Violin

Anne Rice

ISBN 10: 0701165200 / ISBN 13: 9780701165208

Published by Chatto & Windus, London, 1997

About this Item

Fine book in fresh clean black cloth covers with bright gilt titles to spine. Internally mint and free of inscriptions. The dust jacket is very fine and not price clipped. A lovely copy.

Seller Inventory # 006694

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Violin
• Publisher: Chatto & Windus, London
• Publication Date: 1997
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0701165200
• ISBN 13: 9780701165208
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition: First Edition
• Condition: Fine
• Dust Jacket Condition: Fine
• Seller catalogs:
  • Modern First Editions

About this title

Synopsis

First edition. Minor wear on edge of dust jacket. Otherwise appears to be unread.

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.