911 for his dying dog thus triggering police interest in his amateur genetic lab, which soon turns him into a suspected bio-terrorist and a fugitive. What might have been a fast-paced spy-novel plot, an unrelenting crescendo rising to an explosive end, is slowed down and extended by long remembrances, the old man's retrospective glances at his life. A review of his life is interspersed with the protagonist's thoughts on music: its nature, its ontology, its ubiquity. There is an intricate relationship between music, memory, and time: "Music forecasts the past, recalls the future." We come to understand music as something like another dimension of being. Although Powers never mentions Nietzsche, some of the musings made me think of Nietzsche's concept of the eternal return of the same: as if universe were a vast composition, and our lives a small part, a particle, a note in the musical partition, music is perhaps the key to understanding the larger design. "Peter Els wants only one thing before he dies: to break free of time and hear the future."
    • 3/5
      Not quite my tempo.Aw man, and I'd been so primed to like Richard Powers. But although there were flashes of nice phrasing and interesting ideas playing around here which have left me ready and willing to read more of him, I couldn't shake off the increasing realisation of how little I was actually enjoying this novel. I was often just bored. The fundamental conceit about the commonality between music and biology really interested me, and sometimes it's put very engagingly—To Els, music and molecules were each other's long-lost twins: mixtures and modulations, spectral harmonies and harmonic spectroscopy. The structures of long polymers reminded him of intricate Western variations. The outlandish probability fields of atomic orbitals—barbells, donuts, spheres—felt like the units of an avant-garde notation. The formulas of physical chemistry struck him as intricate and divine compositions.—but in the end this is not really explored in any meaningful way, it's just kind of there as a prop for a wildly implausible plot. More importantly, though, all of it is presented in such a vague and directionless way – one of those old-man-looks-back-on-his-life things where fuzzy plot and meandering prose is taken to be acceptable because of how it might approximate the fallibility of memory or something. Adding irritation to disappointment, the text is given a patina of literary affectations, such as cutting out chapter breaks, putting direct speech in italics, and interspersing the story with tweets that look nothing like tweets – all of which to me just felt like an attempt to disguise structurelessness as a literary tactic.There were bits I really admired, don't get me wrong. The story of Messiaen's Quatuor pour la fin du temps is really well done, and I liked the evocation of the musical happenings and avant-garde explorations of John Cage and his disciples. But these sections seemed to be floating in narrative limbo, and there were other points where I found myself thinking, very unfairly, this is everything I hate about contemporary American literature. Something about this novel really made me look back nostalgically on the literary experimenters of the 1960s, 70s and 80s – I'm thinking Burgess, John Gardner, John Fowles, Pynchon, Gaddis, Guy Davenport maybe – I don't know what it is exactly, but I recognise something in Powers's approach that brings that period to mind, except that here something for me is missing.I think it is to do with the prose style. There were some sentences in here I liked, but a lot more that I was on the fence about – e.g., ‘Of love's Pangaea, no more than a few scattered islands remained above water’ – this is the sort of thing I will go with enthusiastically from a writer I trust because it's kind of ostentatious but has possibilities, but from someone I haven't relaxed into yet, it's not the kind of phrase that entirely stands on its own merits. There were others that didn't click – ‘Richard pointed at him, his thumb a gun site’ – is that just a misspelling, does he mean a gun sight?When you're writing from the point of view of a musical composer, this gives you loads of scope for how you choose your metaphors and your vocabulary in general. And Powers does this in a way that works okay – he talks about a house that is ‘as clean as a C major scale’ and, returning to a place from his past, he says he has come back ‘da capo, after so long a time away’ – you know, often it's a little crowbarred-in there but sometimes it works well. During his first time in bed with a girlfriend at university:She lowered herself with a strange, sharp cry of elated betrayal that he'd try to re-create in various combinations of instruments for the next forty years.…which I really like, it's one of the few scenes where the book's dramatic irony and musical sensibility come together really well. But on the whole this is nothing very exciting or expressive. I mean look – Guy Davenport wrote a book about music where he assigned one literary register to the strings, another to percussion, and so on, giving him a sort of orchestral effect by mixing different writing styles – nothing explained or signalled in the book, just a tactic for an author trying to make the form bounce productively off the content. What for? So that he enjoys himself. When I read Powers I do not feel that he was enjoying himself. And in fact now I sit down and think about it, it occurs to me that Anthony Burgess wrote a novel about a musician looking back on their life as well, it's called The Pianoplayers – it's a minor work and I remember thinking that it wasn't a very good book, but if it came to a choice between re-reading that or Orfeo I would leap upon the Burgess like a starving man spotting a stray Jaffa cake. When Burgess does this stuff it is done with joy and exuberance; doesn't it have a scene where someone brings a woman to climax by rubbing ‘in slick, circular rallentando’? Or have I made that up? I might have made it up, it must be fifteen years since I read that book. The point is not that I want the musical stuff integrated more unseriously, still less that I am calling for more sex scenes; the point is that I miss the fun here. I revel in Burgess's sentences even when I don't care about his stories; Orfeo, from its title to its layout, takes itself altogether too seriously for me to generate the enjoyment I want from a novel.I realise I am overanalysing here. This is in no way a bad book, and the fact that I feel the need to compare it with all these writers I love is a sign that there is something here that really appeals to me in principle. I just wanted to work out what made it unsuccessful. The funny thing is that Els's conclusions in the novel are actually really encouraging and seem to offer a possible mission statement for the whole:Trust in whatever sounds twist your viscera. Write in the cadences of first love, of second chances, of air raids, of outrage, of the hideous and the hilarious, of headlong acceptance or curt refusal. […] Whatever lengthens the day, whatever gets you through the night. Make the music that you need, for need will be over, soon enough.Hear, hear – just a shame the novel doesn't seem to want to follow its own advice.
    • 5/5
      A truly extraordinary novel set in the world of modern classical/serious music. Powers clearly knows and loves much of the music of the twentieth century, and much of this story is an exploration of that culture and how its evolution reached a dead end in which a few radical composers wrote ever more complex music for a dwindling audience. The book addresses deeper questions of the place of music and art in society and the paranoid security culture of modern America.
    • 4/5
      If I didn't have a degree in musicology, I think I would have found this book very tedious. Since I do have a degree in musicology, I really enjoyed the tour through Twentieth Century music history, the music theory metaphors, and the drawn-out descriptions of musical pieces. Oh, and there was also a story... I found the story to be somewhat plodding. The flashbacks to the past are very long, and it takes until almost the very end of the book to see how the flashbacks relate to the current events. This makes the whole book somewhat top-heavy... mostly it feels like Powers came up with a good short story, and then added enough musical rambling to stretch it out into a novel. I listened to the audiobook, which meant I couldn't skim the tedious parts. The narrator was pretty good.
    • 3/5
      I wanted to love this book. The Time of Our Singing is possibly the most wonderful book I've ever read (and I've read a LOT of books). So I was probably expecting too much when I cracked this one open.Don't get me wrong. It's a good story. I just couldn't make any sort of emotional connection with the protagonist, and apparently, that's more important to me than I realized.It's beautifully written, clever, and full of big ideas. I just couldn't connect the way I wanted to. I am still going to try the rest of Powers' books though. I just won't go into them expecting to think they're the best book I've ever read. (Though they may very well be.)
    • 4/5
      Six-word review: Musician-chemist becomes fugitive from authorities.Extended review:Orfeo. How do I review this book? I have a notion that Powers has in mind an ideal reader, his peer, one who is qualified to follow his musical line wherever it leads, missing none of the subtleties or allusions or nuances, and decode all the secondary themes, mark the motifs, detect the elusive harmonics; and that I am not that reader. I should perhaps humbly beg his pardon for presuming to read his book.Or is this nothing but a defensive reaction on my part, exposing a chip on my shoulder, because I lack the degree of musical knowledge that it would take to recognize and comprehend the extent to which this novel wants to be played on an instrument--or indeed performed by an ensemble?Let's talk about the story. The story is that of Peter Els, a one-time chemistry student who fell in love and switched to music. He's a composer. A distracted call to 911 when his dog dies brings the police to his home, and they spot his do-it-yourself chem hobbyist's home laboratory, where he has been experimenting with DNA. Primed for suspicion, the cops tag him as a possible bioterrorist. He isn't, but he decides to go on the run. His flight takes him back into his personal history, causing him to reconnect with several people who have been important in his life and also recapitulating his musical biography.This book didn't impress me in quite the same way that The Gold Bug Variations did, or maybe I just missed more of it; but what stands out to me especially is its texture, the way so much of it is rendered like a musical tapestry, a weaving together of sensory dimensions. I wish I knew enough to call it a fugue, but I don't, except in the literal sense of running away or fleeing.The title is, I presume, a reference to Orpheus, the hero of ancient Greek mythology whose musical gifts gave him special powers.Unfortunately, only ten days after finishing the book, I've forgotten how it ends. However compellingly written it seemed to be at the time, I'd say that that is not a good sign on the memorability scale.
    • 4/5
      Unique book. The idea of combining biology and music is there and there is a fantastic portrait of an avant garde composer through his development in the 60s and the sacrifices of his family. Very moving at the end.
    • 4/5
      Not a bad read. The chief character, Peter Els, is a modern composer who runs into problems with the national security state. The descriptions of music and its processes are excellent, especially the writing of the Quartet for the End of Time in a POW camp in 1941. But the plot and the writing otherwise are mediocre.
    • 5/5
      A wonderful book. Articulate, erudite, sublime and affecting. The best novel I've read this year by a considerable margin, and far superior to anything on the Booker shortlist - which I mention because it bewilders me how this didn't make it to that shortlist ahead of some of the barely literate doggerel that did. Anyway...The opening of the book is unpromising. A retired music professor is burying his dog. When not listening to music, he dabbles in home genetics. Oh dear, thinks the reader, this is going to be a slog. But patience and commitment is rewarded - and you do have to commit time and brain space to Orfeo to get anything out of it. Like the main character, Peter Els, you have to listenA misunderstanding with Homeland Security officials sets him on the run. And as he drives through middle America, his life, his music, its position in contemporary culture, his relationships and a life that many would think wasted, but he does not, is reprised. And by the time you reach the final crisis you find tears welling. Powers writes beautifully about many things, but particularly about music, especially 20th century music and how the avant garde composers of the 60s and 70s, like Els, eventually lost the battle to the conformity of popular music. Do you have to know anything about music to enjoy it? Probably it helps if you know a little, or at least have an interest; one of the most moving sections of the book describes Olivier Messaien composing and performing the Quatour De La Fin Des Temps in prisoner of war camp in 1941. I immediately went online to find a performance of it - it really is quite remarkable - but I suppose you don't need to. But I think it helps your understanding if you do. The same with Steve Reich's Proverb which is also discussed in detail (although I find it hard to imagine it playing in a Starbucks in a small college town!)But Powers also writes beautifully about relationships and for Els, the most important has been with his first girlfriend Clara, his wife Maddy, his collaborator Bonner and most importantly, his daughter Sara. His relationship with Sara and how music provides and inseperable bond between them - at least for Els - his the most moving, and I think the crux of the bookHe sets Els development in the context of political and cultural movements and events with an accuracy that most novelists don't manage. And able to place the present in its historical context as he does by juxtaposing The Waco Siege and the Munster RebellionAs I say , a wonderful book. I shall now see out other works by Mr Powers
    • 2/5
      I really didn't like this book! I think that the basic storyline was rather clever, but I found the author's style of writing very off-putting.Peter Els, a retired music professor, is working on a series of microbiological experiments when his beloved pet dog dies. In the depths of his upset he accidentally places a call to emergency services which leads to a routine follow-up visit by the local police. In the post-9/11 culture of suspicion his experiments arouse the curiosity of the police, and Els, still distracted by the loss of his faithful pet, is unable to offer a coherent explanation of why he has been undertaking his experiments. The police in turn pass on their concerns and Els is visited by offers from the Department of Homeland Security.The lead story is well developed and gripping, but it is continually obscured by flashbacks through Els's life which served only to detract from, rather than enhance, the impact of the novel, and I found them immensely irritating.
    • 4/5
      Given that he’s been nominated for the Pulizer Prize you’d have thought I’d have read more Powers’ books then I have , but my only previous experience of his work came with ‘Gain’, which whilst I found beautifully written in places, a bit of a chore to read. If I’m honest there were times reading Orfeo where some of that feeling was coming back to me, but in the end it was a book I enjoyed. On the face of it the story is loosely about a College music professor who ends up on the run when the government decides he’s become a biotech terrorist. What is actually about is the choices we make in life about our ‘calling’ and centrally about music , and classical music in particular. For a long time he refuses to see any merit in any other. And Power writes exquisitely about music. He write about the notes, the tones the rise and falls and of course the sounds. I could pick hundreds of examples from the book but, he also just write generally about it: – “Music, he’ll tell anyone who asks over the next fifty years, doesn’t mean things. It is things.” “Music wasn’t about learning how to love. It was about learning what to disown and when to disown it. Even the most magnificent piece would end up as collateral damage in the endless war over taste.” “The way he’d remembered it, everything happened in that shared glance. On that downbeat, he left a wife who’d given him a decade of unearned patience, abandoned a daughter who wanted only to make things with him, and stepped out into free fall. For nothing, for music, for a chance to make a little noise in this world. A noise that no one needed to hear.” “Music and viruses both trick their hosts into copying them.” “All my life I thought I knew what music was. But I was like a kid who confuses his grandfather with God.” Here is a central character – Richard Els – who believes music should be difficult and hard and that obvious melody are a failure. Or at least he does through passages of his life. He devotes his life to finding the perfect sounds that will change the world, but not in popularist way. He is a man with few loves and even fewer friends. He reminded me of a less likable Anne Tyler central character. And indeed it is these few other characters, Maddy, Clara, Sarah, Bonner who help to flesh out this man whose life’s priorities cause his undoing. It is an engaging book, but one that I may have abandoned had it not been for my own love of music and my own fascination with the links between music and science and the regular quotable lines relating to music of all kinds: “At his click, the room filled with a vivacious, pitchcorrected, and jaw-droppingly sunny little song. On Els’s screen, a thirteen-year-old singer woke up, went to the bus stop, joined her friends in a convertible, and visited a suburban house where an upper-middle-class teen party was in full swing” Or “Air raid announcing the end of the world. A driving motor rhythm in the drums propelled virtuosic parallel passages in the guitars and bass. The song came on like a felon released from multiple life sentences. The melodic machete went straight through Els’s skin. The song was one long, joyous jackhammer assertion of tonic. Surprise was not its goal, and the pattern laid down in the first four measures drove the tune on in a storm surge. But after two minutes, it sprouted a hallucination in the relative minor floating above the thrash, and for several notes Els thought the band, in a fit of real anarchy, had thrown Chopin’s E Minor Prelude—the “Vision”—into the cement mixer …” describing an Anthrax song. I ended this book marveling at some of the writing but ultimately not loving Els or the book.
    • 3/5
      Loosely based on the myth of Orpheus, whose musical ability saved the Argonauts and almost allowed him to rescue his lover from Hades, Orfeo tells the story of Peter Els, a talented but obscure composer who has taken up amateur genetic manipulation in retirement. Things go terribly wrong when someone spots the home lab and a government agency arrives to confiscate his equipment and question him. This portion of the story is very much just a background to the larger story of Els' life. He's talented, but not able to take responsibility or make decisions for himself. His life path is determined by a girlfriend, his divorce by his inability to forge his own path or to take his life seriously. I was frustrated by the character, who came across as less of a valiant hero and more as a guy who just goes wherever the wind takes him. Had he been younger, he would have been the classic slacker dude, just wanting to make his music and letting a series of disillusioned girlfriends make the big decisions. Els has one good friend in his life, although at the time the book opens they have not spoken for eighteen years, a hot-headed choreographer who pushes Els to greater accomplishments, even as his blowhard style causes them to constantly fall out. There is a great deal of music described in this book. Music, like visual art, is difficult, if not impossible, to describe with words if the reader hasn't experienced those works for themselves. I wish there had been a way for Richard Powers to communicate the deep love and understanding Els has for music without the detailed descriptions, which made up a large portion of the book. Maybe he should have gone further and incorporated the music into the text somehow (shouldn't this be possible with an ebook or an audiobook?). There was a theme of our shrinking attention spans, which is echoes in Powers' use of brief snippets of Els' thoughts to break up the book into segments instead of chapter breaks. I can see why Richard Powers has the reputation he does and why the Booker Prize committee has put Orfeo on their long list. But my appreciation of his skill remains more theoretical than actual. I'm glad I've read something by this author, but I don't have any plans to renew the acquaintanceship.
    • 5/5
      Magnificent. Taut and lithe storytelling that, even in the few instances when it verges on the overwrought, held my attention and demanded my respect. Powers writes about what it's like to experience music as though from within; his passages of this kind are among the best music writing I know. Can't wait to grow up--change--enough to be ready to reread Orfeo.
    • 4/5
      In Richard Powers' latest book we are introduced to Peter Els, a 70 year-old "DIY genetic engineer," working out of a makeshift lab at the back of his house, experimenting with biochemistry to create a bacteria based musical composition. When the police arrive in in response to a 911 call from Peter about his dog Fidelio, who has suffered a stroke, they happen upon his strange set-up and Peter becomes the target of a terrorist investigation. So Peter takes off on a journey to outrun investigators and revisit lost family members. Along the way, Powers intersperses Els' history, his musical education, his first love, and the pacing slows down, but we are treated to beautifully intense descriptions of classical and avant-garde music. The finale is heartbreaking, but satisfying. Fans of Powers' previous book, the Echo Maker, will find this book slightly more accessible, though no less intriguing. The title of the book is an allusion to the myth of Orpheus, a passionate musician who must travel through the underworld to reclaim his lost love.
    • 4/5
      the main character is retired composer, 70 years old, and is hobby is science, biology. Power's novels are about idea, science, music, and relationships. we get all ot thai in this novel. through a strange twist of fate Peter comes to the notice of homeland security, he runs to espace them, I think what he is really doing is contacting with his past and himself. he meets his ex wife and daughter. He left them so he could create music, his wife said you have a family art great but we need to eat. He wants to make peace with them and more with himself. he meets his best friend a relationship that ended in anger years ago. lots of stuff in this novel I highly recommend it
    • 4/5
      I love Richard Powers. I don’t know a thing about music or genetics or anything else Richard Powers often writes about. It doesn’t matter. I love his writing anyway. Even though I don’t know what he is talking about. His writing is beautiful whether you understand music or not. His writing is beautiful whether you understand genetics or not. I love Richard Powers.
    • 3/5
      Lovely Indiespensable copy. The usual genius at work, I am afraid most of the music is lost on me as I've never had an ear for it. The plot borders on silly, which doesn't leave much for me to enjoy.
    • 4/5
      Not unlike Orpheus, the mythical musician who travels to the underworld to retrieve his wife, Eurydice, Powers' protagonist Els descends into his own hell when he panics and flees after being invesitgated as a potential terrorist. The hell that Powers depicts in his novel is government’s obsession with terror and the effectiveness of modern technology at surveillance, “Panic like any art can never be unmade.” During his flight Els remembers his life and career in music while seeking his own Eurydice(s): four people who greatly impacted his life—first love, Clara; ex-wife, Maddy, colleague Bonner and daughter, Sara. Els also remembers his struggle to express himself through music, receiving little reward or recognition. “We are made for art, we are made for memory, we are made for poetry, or perhaps we are made for oblivion.” He comes to realize that music is everywhere and only needs to be heard to be appreciated.Like Powers’ other novels, Orfeo is a highly intellectual exploration of the junction between science and art—in this case music and biology. The prose is often elevating and the reader usually acquires new knowledge and insights. However, Powers’ novels can be difficult for those with little knowledge in the fields. Powers relates the stories behind several musical works in Orfeo although the ubiquitous musical references and terminology can be challenging for the non-musician reader.
    • 5/5
      This is an engrossing novel of one man’s lifetime as a musician/composer and what he experience in his pursuit of creativity. Into this piece of literary fiction, Powers incorporates a little DIY genetic engineering, along with the contemporary evolution of music. This would be of special interest to those who have some background in music theory.
    • 4/5
      Peter Els, a 70-something avant-garde composer whose music has been written for few and heard by even fewer, still strives to produce the transcendent music he is sure is out there if he can only listen hard enough: music that will last forever, even if no one can hear it. An aspiring chemist in college, he has bought lab equipment and a designer strand of DNA, coded to a composition he's written, and has been attempting to splice it into a harmless bacteria purchased online. Enter Homeland Security, who confiscates all his work but just misses arresting him. He flees cross-country, reminiscing about his life and loves, his music, and the composers and compositions which have guided and moved him. A great deal of the book consists of back stories and analysis of mid-20th century music. Particularly intriguing are the history of Messiaen's "Quartet for the End of Time", written in a German concentration camp (1941); John Cage's"Musicircus" (1967), and Shostakovich's Symphony #5 (1937). There is also analysis of Els's own (fictitious) work. For the reader with no knowledge of music theory and history, this book might be of little interest and, quite possibly, incomprehensible. Some reviewers have reported finding it rewarding to listen to the works mentioned while reading the book, but I prefer to concentrate on one entertainment at a time. Also, I admit to disliking much modern classical music (although the Shostakovitch is a favorite), and perhaps because of that I found little sympathy for the difficulties Els has throughout his life because of the choices he makes for his music, which brings him little in the way of income, renown, or contentment. But the book is an interesting look into how someone might get caught up in the avant-garde philosophy, although Powers's view of what such a life might look like has a distanced and uncomfortable feel to it, as though it were a composition in Els's own style.
    • 3/5
      I thoroughly enjoyed an Indiespensable Books interview with author Richard Powers beforehand and turned down several pages for reference. One quote in particular stands out after reading the book: "There are moments when Els is reflecting on the real crisis in music right now, which is that it's superabundant. When all of us can listen to every piece of music that was ever written, at any time, from anywhere that we want, how can we hear anything? What happens is we cease becoming adventurers and we cease becoming participants and subjects in this grand experiment of art,and we simply become consumers and really good commodity experts. When we have the entire gamut for our consumption, we just go to those things that we like the easiest. And that's the problem. It's hard to listen all the way through a three-minute song when we know that with the flick if a finger, we can pull up something that might be slightly better for our current mood." I think the same applies to books -- I have, after all, used the Pearl rule more than once. In my defense, I did finish Orfeo, but the fault may still lie with me: I wasn't in the mood. Richard Power's Orfeo was clearly not for me, or at least not for me when I read it. It has an interesting, difficult premise, describing music in words, and I think Powers did a masterful job of it, but it still didn't work. I couldn't hear it. And the ENTIRE book revolves around music. I tried to read it slowly, looking for richness in the words, and I tried to skim it, listening for the overarching melody, but neither method worked for me. The main character is a musician, who has failed in his 70 years to write something new, something earth-shattering. In his retirement he turns to science, his other passion, and begins to tinker with DNA in his home lab. Homeland Security finds out about it and Els is forced into hiding. During his flight, he revisits the past, pivotal moments of his life. I feel there is genius here, but somehow I missed it. Other readers may be more successful.