Orpheus Builds A Girl

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Wilhem von Tore doesn’t have much time left. As he reflects on his life his main memory is his beloved Luci, love of his life and the woman he vowed to stay with forever. And stay with her he did, despite her having died of tuberculosis only a few months after their first meeting. Despite Luci being buried by her grieving family shortly after her death. Small obstacles, but nothing that would get in the way of Wilhem’s quest.

Based on true events ORPHEUS BUILDS A GIRL tells a story of obsession and possession, of the possible cruelty of human inquisitiveness, and the strange bonds within family, culture, and reputations. I would say this is not a book for the squeamish: including body horror, scientific experiments, war, racism, and much more. It is about sisterly love, the dead, and how obsession can be used to justify a person's actions. Though only together for a few months in her first life, their love is written in the stars. Using scientific research compiled over decades, Wilhelm ensures that, for him and his beloved, death is only the beginning. ORPHEUS BUILDS A GIRL is not my usual read I admit, but I enjoy listening to the author during the podcast Teenage Scream, and perhaps this has swayed me to read outside my usual genres. That being said this dual point of viewed novel was delicious to read.

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Set in the 1970s in Key West, Floida, a German doctor who had worked for the Nazis in his youth, Wilhelm von Tore, becomes infatuated with a young Cuban woman, Luci, who he is treating for tuberculosis. When she dies, von Tore refuses to accept it, and takes matters into his own hands.

From the start Parry is able to create something unsettling in the chapters devised through von Tore's descriptions; there is something remarkably twisted and self-gratifying in the doctor's chapters of his youth that only become more questionable once the two character's lives become intertwined. Luci is rebellious and wild and inquisitive; she is everything her sister is not, where as Gabi tries desperately to keep her family together, to appease her mother's sallow moods and depression, to keep her sister safe from the world. Gabi loses herself in trying to keep the peace and be a constant people pleaser.

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This story is something else. It’s macabre. It’s sinister. It’s so, so dark. But it’s also beautiful. It’s heartbreaking. Its unbearable. Its a story I don’t think I’ll ever forget. Gabi's chapter's are filled with something else unsettling, herself being unsettled and anxious throughout her life; always thinking of keeping her family together and ooking out for her younger more robust and adventurous sisters. The reader is pulled into the lives of her Cuban family, living through joys and heartbreak but always constantly aware of what Luci was doing. Gabi's recollection revolves around her sister to counteract the doctor's views; perhaps that is the point of her recalling memories, to actively disagree with what the doctor has put forward? Or maybe that is truly how Gabi saw her youth? Either way the familial chapters paints Luci in a different light than that of von Tore. gross, creepy, vaguely romantic, and loosely inspired by true events Orpheus Builds a Girl tells of the story of Wilhelm as he tries to revive his “one true love” Luci while simultaneously giving us the perspective of Luci’s older sister Gabriela.

But this book is not content with putting us in the mind of a deranged lunatic - it feels the need to intercut his 1st person narrative with that of the dead girl's sister, supposedly telling the other side of the story. The problem with this is that it's abundantly clear to us pretty much from the start that Wilhelm is crazy: after all, as a child he has a weirdly co-dependent relationship with his grandmother and cuddles up to her dead body for days till they're found together. Add to that his discreet but obvious allusions to his Nazi past: the 'youth organisation' he joins in 1930s German (Hitler Youth or similar), the obscure medical 'experiments' he participates in during the war even if he, self-righteously, tells us he was never interested in work on twins (as was, notoriously, Josef Mengele), his recall of the firebombing of Dresden, and his later escape from German via South America and, eventually, to Florida. Based on a true story, Orpheus Builds a Girl is a novel of sisterly love, sinister obsession, and the battle for control of the story. A dark, chilling debut novel from award-winning writer Heather Parry.There is something quite off-putting having another's life told through two other's eyes. Although von Tore views Luci through his own twisted version of rose tinted glasses, it is also worth considering Gabi's version of her sister to be skewed too, and yet we as the reader are never allowed entreaty into Luci's own perception of events.