Word: orpheus
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...ORPHEUS DESCENDING...
...vehicle he chose was Tennessee Williams' Orpheus Descending, a nightmare vision of the playwright's native South. Its Grand Guignol events -- religious hysteria, racial confrontation, abusive law enforcement, Klan night-riding and a climactic murder by blowtorch -- seemed at the 1957 debut to arise from Williams' inner demons. Three decades of civil rights struggle compelled a whole nation to see those demons as its own. Yet if the descent into lynch-mob madness echoes grim headlines, Hall has scrupulously avoided the common error of toning down Williams' expressionistic excess into unsuitable realism. In the first scene, the lighting changes with...
...LYRE OF ORPHEUS by Robertson Davies (Viking; $19.95). The third novel in a trilogy about the life and aftereffects of an eccentric millionaire. An engaging plot involving high finance, grand opera and a voice from Limbo...
...home. He gracefully provides enough information about what has happened in the two preceding novels to keep everyone, including forgetful fans, up to speed. But he is also solicitous toward those who have been present and paying attention from the beginning; the plot and characters of The Lyre of Orpheus gain resonances from the earlier books that only initiates will hear...
...opera is not the only unfinished business in The Lyre of Orpheus. Darcourt is struggling to complete his biography of his friend Francis Cornish and trying to fill a mysterious gap in his subject's life between 1937 and 1945; readers who remember What's Bred in the Bone already know the bizarre information Darcourt will discover, including the existence of a 16th century triptych with unmistakable ties to the 20th. And a potential blackmailer turns up, hoping to hold several characters responsible for deeds that occurred way back in The Rebel Angels...