Violin/Open Market Edition - Softcover

Rice, Anne

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0345424468 ISBN 13: 9780345424464

Publisher: Ballantine Books, 1998

Synopsis

This big, luscious novel carries us from nineteenth-century Vienna to present-day New Orleans and Rio de Janeiro as it tells the story of three charismatic figures bound together by their obsession with music.\n\nOne is an exquisite young woman who dreams of becoming a great musician. One is a violinist, the ghost of a Russian aristocrat, who preys upon the woman--using his musical genius to enchant, command, and manipulate her and draw her into his spectral realms. The third in this triumvirate--is the crank shade of Ludwig von Beethoven.\n\nA fabulous trio. A seductively opulent world. An amalgam of the eerie and the romantic that could only come from Anne Rice at her inimitable best.

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.

Review:

"Enough to frighten even jaded readers. If anyone can make a haunted violin the object of obsession and nightmare, it's Rice" (Publishers Weekly)

"For nearly twenty years now, Anne Rice has been telling stories that share secrets - secrets of life and death, of sex and the soul, of monsters and humans" (Mikal Gilmore Rolling Stone)

About this edition

• Publisher: Ballantine Books
• Publication date: 1998
• ISBN 10: 0345424468
• ISBN 13: 9780345424464
• Binding: Paperback