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Orpheus Lost

3.62 of 5 stars 3.62 · rating details · 302 ratings · 60 reviews

Leela is a mathematician who has escaped her Southern hometown to study in Boston. She meets an Australian musician, Mishka, and from the moment she first hears him play his music grips her; they quickly become lovers. Then one day Leela is picked up off the street and taken to an interrogation center somewhere outside the city. There has been an explosion in the subway; t...more

Hardcover, 368 pages

Published October 17th 2007 by W. W. Norton & Company (first published 2007)

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Dec 19, 2012 Sherri rated it 3 of 5 stars

Leela is a mathematician writing her thesis on math and music. She is living with Mishka who plays the violin and the Oud - a Persian instrument. Their life is fairly normal, except that Mishka disappears for periods of time that he won't explain to Leela.

At the same time there are various terrorist subway and train bombings in the area. One evening Leela is instructed to get into a car and is taken to an interrogation room where she is shown pictures of Mishka talking with the person who they b...more

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Jun 17, 2012 Alyssa Cooper rated it 5 of 5 stars

Someone told me once (and I'm sure he was paraphrasing from someone much more qualified) the most interesting stories are entered late, and left early. Orpheus Lost makes great use of this technique, leaving me desperate for origins in the beginning and eager for more at the end.
This novel combines real, gritty characters - all with their own individual personalities and flaws that make them, undeniably, into real people - a compelling story line, and a glimpse into some of the darkest and stran...more

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Dec 10, 2010 Shane rated it 3 of 5 stars

An inversion of the Orpheus myth where our hero gets trapped in the Underworld and his lover Eurydice orchestrates his release.

Mishka, a half Jewish, half Lebanese Australian studying music in Boston, is our Orpheus while his lover Leela, a transplant from the Bible-belt south (from a town appropriately called Promised Land), studying the mathematics of music, is his Eurydice. In his quest to find his missing Lebanese father, Mishka gets involved with a bunch of suicide-bomber terrorists and fli...more An inversion of the Orpheus myth where our hero gets trapped in the Underworld and his lover Eurydice orchestrates his release.

Mishka, a half Jewish, half Lebanese Australian studying music in Boston, is our Orpheus while his lover Leela, a transplant from the Bible-belt south (from a town appropriately called Promised Land), studying the mathematics of music, is his Eurydice. In his quest to find his missing Lebanese father, Mishka gets involved with a bunch of suicide-bomber terrorists and flies out to Lebanon where he disappears. On his tail, and on Leela’s, is the twisted and tortured Cobb, also formerly from Promised Land, a veteran of the Iraq war, now a contract security consultant; Cobb has secretly admired, pursued, and been scorned by Leela while they were growing up in Promised Land. Now it’s payback time for Cobb as he holds the power to bring Mishka back alive, or not.

The story flips back and forth between Boston, Promised Land, the Daintree rainforest in north-eastern Australia, and the Middle East. While the American and Australian scenes are well developed (probably due to the writer’s first-hand experience of having lived in these countries), I found the Middle Eastern ones sparse, suggesting that Turner Hospital had no real experience of the locale and was writing from sketchy research material. That said, there are great contrasting scenes painted in the US and Australia: the dreamlike sequences when Leela and Miskha first meet and later when they realize that they are implicated in terrorism after a subway bombing in Boston; when Mishka recalls growing up at Chateau Daintree deep in the rainforest, the only child in a quirky multi-generational family of transplanted music –loving Hungarian Jews released from the Holocaust, as unique to the area as the quandong trees that grow only in the Daintree; and when we are taken back to Promised Land to visit Leela’s and Cobb’s respective cantankerous fathers, both dying of cancer and waiting out the other guy.

Strangely enough, I was enjoying the literary nature of the book until the pace quickened after Mishka was kidnapped and the novel veered off into the thriller genre, and, in my opinion, failed at that point. Because what happens in the Middle East is so fragmentary and all the action happens off-stage, I found this section more like a data dump where all the loose ends were tied up in a perfunctory way, as if the book was being suddenly rushed to market. It’s a pity, because the build up to that point was superb.

Shortcomings apart, this book is a good reminder of how terrorism has penetrated the fabric of life and literature in the developed west, be it in the US or Australia, and how it has conditioned our behaviour and expectations. And it also says to me that the literary-thriller genre is still an open field, and that it’s tough to integrate two different genres without readers on both sides of the scale left wanting “a little bit more.”
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Mar 21, 2009 Sandra rated it 4 of 5 stars

Well, it is a good thing that I saw Metamorphosis at the Pgh Public, because it helped me understand this book. I believe I have admitted publicly that I made it through 4 yrs of HS and 4 yrs of college without reading any classics/mythology/etc. My aunt, a former hs AP English teacher would be aghast to know this. But somehow, I muddle through life ignorant.
Anyway, this was a pretty good book. Leela picks up and falls in love with a street musician Mishka. Her childhood friend/rival Cobb is a "...more

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Feb 12, 2013 Lyn Elliott rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Recommended to Lyn by: Book club Feb 2012

Shelves: fiction

Hospital writes wonderfully, the flow and tone of her prose changing subtly with the flow and tone of the interwoven stories that make up Orpheus Lost. The overall feel of the book for me is one of images moving forward and then back, perhaps in the ways that memories appear vividly and then resolve again. Sometimes the light is bright, as In the scenes in Mishka's childhood home in North Queensland, sometimes muted and, in the underground 'interrogation' centre , very dark indeed. Somehow, even...more Hospital writes wonderfully, the flow and tone of her prose changing subtly with the flow and tone of the interwoven stories that make up Orpheus Lost. The overall feel of the book for me is one of images moving forward and then back, perhaps in the ways that memories appear vividly and then resolve again. Sometimes the light is bright, as In the scenes in Mishka's childhood home in North Queensland, sometimes muted and, in the underground 'interrogation' centre , very dark indeed. Somehow, even in the worst places, Hospital maintains a delicate touch.
We are shown glimpses of the tortured and the cells in which they are confined; the awfulness of the Australian desert detention centre (probably based on Woomera); the effects of war and terrorist activity, all of which form part of the world Hospital wants us to see as part of the background, the atmosphere, the environment in which her characters live, love, find, lose and find each other.
Accompanying the obvious theme of search for the lost love implied by the title, a secondary strand flickers constantly - nothing is what it first seems; actions taken cannot be undone and change lives for ever.
Music is ever present in the first parts of the book, swirling around Mishka, as Orpheus, and his family. Once Mishka disappears and his primary place in the story is taken over by others (Cobb, Leela) the music disappears too, as in the Orpheus myth his music ceases when he loses Eurydice.
I grew up on myth and legend, and I keep wanting to match characters in the book to figures in the Orpheus myth, but they don't fit, not even in an inverted version where Eurydice searches for her lost Orpheus, rather than the other way round.
Many of the strands in this book are left as floating wisps, which suits the shadowy world Hospital would have us aware of. It's enough to know the outlines, not the details of Uncle Otto, Dr Siddiqui and Mishka's father.
I've given this 4 rather than 5 because, I think, of my mild irritation that it doesn't follow the myth closely enough. An odd reason but there it is. Not that I would wish the ultimate fate of Orpheus on any of the characters - to be torn apart by enraged women!(less)

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Nov 26, 2008 Celia Powell rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: general-fiction

I love Hospital's writing, and I think even if you didn't enjoy Orpheus Lost, you can't deny the skill of Hospital as an author.

Orpheus Lost is a re-working of the myth of Orpheus - although any subtleties would have been lost on me, given that my knowledge of the myth is Orpheus seeks to retrieve Eurydice from the dead, and looks back at the last minute only to lose her forever. Our Orpheus in Orpheus Lost is Mishka, whom Leela discovers playing his violin in the subway. They become lovers, and...more

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Feb 13, 2011 Elyse Rudin rated it 4 of 5 stars

A young woman mathematician specializing in math's relationship to music, something I've always been interested in (not), meets a young man playing his violin in the Boston subway. They fall in love and live together. Suicide bombings in the Boston area puts people on high alert and one of the bombers had been seen with the young man whose background is a bit of a mystery. The man questioning the girlfriend was a boy she grew up with from her small town and they have always had feelings for each...more

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Nov 22, 2011 Celeste Rousselot rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: favorites, my-written-reviews

This is another of Turner-Hospital's books I just couldn't stop reading. A love story of strange proportions, Orpheus Lost entered my psyche like no other. These are not your ordinary lovers, a student and potential terrorist. As darkness and the underground environment surrounded me, I felt as though I could never hide, let alone escape, from the ever-enclosing underworld. Turner-Hospital, an Australian, now professor at the University of South Carolina, who also wrote Oyster, another fantastic...more

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May 31, 2012 Rhiain rated it 5 of 5 stars

Beautifully written and enthralling from beginning to end. Through this novel we are taken into the heartache of young love, family estrangement, and the horrors of modern day terrorism. This is a very unique story as it is told to us from multiple perspectives, jumping from memory to present day. And don't worry, you don't need to know the tale of Orpheus to get this story, but it certainly deepened my understanding and appreciation of the plot and character development. Genius!

Characters are j...more

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Sep 09, 2009 Melody rated it 2 of 5 stars

Shelves: novels

This is the story of a genius female mathematician who falls for a brilliant musician with a sorrowful soul, then watches in horror as one of her childhood friends--now the head of a private security force in post-9/11 Iraq accuses her lover of conspiring with terrorists.

It's an interesting approach to the underworld, to the story of Orpheus and Eurydice, and at times, it works beautifully. But I hated the first 150 pages of this book, which struck me as unoriginal, overly sexualized, and unawar...more

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May 09, 2011 Ruth Seeley rated it 4 of 5 stars

Strange to have read this immediately before Anne Michaels' The Winter Vault, but I find my reading often provides this kind of inadvertent synchronicity, as if I were attempting to write undergraduate papers on novels with similar themes. Loss, the devastating effects of war-induced diaspora, and love as redemption are this novel's themes too, but Turner Hospital manages to create characters about whom one gives a damn. I often wonder why she isn't better known and/or taken more seriously as a...more

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Jun 27, 2012 Emma Willis rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shifting between unlikely perspectives of a mathematician, an Army/ Security guard and a fragile, emotionally wounded and gifted musician, explores the terrain of falling into the metaphorical underworld of Hades. These characters make a fatal mistake and 'Orpeus', the double identity accidently becomes associated with a terrorist organisation. This novel is about the guilt, revenge and justice. It is also about the ramifications of uncovering terrain that is best forgotten. Like her earlier nov...more

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Jul 22, 2011 Siggy rated it 5 of 5 stars

"There's a gene for melancholy and I have passed it on". Devorah Bartok, one of the main characters of Janette Turner Hospital's new book "Orpheus Lost" hypothesizes at one particularly hopeless moment in the narrative and, indeed, for those of us with this tendency to melancholy, recent events of world history have been a little difficult to bear. From the hastily constructed, clumsy rhetoric of the War on Terror to the seemingly inevitable exposure of the leaked photographs of abuse at Abu Ghr...more
"There's a gene for melancholy and I have passed it on". Devorah Bartok, one of the main characters of Janette Turner Hospital's new book "Orpheus Lost" hypothesizes at one particularly hopeless moment in the narrative and, indeed, for those of us with this tendency to melancholy, recent events of world history have been a little difficult to bear. From the hastily constructed, clumsy rhetoric of the War on Terror to the seemingly inevitable exposure of the leaked photographs of abuse at Abu Ghraib Prison . Janet Turner Hospital's new novel "Orpheus Lost" takes this melancholy territory as its background and adds a modern rendition of the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice, in which lovers are set an impossible task and fail as a result of being human. The lovers in this case are Leela, a mathematician, and Mishka, a musician, both interestingly dealing in abstract representations of the world.

Turner Hospital's canvas is vast and encompasses both political and artistic sense of diaspora. Mishka's grandparents are holocaust survivors who became outsiders in North Queensland, Mishka travels to the states for his music and to the middle east in search of a his father. Although most obviously about recent events in world history the scars of conflicts in Europe and Vietnam linger for the characters of the novel. Despite the novel's broad scope the characters are profoundly lonely. The more dominant the mechanisms are to control the world the more isolated the people within it.

Despite the weight if it's message "Orpheus Lost" is a highly readable book. Turner Hospital's characterization is such that the reader feels an immense sense of care for all of the novel's characters. Even the sadist mercenary Cobb is presented in a sympathetic light and is provided with the opportunity for redemption.

Music is a central motif in the book. "For loss we have music". The reader finishes the book keen to seek out Gluck's musical retelling of the Orpheus myth and left to imagine Mishka's own composition "Sonatina for Parrots and Quandongs". (less)

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Oct 26, 2008 Anne rated it 3 of 5 stars

Orpheus Lost begins its focus on Southern-girl turned MIT mathematician, Leela. She finds herself in the bowels of the subway drawn in by the haunting sounds of musician Mishka Bartok's violin. Shortly after, the two begin to date and eventually move in together. The novel is thick with references to Orpheus and Eurydice, playing off the myth on various levels. After a suicide bombing, Leela is interrogated by her ex-boyfriend and ex-best friend Cobb, who has become a mercenary and has a persona...more

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Dec 07, 2010 BeHappy rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: fiction

I really did not think that I would enjoy this novel - a book that touched on themes of terrorism, child abuse, torture Middle East politics and lost love but I did. Janetter Turner Hospital is an excellent writer who reveals backstory after backstory about three conflicted characters - Leela, a MIT graduate student; Mishka, a gifted musician and Cobb a former Special Forces op. The lives of these characters come together in an intense drama of personal and political conflict.

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Feb 13, 2009 Ann rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

I wouldn't have known about this book except for its being this month's selection for the Stanford Book Salon. This modern reworking of the Orpheus and Eurydice legend is satisfying on many levels: a page turner, beautifully written with rich language, timely in this post 9/11 world. The author, who is Australian, currently teaches at the University of South Carolina. (Both Australia and South Carolina--along with Cambridge,MA--figure prominently in this novel.)

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Jun 18, 2011 Kristin rated it 4 of 5 stars

Loved this novel. It is beautifully written - I will definitely put more of Turner Hospital's novels on my "to read" list. I liked the way the author changed narrators throughout the novel; this meant that the characters were well portrayed. I don't know anything about the mythology behind it, but that wasn't a problem at all.

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Feb 02, 2009 Jacqui rated it 4 of 5 stars

I enjoyed this book and the rdevelopment of the elationship between the two central characters. It was interesting and you had to read into the sub-text.
I like her writing and found it an easy read.

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Jun 22, 2011 Haley rated it 3 of 5 stars

Not a bad read, I wish I would have been more familiar with the original Orpheus story since this is a different spin on it. It kept my attention but it wasn't anything outstanding in my opinion.

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Jan 31, 2012 Atl Goddess rated it 5 of 5 stars

This is one of my favorite books. It is a real page turner with good character development. It spans the globe spinning a great tale that is as evocative of Australia as South Carolina.

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Jul 31, 2011 Kari rated it 5 of 5 stars

loved this book, and wish I hadn't given away my copy. She always does such a great job of capturing atmosphere in her stories, and this one captures the timbre of today's world so well.

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Mar 15, 2009 Heather rated it 1 of 5 stars

This was really a terrible read. Badly written, badly conceived story with characters that didn't work and were unbelievable and inconsistent.

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Apr 02, 2008 Andrea Karotkin rated it 5 of 5 stars

The descriptions in this book are fluid, graceful, inspiring...the words just pull me along like a river. Sometimes a paragraph is so vibrant that I want to dive into it and swim in the words. I even touch some of the sentences to see if they are real.

"And he would see, in the fluted wall of water beyond the veranda eaves, the shredded rainbows of moonlight and the ribbons of candle-glow that were tossed and tangled about."

If I owned a copy of this book, at least one third of it would be highl...more

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Jan 25, 2009 Fredsky rated it 1 of 5 stars

I did not like this book, and gave up on it after I started peeking at the last pages for a conclusion. I found it soupy and contrived.

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Mar 12, 2011 Claire Haeg rated it 4 of 5 stars

An odd and very dark novel. It's set in post-9/11 Boston and in the Daintree. Quite a strange premise but I do like her writing.
CH

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Jul 23, 2011 Jen rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: australian, thriller

Listened to this as a hear a book version and disliked the narrator's American voice, which has probably coloured my view of the novel. A timely story about an innocent Australian musician who is imprisoned on terrorist charges and tortured.

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Jan 14, 2009 Rob & Liz rated it 4 of 5 stars

Orpheus Lost is a book that deals with terrorism and all of its tentacles in a very sensitive manner.

Liz

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Jan 18, 2013 Liz rated it 3 of 5 stars

The descriptions about life in FNQ where the highlight for me. I thought the plot got a bit lost towards the end. Like it was a rush job to pull it all together and finish the book. I enjoyed the first 3/4 of the book more than the last 1/4.

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Feb 21, 2010 Moira Burke rated it 1 of 5 stars

"Eh. A modern Orpheus tale about a mathematician, a musician, and a bounty hunter. The writing was bland."

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Apr 28, 2012 Jocelyn rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: on-my-e-reader

This was excellent. I had a lovely time reading it. It's politics are a little darker than I think reality is, but close enough to be acceptable/convincing as a fiction. Some of the wrap-up was a bit glib, but still satisfying.

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About Janette Turner Hospital

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

Her first published short story appeared in the Atlantic Monthly (USA) where i...more Born in 1942, Janette Turner Hospital grew up on the steamy sub-tropical coast of Australia in the north-eastern state of Queensland. She began her teaching career in remote Queensland high schools, but since her graduate studies she has taught in universities in Australia, Canada, England, France and the United States.

Her first published short story appeared in the Atlantic Monthly (USA) 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 l977) won Canada's $50,000 Seal Award in l982. She lived for many years in Canada and in 1986 she was listed as by the Toronto Globe & 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 four short story collections and her work has been published in multiple foreign language collections. 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, an anthology of the decade in l995.

The Last Magician, her fifth novel, was listed by Publishers' Weekly as one of the 12 best novels published in 1992 in the USA and was a New York Times 'Notable Book of the Year'. Oyster, her sixth novel, was a finalist for Australia's Miles Franklin Prize Award and for Canada's Trillium Award, and in England it was listed in 'Best Books of the Year' by The Observer, which noted "Oyster is a tour de force… Turner Hospital is one of the best female novelists writing in English." In the USA, Oyster was a New York Times 'Notable Book of the Year'.

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 Christina Stead Award. In 2003, Hospital received the Patrick White Award, as well as a Doctor of Letters honoris causa from the University of Queensland.

Orpheus Lost, her most recent novel, was one of five finalists for the $110,000 Australia-Asia Literary prize in 2008.

Orpheus Lost was also on Booklist's Top 30 novels of the year in 2008, along with novels by Booker Prize winner Anne Enright, National Book Award winner Denis Johnson, Philip Roth, Don DeLillo, Michael Ondaatje, Ian MacEwan, Ha Jin, and Michael Chabon.

The novel also made the list of Best 25 Books of the Year of Library Journal, and Hospital was invited to be a keynote speaker at the annual convention of the American Library Association in Los Angeles in June 2008.

The Italian edition, Orfeo Perduto, has been so well-received in Italy that it will be a featured title at the literary festival on Lake Maggiore in June 2010 where Hospital will be a featured author.

She holds an endowed chair as Carolina Distinguished Professor of English at the University of South Carolina and in 2003 received the Russell Research Award for Humanities and Social Sciences, conferred by the university for the most significant faculty contribution (research, publication, teaching and service) in a given year.
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