Violin - Softcover

Rice, Anne

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0345389425 ISBN 13: 9780345389428

Publisher: Ballantine Books, 1998

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.

While grieving the death of her husband, Triana falls prey to the demonic fiddler Stefan, a tormented ghost of a Russian aristocrat who uses his magic violin first to enchant, then to dominate and draw her into a state of madness.

But Triana understands the power of the music perhaps even more than Stefan--and she sets out to resist him and to fight, not only for her sanity, but for her life. The struggle draws them both into a terrifying supernatural realm where they find themselves surrounded by memories, by horrors, and by overwhelming truths. Battling desperately, they are at last propelled toward the novel's astonishing and unforgettable climax.

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 eighteen books. She lives in New Orleans with her husband, the poet and painter Stan Rice.
From the Hardcover edition.

About this edition

• Publisher: Ballantine Books
• Publication date: 1998
• ISBN 10: 0345389425
• ISBN 13: 9780345389428
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 304