Word: orpheus
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HEADS, by Edward Stewart. Ivy League sacred cows are milked, and human parts are strewn about in unlikely places by ax murderers in a cheerfully gruesome novel by the author of Orpheus...
Edward Stewart's characters are so folded, spindled and mutilated that the mind's computer tends to reject them as not altogether human. Yet they have a way of engaging the reader with their perverse antics and comic, but horrific, deeds. Stewart's first novel, Orpheus on Top, marked him as a humorist of darkest hue. In this, his second, he has created an "entertainment" worthy of France's Grand Guignol theater...
Quinn is surprisingly effective at making Conchis a cross between Picasso and a monkey, as he was in the novel. In a part that calls for relentless coyness, Candice Bergen cannot be said to act, but her beauty is so compelling that the male audience, like Orpheus, can hardly be blamed for forsaking the future for a backward glance...
...story is from the legend of Orpheus. Nicholas Urfe (Michael Caine), an overread, underbred London dropout, accepts a teaching job on a Greek island. In Caine's adroit impersonation, Urfe explores sensuality from Alfie to Zeta, but along the way he stumbles into a labyrinthine underworld presided over by an occult genius-The Magus. His journey begins one day when he finds a book of poems open to the lines from Little Gidding. They are to become the theme of his life...
...Second Concerto proves how well he has succeeded. Compounded of powerful short phrases, punchy accents and a kaleidoscopic array of rhythms, it motors through three movements and 22 minutes like an Orpheus in the underworld. The brilliant dialogue achieved by American Pianist Gary Graffman and Erich Leinsdorf's Boston Symphony showed that the trip was definitely worth the effort. "The simple fact," said Graffman, "is that Ben has written a major piano concerto, which extremely few people have done in the second half of the 20th century." With their hearty applause, Boston's audience agreed...