A brilliant review, makes me want to read the book Right Now. :)
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"The book is divided into seven chapters, each chapter representing a "string" of Orpheus's lyre.
The "Fifth string: Death" shows the author at her most powerful and poetical. She seems to agree with medieval theologians in seeing Orpheus's wife Eurydice as his own "lower self", and also, perhaps, as death; in Cocteau's Orphée, she tells us, "Orpheus had gone down to Hell to find her, his own Death, as much as to retrieve his wife."
That phlegmatic savant Maurice Blanchot enters a more ambiguous, darker plea, seeing in the quest to the Underworld an attempt by Orpheus not only to rescue Eurydice, representing truth or art, but also, as Wroe writes, "to look at her in 'the other night', as the still-unattained object of his desire".
Orpheus: The Song of Life, by Ann Wroe
Ann Wroe showcases a new kind of writing in this playful and passionate paean to Orpheus.
John Banville
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/jul/29/orpheus-ann-wroe-john-banville-review
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"The book is divided into seven chapters, each chapter representing a "string" of Orpheus's lyre.
The "Fifth string: Death" shows the author at her most powerful and poetical. She seems to agree with medieval theologians in seeing Orpheus's wife Eurydice as his own "lower self", and also, perhaps, as death; in Cocteau's Orphée, she tells us, "Orpheus had gone down to Hell to find her, his own Death, as much as to retrieve his wife."
That phlegmatic savant Maurice Blanchot enters a more ambiguous, darker plea, seeing in the quest to the Underworld an attempt by Orpheus not only to rescue Eurydice, representing truth or art, but also, as Wroe writes, "to look at her in 'the other night', as the still-unattained object of his desire".
Orpheus: The Song of Life, by Ann Wroe
Ann Wroe showcases a new kind of writing in this playful and passionate paean to Orpheus.
John Banville
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/jul/29/orpheus-ann-wroe-john-banville-review
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