Orfeo (Powers)

Orfeo 
Richard Powers, 2014
W.W. Norton
384 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780393240825


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

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). (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—June 18, 1957
• Where—Evanston, Illinois, USA
• Education—M.A., University of Illinois
• Awards—National Book Award-Fiction
• Currently—lives in the Smoky Mountian region of Tennessee


Richard Powers is an American novelist whose works explore the effects of modern science and technology. The Echo Maker, perhaps his best known work, won the 2006 National Book Award for Fiction.

Early years
One of five children, Powers was born in Evanston, Illinois. His family later moved a few miles south to Lincolnwood where his father was a local school principal. When Powers was 11 they moved to Bangkok, Thailand, where his father had accepted a position at International School Bangkok, which Powers attended through his freshman year, ending in 1972.

During that time outside the U.S. he developed skill in vocal music and proficiency in cello, guitar, saxophone, and clarinet. He also became an avid reader, enjoying nonfiction, primarily, and classics such as the Iliad and the Odyssey.

Education
The family returned to the U.S. when Powers was 16. Following graduation in 1975 from DeKalb High School in DeKalb, Illinois, he enrolled at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) with a major in physics, which he switched to English literature during his first semester. There he earned the BA in 1978 and the MA in Literature in 1980.

He decided not to pursue the PhD partly because of his aversion to strict specialization, which had been one reason for his early transfer from physics to English, and partly because he had observed in graduate students and their professors a lack of pleasure in reading and writing (as portrayed in Galatea 2.2).

Career
For some time Powers worked in Boston, as a computer programmer. Viewing the 1914 photograph "Young Farmers" by August Sander, on a visit to the Museum of Fine Arts, he was inspired to quit his job and spend the next two years writing his first book, Three Farmers on Their Way to a Dance, which was published in 1985.

To avoid the publicity and attention generated by that first novel, Powers moved to the Netherlands where he wrote Prisoner's Dilemma, followed up with The Gold Bug Variations. During a year's stay at the University of Cambridge, he wrote most of Operations Wandering Soul; then, in 1992 Powers returned to the U.S. to become writer-in-residence at the University of Illinois.

All told, Powers has published a dozen books, winning him numerous literary awards and other recognitions. These include, among various others, a MacArthur Fellowship; Pushcart Prize, PEN/Faulkner Special Citation, Man Booker long listing; nominations for the Pulitzer and the National Book Critics Circle Award; and the National Book Award itself in 2006.

In 2010 and 2013, Powers was a Stein Visiting Writer at Stanford University, during which time he partly assisted in the lab of biochemist Aaron Straight. In 2013, Stanford named him the Phil and Penny Knight Professor of Creative Writing in the Department of English.

While writing his 2018 novel, The Overstory, Powers left Palo Alto, California, moving to the foothills of the Smoky Mountains in Tennessee. (Adapted from Wikipedia. Retrieved 4/16/2018.)

Book Reviews
Why…was I unable to resist the emotional pull of Orfeo? Why did I pick it up eagerly each day and find myself moist-eyed when I came to its last pages? That, I think, has everything to do with Powers's skill at putting us into the mind of his protagonist. Peter Els is blessed (or cursed) with an almost painfully exquisite musical sensibility. Throughout Orfeo we experience tonal patterns of all kinds—from bird song to the overtone series of a single piano note to the "caldera of noise" at a John Cage happening and the "naked pain" in the Largo of Shostakovich's Fifth Symphony—filtered through Peter's lyrical consciousness.
Jim Holt - New York Times Book Review


Extraordinary…his evocations of music, let alone lost love, simply soar off the page…. Once again, Richard Powers proves himself to be one of our finest novelists.
Newsday


Orfeo… establishes beyond any doubt that the novel is very much alive.
Troy Jollimore - Chicago Tribune


Orfeo is that rare novel truly deserving of the label ‘lyrical'…. Richard Powers offers a profound story whose delights are many and lasting.
Harvey Freedenberg - Minneapolis Star Tribune


Powers deftly dramatizes the obsession that has defined Els’s life: ‘How did music trick the body into thinking it had a soul?'
The New Yorker


Powers proves, once again, that he's a master of the novel with Orfeo, an engrossing and expansive read that is just as much a profile of a creative, obsessive man as it is an escape narrative.
Elizabeth Sile - Esquire


Orfeo reveals how a life, and the narrative of a life, accumulates, impossibly, infinitely, from every direction…. In this retelling of the Orpheus myth Powers also manages enchantment.
Scott Korb - Slate


(Starred review.) When Els’s dog has a heart attack, police respond to his 911 call and stumble into a room converted into an amateur biochemical engineering lab.... Powers’s talent for translating avant-garde music into engrossing vignettes on the page is inexhaustible. Els’s obsession...isolates him from everyone he loves, becomes the very thing that aligns him with the reader.
Publishers Weekly


(Starred review.) Retired composer Peter Els has an unusual hobby, do-it-yourself genetic engineering. Is his work dangerous? We’re not sure.... Powers has a way of rendering the world that makes it seem familiar and alien, friendly and frightening. He is sometimes criticized as too cerebral, but when the story’s strands knit fully together in the final act, the effect is heartbreaking and beautiful. —Keir Graff
Booklist


(Starred review.) The earmarks of the renowned novelist's work are here—the impressive intellect, the patterns connecting music and science and so much else, the classical grounding of the narrative—but rarely have his novels been so tightly focused and emotionally compelling.... [T]his is taut, trim storytelling.
Kirkus Reviews

Discussion Questions
Use our LitLovers Book Club Resources; they can help with discussions for any book:

• How to Discuss a Book (helpful discussion tips)
• Generic Discussion Questions—Fiction and Nonfiction
• Read-Think-Talk (a guided reading chart)

Also, consider using these LitLovers talking points to start a discussion for Orfeo:

1. We're told at the beginning of Orfeo that Americans have shortened their attention spans. “The country’s collective concentration was simply shot,” Powers writes. “People couldn’t hold a thought or pursue a short-term goal for anywhere near as long as they could a few years before.” Do you agree? If so, why...or how?

2. Throughout his life Peter has craved a sense of awe: "surprise...suspense...and a sense of the infinite...beauty"—a nobel goal, perhaps. But in his attempts to attain the sublime, what has he sacrificed?

3. The music that Peter has worked his life to create has as its goal "to change its listeners....to raise everyone he every new from the dead and make them laugh with remembering." Is he overstating his belief in music's capabilities? What is music's effect on the human soul? What is it to you personally?

4. What drives Peter? What is he so desperate to encode melody in the nucleotides of bacteria? What might Richard Powers be suggesting about the place of music in life...or the place of all art?

5. "All I ever wanted was to make one slight noise that might delight you all," Peter says. what does he mean? Is he being disingenuous...or sincere?

6. The book can be seen as a commentary on government's overreaching and the media's gullibility. In fact, Powers draws parallels between viruses and viral media. In light of 9/11, is the nation overly tramatized? Or do think our fearfulness is justified?

7. If you're not already familiar with the ancient Greek myth of Orpheus, do some research. Why has the author chosen this to name his book after Orpheus (more precisely, the the opera by Monteverdi)? Is the title symbolic? Is it ironic?

8. On the lam from government agents, Peter revisits his past. To which character are are you most sympathetic? His exwife, perhaps, or his daughter? How did Richard's pursuit of transcendence and music interfer, even damage, his relaitonships with those closest to him?

9. Talk about the book's other powerful stories of fraught connections between music and politics—Messiaen's "Quartet for the End of Time," written in a Nazi  death camp, and Shostakovich's relationship with the Stalin regime.

10. Peter believes that we are glutted with artistic attempts to be original and transcendent. What do you make of his observation that "the job of taste was to thin the insane torrent of human creativity down to manageable levels. But the job of appetite was never to be happy with taste."

(Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online or off, with attribution. Thanks.)

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