The Medusa Frequency

by Russell Hoban

An inexplicable message flashed onto the screen of his Apple II computer at 3 a.m. heralds the beginning of a startling quest for frustrated author Herman Orff. Taking up the offer of a cure for writer's block leads him ‘to those places in your head that you can't get to on your own' - and plunges him into a semi-dreamland inhabited by a bizarre combination of characters from myth and the talking head of Orpheus; a lost love; the young girl of Vermeer's famous portrait - and a frequency of Medusas.

Genres: Fiction, Science Fiction, Fantasy, 20th Century, Novels, Classics, Mythology

144 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1987

About the author

Russell Conwell Hoban was an American expatriate writer. His works span many genres, including fantasy, science fiction, mainstream fiction, magical realism, poetry, and children's books. He lived in London, England, from 1969 until his death. (Wikipedia)

Reviews

[MJ Nicholls · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is one of those tiresome tales where a blocked novelist undergoes a mental procedure to cure his writer’s block and ends up hallucinating the severed head of Orpheus via various spherical objects from his everyday life. Same old same old. Many of Hoban novels take place in surreal alternate realities that pile on extra layers of confusing surreality, until it becomes harder to grasp what exactly is happening to whom—and does it matter? This one satirises literary London (and the author, obliquely) to a slight degree, but is mainly about the protagonist hallucinating the severed head of Orpheus via various spherical objects from his everyday life, and something to do with his girlfriend and Eurydice, and conversations in all-caps with science-fiction creatures with unpronounceable names who talk in unpronounceable sentences. At any rate, whatever Hoban is up to—the whole thing is impossible to tear one’s pleasure-racked eyes from for more than twenty seconds, and making sense of the novel is probably good cerebral fun, for those tedious anachronists who care about finding coherence in their books.

[Tony]

My name is Herman Orff. At parties when people ask me what I do I say I'm a novelist and then they say, 'Oh, should I have heard of you?' and I say, 'I think not.' Then we both find somebody else to talk to.

Our narrator has written two novels which did not sell well, though at least one woman has read the second one three times and is a kind of fan. Actively seeking inspiration for a third book, Orff pays the bills adapting works of literature to comic books. 'Balloon Speech'. He once did War and Peace in 25 colorful pages.

The attempted 'inspiration' comes from that girl in the Vermeer painting, new love, old love, and, when all that fails, an electrical head-zapping treatment. It is then that the Head of Orpheus speaks to him, but first appearing as a football (soccer ball for those on this side of the wall), then a cabbage, then half a grapefruit.

Orff likes to listen to international broadcasts to be soothed by languages he does not understand. A character keeps bumping into him, sometimes as a busker, then again as a waiter. Gom yancher, he might say. Numsy fy?

I cheated and re-read the Eurydice and Orpheus myth before wrestling with this and it helped, maybe. But Hoban assuaged me near the end with this quote from H. P. Lovecraft: The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents.

If all I've written above sounds as if this book was a little too goofy for me, that would be mostly wrong. There were, instead, wonderful surprises lurking on almost every page. And dialogue that blew me away. Like this:

'How do you feel about the back of cereal boxes?'
'As noumenon or phenomenon?'
'As an art form?'
'They seem to have fallen into disuse; I remember when they had little stories on them.'
'Right. They've gone with our pre-atom-bomb innocence. We're living in a time that cries out for reaffirmation of traditional values. Used properly the back of a cereal box is to literature what Buddy Holly is to music: it's got drive, it's got soul, it's got be-bop. Look at this.' He took a box of Holywell Corn Flakes out of a desk drawer and showed me first the front and then the back of it. They were both the same . . . 'Do you believe that?' he said. 'Two fronts, no back, you don't know where you are with it, your whole day starts off funny. Put a comic on one side and that's the back, you eat your corn flakes and you read it, you know where you are.'

After Orff eats half a grapefruit - or what's left of Orpheus - he feels a tightness in his chest and a pain running down his left arm, so he goes to the doctor:

'I guess by now you've finished the novel you were working on when I saw you last year. Breathe in.'
'No, actually I haven't.'
'Breathe in again. Very stressful occupation, novel-writing, so I'm told. Do you happen to know Rupert Gripwell? Lean forward.'
'No. Is he a novelist?'
'Undertaker. He says they don't last as long as journalists.'
'Undertakers?'
'Novelists.'
'Why is that?' I said, as he took my blood pressure.
'Says they drink alone too much. People drink faster when they drink alone. You drink alone much?'
'Well, I can't be bothered to go looking for people every time I want a drink, can I?'

Can I?

[Craig · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is an odd short novel with existentialist/absurdist underpinnings; it would probably be labeled bizarro if it appeared today. It's very cleverly constructed, and I particularly liked the character and other names such as Mumchance Press, Reedham & Weap, Hermione Thrust, Slith & Tovey, and just on and on and on. The spoilery summary of what I thought: It's the recursive story of a writer who's unable to come up with an idea for his third novel. He's been writing comics adaptations of classics (he did War and Peace in a twenty-five page comic), when he finds a flyer advertising a new electronic treatment that will stimulate his brain and unfetter his muse. He learns that the person offering this procedure is the man his (former) lover Luise left in order to move in with him, but he goes ahead with the treatment anyway. (Not a good choice, right?) Afterwards he begins a very philosophic series of chats with the head of Orpheus, who appears to him in the guise of a soccer ball, a moldering head of cabbage, etc. He begins a book about a writer who does all of the things he's doing. He has vivid bouts of longing and lust for the female characters, particularly his long lost love Luise, who's now happily married to Lars, has a daughter named Ursula, and is living in Scandinavia. There's a lot of discussion of Eurydice and the Kraken and Medusa and the Oracle, and a refresher in the Greek myth cycle is probably in order. He eventually gives up on the novel idea and artistic advancement but finds success writing Lovecraftian comics for the back of cereal boxes. More than anything else it reminded me of a Barry N. Malzberg novel, with a touch more humor and Lovecraft. It was fun, if confusing.

[Ani · Rating 4 out of 5]

One of those thin volumes it takes you long to read. Beautiful language, overflows with prose and striking images. If you are a kind of reader who likes to highlight great lines with a marker, beware that you will need to highlight everything here. This bizarre book is hard to imagine to be written over 30 years ago.
At times absurd, twisted, confusing it begs you to read it again when you are done or just open up a random page every night before bed or when you confusingly wander to your bookshelf.

[Tijana]

Vrlo ambiciozno (na granici s pretencioznim) i više magijski realizam nego žanr, a ponajviše postmoderna, i zabavnije u sitnim detaljima (npr. nazivi izdavačkih kuća) nego u celini. Konstelacija Orfej/Euridika/Meduza u svetu moderne (tada) književne scene mnogo više obećava kao koncept nego što, naročito negde od poslednje trećine, uspeva da ispuni.

[Rachel Denham · Rating 4 out of 5]

Initially, the book was really confusing, but the writing is superb and kept me going.

There are a lot of things happening at once, and a lot of references to figures that I didn't know or had forgotten about. I found myself having to brush up on my knowledge of Greek mythology. Despite the confusion, it got a lot more concise. By the end of the book, everything seems to make complete sense.

I enjoyed the book and actually saw a lot of elements of existentialism in it. I found myself thinking a lot about writings by Camus (particularly The Stranger) while reading this book. It's also interesting that Hoban made a connection between existentialism and Greek mythology. This is actually the second time that I've seen the two being linked, and in this case, the two make a very formidable pair.

The book is very complicated, but its themes are easily understandable. The book forces you to think, but it doesn't go over your head.

I would definitely recommend this book to anyone who enjoys intelligent reads and not just "fluff" reading. My rating is a 4-4.5.

[Joseph Devine · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is the fifth book by Hoban I have read in a row, and while i find it is the weaker of those five so far, it still has much to enjoy. It's confusing, surreal and occasionally elusive, even for him, but as usual, his writing is so good it kept me going through the more bewildering passages, and come the end it had begun to fall into place. It just feels a bit less cohesive than his others, but then again, after reading 4 of his cerebral novels back-to-back, maybe I was just a bit Hoban'ed out. His writing does stretch your brain! It had many wonderful, memorable and sometimes truly moving moments, and was a short snappy read to boot, so I'd still recommend it, but his books like Turtle Diary, Riddley Walker and Pilgermann moved me far more. I have three more of his by my bed waiting for me, but I'm having a palette cleansing break with some more simple and to-the-point nature writing. I need to rest my brain, because reading Russell Hoban is a bit like doing LSD.

[Charles Walker · Rating 2 out of 5]

A clever little book, maybe a little too clever. But it's a quick read, and enjoyable along the way, and adds up to more than I thought it would. The Greek references are interesting, but a simple Wikipedia search will get you more or less up to speed on figures like Eurydice, Orpheus, Hermes, etc., and the book is perfectly readable with little to no knowledge of mythology.

A lot of humor in here too; I chuckled out loud a number of times. In a lot of ways it reminded me of The Crying of Lot 49 - a lot of the stylistic tics here seemed out of Pynchon to me. Not a classic on my shelf, but definitely worth a read.

[Veronica · Rating 4 out of 5]

Classic Russell Hoban! All the elements are here ... the head of Orpheus floating down the river, Eurydice, Medusa, a hospital, doomed love, even yellow A4 paper. It's short and magnificently bonkers. No, nothing makes sense -- just go with the flow. My favourite chapter was chapter 8: Tower Hill and the Cheshire Cheese. There's a funny scene in a pub in which it turns out that London is populated by extras playing multiple roles, but there's also some lovely descriptive writing, so evocative of dusk in the city.

I left the house at about five o'clock. It was novembering hard outside; the dark air sighed with the dwindle of the year, the sharpening of it to the goneness that was drawing nearer, nearer with every moment.Pinky-orange shone the electrical-hibiscus street lamps; almost their light had a fragrance; the brown leaves underfoot insisted on the ghosts of dark trees standing in the place of lamps and houses; the pinky-orange globes hung mingled with the swaying dark and winter branches; the winter light and traffic, the winter walkers in the dark street all moved through the ghostly wood and went their way upon the ancient leafy track.

This has been on my TBR list for ages and I'm glad I finally tracked down a second-hand copy.

[Divya Pal · Rating 3 out of 5]

Clearly the inspiration for China Miéville’s cephalopodic leviathan, the goulash being garnished with the Greek myth of Orpheus and Euridyce.

After his death, the Muses collected the fragments of Orpheus’s body, and buried them at Leibethra at the foot of Olympus, where the nightingale sang sweetly over his grave. The subsequent transference of his bones to Dium is evidently a local legend. His head was thrown upon the Hebrus, down which it rolled to the sea, and was borne across to Lesbos, where the grave in which it was interred was shown at Antissa.

Added to this hallucinogenic novel are names like - Nnvsnu the Tsrungh, the great Snyukh, the Blug of Nexo Vollma, Nabilca (the thing of darkness).

[Glyven · Rating 3 out of 5]

The Medusa Frequency is a short science fiction novel from the 1980s, a decade that saw film, TV and other media increasing their potential for cutting-edge sci-fi via better, computer-generated special effects. The technological conceit of Russell Hoban's novel might tempt some to label it as "cyberpunk," but its classification as any kind of science fiction would be too restrictive. True, it starts off with a struggling novelist attempting to cure his writer's block by having his brain "zapped" by a machine. But the novel, instead of becoming a Max Headroom-like story of man-meets-computer, turns into a meditative tale of romantic unfulfillment, kept ostensibly in the mythic-futuristic realm by characters that are technology-based or influenced by Greek myth.

Hoban is an author with a great sense of humor that manifests itself in everything from character names (Gombert Yawncher, Tycho Fremdorf, Boumboume Letunga et al.) to the absurd appearances of a talking disembodied head. He's also a cerebral writer--The Medusa Frequency could be seen as intertextual and metatextual, but its references to the tale of Orpheus and Eurydice, to Vermeer's Girl with a Pearl Earring, and to extra-literary artifacts (films, paintings, music, comics) are balanced with the aforementioned wit.

But in much the same way that Woody Allen's most celebrated film comedies, while highly literate and intellectual, are ultimately about romantic relationships, The Medusa Frequency is essentially the story of a man coming to terms with lost love. For all the novel's inventiveness, some readers may feel cheated, as if they've been tricked into reading a book about someone else's (perhaps Hoban's) romantic troubles. There are times when the story's fantastical elements are treated as hallucinations, or at the very least are made secondary to the main character's anguished pursuit of his ex-lover.

Other readers may view the relationship material as poignant. The Medusa Frequency is thought-provoking and not at all superficial, and I may appreciate it more after a second reading. Hoban's better-known novels have eluded me thus far, but I anticipate reading Riddley Walker.

[Aaron · Rating 4 out of 5]

Kind of a mix between Douglas Adams and Nabokov, this meditation on writer's block and a relationship's end, framed within the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice, perfectly illustrates what Robert Coover meant when he said “We need myths to get by. We need story; otherwise the tremendous randomness of experience overwhelms us."

[Caz · Rating 4 out of 5]

“The head of Orpheus turned up as a half grapefruit and in a absent minded moment I ate it”

[Matthew Berg · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is among the few books I've taken out from the library and decided within a few chapters I must own a copy of.

I won't bother with the customary and cursory regurgitation of the plot, but will merely note that the apparent strangeness is not strange for the sake of strangeness, and in spite of expressing that with is primordial and timeless the book retains a surprisingly conventional narrative structure.

Like most books I enjoy thoroughly, it is not the work as an isolated and discrete entity that I appreciate as much as how it evokes themes and ideas that suffuse themselves through all the creative works that resonate with me. Through the passage of reading I found myself reminded of the construction of myth-images in the works of Robert Holdstock and comtemplating Targ-Trag in Sol Yurick's An Island Death and how his "idea of me" was eroding through continuous discursion and deconstruction. Having just recently finished Charlie Kaufman's "Antkind", it was hard not to draw parallels in how each illustrated how an audience participates with the fictions they interact with.

While I do not begrudge Hoban his success as a children's author, it seems a shame he has not found broader renown for his adult fiction. It appears eight of his books have recently been reissued, so perhaps he is on the cusp of rediscovery. (Looking at the rest of his catalog I am not surprised to discover that another of his books received a fairly glowing review from the Goodreads member who has consistently mirrored my taste in literature, and another is on the to-read list of two other members who have been reliable sources of worthwhile recommendations.)

[Nigel McFarlane · Rating 2 out of 5]

I love Russell Hoban, but this has got me baffled.

The protagonist is a writer with writer's block who confronts his issues by talking to various heads that represent archetypes: the head of Orpheus represents the storytelling he aspires to; and Vermeer's Girl with the Pearl Earring is (at least initially) Eurydice, representing loss and the inability to let of the past. In fact, all women in the novel seem to be Eurydice, which represents a rather outdated male perspective but we'll let that go... I think I've understood that much correctly.

But the betentacled head of the Kraken represents... terror? Cthulhu? I'm not sure. And then there's Medusa herself, who seems to be, surprisingly, the archetype that frees him from being turned to stone and represents some better, future-looking alternative to Eurydice, but I don't know why.

I didn't know the head of Orpheus was a thing, so I've learned that much at least. Maybe you need some classical knowledge to understand this properly. Or maybe Russell Hoban himself had writer's block, and generated a pile of semiotic nonsense in response? Or maybe you're supposed to enjoy the ride and not try too hard to understand it?

[Owen · Rating 3 out of 5]

The Medusa Frequency reminded me of what little I've read of Philip K. Dick. The main character undergoes some kind of electroshock treatment to remove his writer's block, but he ends up having circular conversations with the imagined head of Orpheus. Orpheus, by now just a rotting skull, appears from other similarly shaped objects like a football, grapefruit, or head of cabbage. There's also the computer that talks to him about multi-tentacled thing at the ocean deep. And there are a few female characters, who are obviously just imitations of Eurydice, or Medusa, I forget. It's a pretty trippy novella; I can't decide if it got easier to read towards the end or if I just took the plunge.

[Renay · Rating 1 out of 5]

although the blurb made it sound pretty and interesting, a "trip to those places in your head you've never been to before" were hard to read and even harder to understand, if understanding were at all possible.
nonsensical ramblings, flights of fancy and wondering, and garbled mumbo jumbo seem to be the theme and plot of the story.
being only a short book i thought i could handle the small task of reading it. i was wrong. i couldn't handle it. it's hard enough living in my own head and trying to sort and understand the rantings, let alone reading someone else's.
the book has a pretty cover......
;)

[Matt Whitby · Rating 2 out of 5]

"One of his most accessibly entertaining books," says The Times. If that's true on the former front, then I can't begin to imagine quite how inaccessible the others are. It read like a meandering stream-of-consciousness ramble, free of plot, and for a short book, it was one which I kept thinking should be shorter.

[Finnley · Rating 3 out of 5]

I really wanted to love this, but i couldnt. Maybe one day I’ll come revisit it and find clarity. I typically love absurdist plots but this lost me a little and my adhd said put this shit down

[mkfs · Rating 4 out of 5]

What a charmer!

This is exactly the sort of novel that I find myself groaningly -- nay, head-strikingly -- slogging through, page after page, in a fruitless quest for plot or message. Typical first-novel junk: a blocked writer, who cannot get over the decade-old loss of a woman, is pushed into the process of self-discovery by external forces. Do new writers write about anything else?

But Russel Hoban is not a new writer, and this is not his first novel. More to the point, he is a good writer, and Medusa Frequency works. It works very, very well. While not a compelling page-turner, it lurks at the edge of the mind, waiting, a lyrical and playful retelling of an age-old story.

That story is, of course, the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice, which Hoban twists into an analogy for the creative process. Got art trouble? The head of Orpheus will turn it into heart trouble for no charge. Trapped in the singular worldview of a first-person narrative? Buy one of the supporting characters a beer, and see what happens.

All of this with Hoban's characteristic skewering of the arts. A viewing of an experimental film rings disturbingly true, and had me squirming in reminder of the seats at the Anthology Film Archives. "I don't think film people should be allowed near words, it's bad for everybody", Hoban says through the narrator, but clearly the opposite works out quite well.

In many ways, the novel is Proustian, if one refuses to take Proustian to mean "a long rambling meditation on the past" and instead defines it as "exploring the workings of the mind through narrative":

You know how you'll hear a sound while you're asleep and there comes a whole dream to account for it and in the dream there are things that happen before and after the sound

And if such mind-wandering fails to grab you, there are plenty of likeable-fellow moments as the main character languishes around the month-old coffee cups in his cluttered apartment:

In the morning I came awake as I always do, like a man trapped in a car going over a cliff.

Sounds like somebody's got a case of the -- well, you know.

[Old Man Scaps · Rating 4 out of 5]

Weird, delightful, sad, and hilarious. A short novel in the first person.

Herman Orff, a writer trying to write his third novel, becomes so desparate that he meets up with Istvan Fallok, his musician ex-friend. (At one point, the two of them both dated a woman named Luise. The love of their lives, and she dumped them both. She had dated Istvan first. Hence the ex-friend-ness.)

So. Naturally, Istvan zaps Herman's brain with music from a machine. (Electrodes and everything.) This zapping leads to hallucinations that are supposed to help Herman write his third novel. These hallucinations star the severed, sea-soggy head of Orpheus, the mythical Greek fellow who invented music, who longs for Eurydice, who has trouble remembering his past.

Further weirdness ensues, and Russell Hoban's infatuation with story, myth, art, loss, and humor shine through every page, often lyrically, but never indulgently.

I highly recommend this book for anyone who wants a healthy dose of well-executed literary weirdness.

[Bob Jacobs · Rating 4 out of 5]

Wat een trip is dit boek. Constant in relatie met de Orpheus en Eurydice-mythos, maar evengoed met andere kunst (Vermeer, Rilke, …).

Uiteindelijk echter - en dat is het grootste compliment dat ik het kan geven - is dit werk volledig zijn eigen weirde zelf.

[Anne Earney · Rating 3 out of 5]

What did I think? This is a strange little novel. If I didn't stop reading between chapters, I completely forgot what was going on, even if only a few hours passed. My favorite character was a disembodied head that was actually the hallucination of other characters. The writing involves some really fun word-play, including made-up words and some hilarious dialogue (kinda metafictional, or maybe just extremely dry, but either way I laughed out loud several times). Some of the reviews mention the science fiction element, which might have kept me away had I not been seeking out novels with references to the Netherlands, but the science part turned out to be such a small part, it was insignificant. Despite the 3-star rating, I am interested enough in Russell Hoban's work to read more.

[Zach · Rating 4 out of 5]

I picked this up on a whim because I loved the structure and narrative of Riddley Walker. While this doesn't share the futuristic post-apocalyptic world of Riddley, it is no less bizarre. Much of the novel's dialogue occurs between the narrator and the disembodied, hallucinated head of Orpheus, which is both hilarious and jarring.

The narrative is difficult to follow for the first half of the novel, but I eventually got used to the novel's patterns of unpredictability and existential woe.

I recommend this as a short, perplexing, but satisfying read that shifts time and perspective in fits and starts.

[Meg Onthemove Reading · Rating 3 out of 5]

A 3.5.

A strange, difficult little book.

Herman Orff, a writer, is experiencing block. He sees an advert for a new treatment to unblock the paths of creativity, and after the treatment begins to experience delusional hallucinations of Orpheus's Head.

Journeying through a dark, dank London both overground and underground this feels like the hallucinagenic windings and warnings of an overly vivid dream, rather than anything based in any reality.

Like Hoban's other works the language and description is beautiful, the marriage of modernism and classical Greek mythology interesting, the plotting "can do better".

An interesting rather than a good read.

[Andrew · Rating 4 out of 5]

A difficult read early on, but it had me after a few chapters. It's a good book for people who like to think about three million things at once and convince themselves they all fit together, even when you can't see the lines between the dots. Also for people who are crippled by writers' block, inactivity, insignificance, and obscurity. Some very memorable passages and lots of introspection. It's also quite funny. A great reading experience overall. I'm not talking about the plot, because it's not really what the book's about.

[Samantha The Escapist · Rating 3 out of 5]

I picked this book up off used book table. It had long since lost its jacket and just sort of sat there all tiny and black. There was no description, I had no familiarity with the author. So going on only the single-paragraph first chapter, I decided I was on board for something weird.

However, I didn't exactly ask for the pretentious and tiresome writing.

Compelling and tedious all at once. It was fun to sift through the weird, and if I had the time back I'd still have read it, but I can't really recommend it for anything in particular.

[Sarah · Rating 2 out of 5]

Bizarre. Just...bizarre. The premise here is essentially very interesting - writer's block, cured by a sort of prompted madness - but it quickly descends into such a combination of magical realism and stylized prose it's very hard to keep track of what's going on. I adored Hoban's "Amaryllis Night and Day," but this one's just a little too much too fast. Still, a lot of unique ideas to be wheedled out of the jumble here.

[Tom · Rating 3 out of 5]

Too aggravating to be good. Every so often a line lands properly but even at 140 pages it felt like there was too much filler to get through. The mystery and the motifs overpower the plot but are in themselves underpowered (sometimes repetition is just repetition) and overall it's unsatisfying. What it reminded me of is Nick Harkaway's Gnomon, but at least Russell Hoban's good enough not to waste 600 pages on something.

[Susan Omand · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is one of those stories that, for me, would be better in a more visual medium. While I really enjoyed the idea behind it, that there were unforeseen side effects to an author getting "brain zapped" in order to overcome a creative block, and the dialogue was very Douglas Adams-esque in its humour, the characters themselves felt a bit flat for me and the description could have done with a little beefing up in order to make them and their locations inhabit my own brain a little more.