Orpheus Lost - Janette Turner Hospital

Orpheus Lost is one of the picks for this year's Stanford Book Salon. It begins its focus on Southern-girl turned MIT mathematician, Leela. She finds herself in the bowels of the subway drawn in by the haunting sounds of musician Mishka Bartok's violin. Shortly after, the two begin to date and eventually move in together. The novel is thick with references to Orpheus and Eurydice, playing off the myth on various levels. After a suicide bombing, Leela is interrogated by her ex-boyfriend and ex-best friend Cobb, who has become a mercenary and has a personal interest in tying Leela's current lover to the terrorist incident. Mishka, however, has secrets of his own that take him to Lebanon and unleash the usual web of confusion and misunderstandings one would expect in a book with middle-eastern characters in a post-9/11 world. Thus, at about 100 pages in, I found myself unimpressed and unsure I wanted to continue to read a story I had already heard a million times. But, then the author took a turn. She returned to the South for backstory on Leela and Cobb. She explored Mishka's parentage and the effects of loss from the Holocaust on his Hungarian family. The terrorist misunderstandings, while real and frustrating, then become the tragic result of years of secrets. Orpheus Lost is many stories of families woven together to the point of Leela and Mishka's hope for reunification. And, like Orpheus and Eurydice, they both have to travel to hell and back, in the hopes that they can avoid looking back at their past, in order to begin anew.