Orpheus Lost
Pymble
London
:
Fourth Estate
,
2007
Z1364404
2007
single work
novel
(taught in 5 units)
'In this compelling reimagining of the Orpheus story, Leela May travels into an underworld of kidnapping, torture and despair in search of her lover, Mishka.
'Leela is a mathematical genius who escaped her hardscrabble Southern home town to study in Boston. It's there that she meets a young Australian musician, Mishka. From the moment she first hears him play, busking in a subway, his music grips her, and they quickly become lovers.
'Then one day Leela is picked up off the street and taken to an interrogation centre somewhere outside the city. There has been an 'incident', an explosion on the underground; terrorists are suspected, security is high. And her old childhood friend Cobb is conducting a very questionable interrogation. Over the years Cobb has never forgotten Leela and the secrets she knows.
'Now he reveals to her that Mishka may not be all he seems. That there may be more to him than growing up in the Daintree rainforest in northern Queensland in an eccentric musical family. Leela has already discovered on her own account that some nights when Mishka claims to be at the music lab are actually spent at a cafe. A cafe, Cobb tells her, known to be a terrorist contact point.
'Who can she believe?
'And then Mishka disappears.' (Publisher's blurb)
In the course of the semester, we will shamelessly enjoy losing ourselves in six novels from a range of national literatures. We will begin by thinking about the state of the novel in the twenty-first century as we investigate what we gain as readers from learning to read well—in other words what a reader gains in crossing the border from the complexities of literary appreciation to those of scholarly critique, from becoming a reader to becoming a reader who is also a critic and a writer of literary criticism.
