“Zigger Zagger: Orfeo is another brilliant turn from Richard Powers,” by Matthew Packer, New Zealand Listener, June 26, 2014. At one level, Orfeo is a contemporary Fugitive-style thriller, a cross-country escapade in trying to outfox Homeland Security. But it’s also an exploration and history of the frontiers of modern music and art, loaded with insights into, Read More
“Richard Powers’ Time of Our Singing: A Novel about Race and Miscegenation in America,” by E. P. Chiew, in her blog Fiction, Food, Food Fiction, June 10, 2014. The wonder and passion Powers brings to elaborating his metaphysical conceits make his books more than merely cerebral. His closest literary relative isn’t another novelist or, Read More
In the list of summer reading for men, AskMen, June 2104, Michael McKenna writes of Orfeo: Vast, esoteric and demanding, Powers’ books tend to center on strange connections and transcendent harmonies … summer is a time of reflection as well as activity, of languor and thoughtfulness as well as excitement. If this is where your preferences, Read More
“Harmony and Discord,” by Ivan Kreilkamp, Public Books, June 15, 2014. “Orfeo is, characteristically for Powers, sprawlingly ambitious and wide-ranging…[its] musical history bristles with so much rich detail that it never seems simply allegorical.” Orpheus was the first rock star, the archetype of all subsequent sexy, irresistible, doomed musicians. His song not only charmed all human listeners, but, Read More
“Breaking the code,” by David Herkt, Stuff, June 15, 2014. Powers deftly mixes Els’s life on the run from Homeland Security with a recounting of his personal history, the perennial battle between art and science and the paranoia of nation states facing global terror. It’s a broad-sweep novel in terms of time, with a chase-plot, Read More
Brehove, October 19, 2015. “What CBT, extended evolutionary synthesis (EES) and Richard Powers’ Orfeo all have in common” is how this English teacher and blogger describes his post about Orfeo, titled “Plasticity Everywhere,” in silenttrends. “The novel is about art, taste, and the relationship of those terms to natural life. What’s so remarkable about, Read More
Review of Orfeo by Jim Dwyer, Chico News & Review, May 22, 2014. Yet another tour de force from a true master.
“Orfeo by Richard Powers,” reviewed by Duncan White, The Telegraph, May 6, 2014. “[A]n astonishing piece of writing… The novel itself generates real momentum in the final act, as our Orpheus travels deeper into the American underworld… Powers’s triumph is that he makes you care about Els.”
“Richard Powers: Orfeo,” review by Todd McEwen, Herald Scotland, May 3, 2014. Orfeo is an audacious attempt to write about music in a new way. It’s not described, but performed for you on the page. It works. … Richard Powers handles the sensational well, and this is a sensitive, thrilling, brainy book
“Interplay of music, science and perception,” review of Orfeo by James Bradley, The Australian, May 2, 2014. [I]t is rare to come across a book as moving or as thrillingly alive to the possibilities of the contemporary scientific and cultural landscape.
Review of Orfeo by Steve Bidwell-Brown, Readings, April 30, 2014. [O]ne of the most ambitious works of fiction you’re likely to read this year. … With sweeping ideas and enthrallingly told, Orfeo is a brilliant novel.
“Music in the Blood: Orfeo by Richard Powers,” by John Dugdale, Literary Review, April 2014 (p. 54). Richard Powers’s brainy, elegantly written novels almost invariably focus on a field of science or an art form, and in some of them art and science are contrapuntal themes as the narrative advances through several decades. … its characters have, Read More