Richard Powers is indulging us in a runaway riff on music, in a little room in the Boston Athenaeum, on the top of Beacon Hill, overlooking the Old Granary Burying Ground, after a marvelous reading and talk out of his new novel, Orfeo.
Of novelists in Powers’s generation with whom he is often compared – Franzen, Vollmann, Wallace – none equals Powers’s combination of consistent production, intellectual range, formal ingenuity, and emotional effect. … Put simply, Powers knows more than other novelists of his generation and knows how to use his prodigious expertise to place substantial, thoughtful characters in “the intricate, ingenious forms”….
The music in Orfeo is starting to show up on Spotify. Here are two playlists so far:
This one, by David Dodd, contains 466 tracks.
This one, by Ron Hogan, contains 41 tracks.
A review of Orfeo, by James Costa, Three Guys One Book, January 22, 2014.
The year has just begun and Richard Powers’s stunning new novel Orfeo will certainly end up on my top ten list.
The Kirkus starred review of Orfeo is now available online in its entirety.
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.
Richard Powers, whose novels combine the wonders of science with the marvels of art, astonishes us in different ways with each new book. … The questions he raises about biological and artistic culture are deeply intelligent, yet his characters in Orfeo are sympathetically human. (His female characters – including Els’s ex-wife and daughter — are particularly appealing, competent and strong.) His mastery of his subjects is so complete that you never smell the research. … Bravo, Richard Powers, for hitting so many high notes with Orfeo and contributing to the fraction of books that really matter.
“‘Orfeo’ by Richard Powers,” by Ron Charles, Washington Post, January 21, 2014.
… Orpheus, the celebrated musician of Greek mythology, is the perfect motif for this fascinating novel about the allure and power of music.
“The Book We’re Talking About: Richard Powers’s ‘Orfeo’,” Huffington Post, January 21, 2014.
Why are we talking about it?
… [We] think the topics he chooses to write about are fascinating and timely, without fail. There are few literary writers covering the art-meets-science realm, and who better than Powers, with his unique technical knowledge, to do so?
