James Berger, Yale: 'Orfeo,' by Richard Powers
James Berger is a senior Lecturer in English and American Studies at Yale University. He recommends the 2014 novel "Orfeo," by Richard Powers.
He implores students to read the book, explaining that:
"It is a story of music and genetics in our contemporary age of terror and surveillance. An idiosyncratic retelling of the Orpheus myth, an elderly avant garde composer who feels he has tried and exhausted every possible musical experiment, returns to his first love, biology, and seeks to inscribe a musical score onto the mutating DNA of bacteria. Yup.
"But his efforts are mistaken to be acts of bioterrorism, and so he flees into the 'underworld' of contemporary America, returning also to the various Euridices of his past. Amazing book —and you'll learn a hell of a lot about music, science, politics ... and even about Life!"
