RaveThe New York Times Book Review\"[Kadare] returns again and again to the legends around Orpheus, for example, his addition of two strings to the traditional lyre — in Kadare’s telling, a radical breakthrough that causes a bureaucratic hubbub in Olympus. The author doesn’t tether his own story to the classical one too tightly, but the parallels are obvious — for Rudian with his forbidden ghost; and for Kadare, who once spirited his messages past Communist censors. The two extra strings may signify more than the headaches of writers, however. Perhaps they create an altogether new sound, beyond the range of human hearing. It is, after all, the vibration that lulled Cerberus, the hound of Hades, and rescued Orpheus’ beloved Eurydice from the underworld.\
