Orfeo (Powers) - Book Reviews

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