OrpheusEurydice2.0097_Swift

OrpheusEurydice2.0097_Swift

Graham Swift (1949- ), The Light of Day (London: Hamish Hamilton, 2003) .

From the jacket blurb: "Sarah is in prison. Every fortnight she is visited by George, the private eye she employed to observe the final stage of her husband's affair. The visits — and the days between — lead George back into Sarah's past and into events he can picture only too well, while bringing him even closer to a time he can't quite imagine — when she will once again step out into the clear light of day..."

From Bill Leone Bookseller: "The most recent novel by the award-winning author of WATERLAND and LAST ORDERS, the story of a private-eye employed by a woman in prison to observe the final stage of her husband's affair."

Another blurb at Goodreads.com

Book cover: "The Light of Day" by Graham Swift, featuring a close-up, dimly lit image of a person's legs and arm.

"Graham Swift's The Light of Day is, I suggest, an Orpheus appropriation by way of 'critical proxy' as Chantal Zabus terms it (2002: 121). It is not something the creator has signalled to us in any explicit fashion. As earlier discussions of Swift's intertextual style have indicated, his refusal to cite sources explicitly has troubled critics. ... Swift's work is not dependent on his sources to the extent that it fails to make sense without knowledge of the appropriation in operation. Lack of foreknowledge of the resonance of the Orpheus story will not collapse any reading of The Light of Day, or its intricately related themes of exile, detection, and love. Nevertheless, the reader who approaches the novel with a sense of the subtextual undertow provided by the Orpheus myth releases the opportunity for additional interpretations which can only enrich understanding of the novel." Julie Sanders, Adaptation and Appropriation (London: Routledge, 2006), 77 (see 77-81).

Hermione Lee reviews Swift's novel in The Guardian 8 Mar 2003, making reference to "what happened to Orpheus and Eurydice." (=2.0097_SwiftLee)

NYT Review: click here.