Quartet For The End Of Time

“Quartet For The End Of Time: Richard Powers’ Orfeo,” by Jeff Maehre, inStash, January 30, 2014.

Orfeo is a heady and welcome exploration of artistic ambition and the anguish to which one must subject himself to be a true artist.  It braces the reader with the big questions, while presenting a compelling main character toward whom a reader should be, at many turns, viscerally compassionate. Powers’ prose is at all-time elegance, issuing forth with restrained authority.  Some passages make one set the book down and stare into the middle-distance.   An easy read, it is not.  It makes easy reading seem like a waste of time.