Orpheus Builds a Girl
Orpheus Builds a Girl
Heather Parry
With the deftness of Doctor Frankenstein’s sewing needle, debut novelist Heather Parry sews a gothic tapestry fit for the post-#MeToo era. Orpheus Builds a Girl is a story so enchanting you’ll be lulled by its balmy climes, realising only too late that you cannot turn away when, with a painter’s palette, Parry unveils the depths of depravity to which humankind can sink.
Orpheus takes for its inspiration the true case of Carl Tänzler, a German-born radiologist, who took his childhood hallucinations of love and death to their most graphic conclusion by stealing and living with the decomposing corpse of young tuberculosis patient Maria Elena Milagro de Hoyos in the 1930s. In Parry’s fictionalised account, Tänzler becomes Wilhelm von Tore, an ex-Nazi doctor whose narrative swallows one half of the book. The other half is reclaimed by Gabriella, sister to Von Tore’s teenage victim Luci (Maria’s stand-in), whose premature death robs her of her own voice.
The genius of Parry’s debut lies in the careful weaving of contrasting narratives. Whilst Von Tore is forced to flee post-war Germany in order to conceal the nature of his research, Gabi’s family is pushed from Cuba by the revolution. Upon arrival in Key West, Florida, the doctor bemoans the ‘cruel’ circumstances under which he must continue to hide his identity, whilst the Cuban immigrants try desperately to hold onto theirs, in a country which denies their existence. When the Madrigal sisters rebel, allowing the white boys in their class to use their bodies for the sake of at least being seen, or to raise much-needed money for Luci’s treatment, Von Tore seizes Luci’s body as his God-given property: injecting, whitening, cutting, covering, burying, disinterring and penetrating it, whilst feeding us the narrative that he is but manifesting their mutual love, post-mortem.
Frustrated, horrified, and maddened you will be by Von Tore. Yet, so subtly does Parry allow the doctor’s version of events to infest that which we must take to be the truth—Gabi’s account—we are at times gaslit, as Key West’s populace is and was, into entertaining the supposed romance of it all. Just like the fetishisation of serial rapist-killers Ted Bundy and Richard Ramirez, Von Tore (as Tänzler was in life) is pitied as a hopeless romantic by a nation for whom a woman’s body has no value outside of a man’s interference.
The gruesome injustice of Orpheus is the core tenet of Parry’s nuevo-Gothic. With it, she exposes in all its Arendtian evil-banality the colonisation of female bodies by ‘well-intentioned’ men: an unchecked horror which has shaped human history. Meticulously crafted, page-turning, disturbing and provocative, if Orpheus Builds a Girl marks Heather Parry’s entrance stage-left onto the literary boards, then I wait with bated breath for the main performance to begin.
—Cal Bannerman