Violin: A Novel - Softcover

Rice, Anne

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0345425308 ISBN 13: 9780345425300

Publisher: Ballantine Books, 1999

Synopsis

In the grand manner of Interview with the Vampire, Anne Rice's new novel moves across time and the continents, from nineteenth-century Vienna to a St. Charles Greek Revival mansion in present-day New Orleans to dazzling capitals of the modern-day world, telling a story of two charismatic figures bound to each other by a passionate commitment to music as a means of rapture, seduction, and liberation.

About this title

Review

If neatness counts for you, don't count on Anne Rice's musical-ghost novel Violin. It is an eruption of the author's personal demons, as messy as the monster bursting from that poor fellow's chest in the movie Alien. Like Rice, the heroine Triana lives in New Orleans, mourns a dead young daughter and a drunken mother, and is subject to uncanny visions. A violin-virtuoso ghost named Stefan time-trips and globetrots with Triana, taunting her for her inability to play his Stradivarius--which echoes composer Salieri's jealousy in Amadeus and possibly Rice's jealousy of her successful poet husband Stan Rice in the years before her own florid, lurid writing made her famous. The storytelling here is too abstract, but the almost certainly autobiographical emotions could not be more visceral. At one point, the narrator exclaims, "Shame, blame, maim, pain, vain!" But Rice's dip in the acid bath of memory was not in vain--she packs the pain of a lifetime into 289 pages.

About the Author

ANNE RICE is the author of twenty-one books. She lives in New Orleans with her husband, the poet and painter Stan Rice.

About this edition

• Publisher: Ballantine Books
• Publication date: 1999
• ISBN 10: 0345425308
• ISBN 13: 9780345425300
• Binding: Mass Market Paperback
• Number of pages: 384