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72 of 76 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A deeply personal memoir, October 15, 2008
With CALLED OUT OF DARKNESS, Anne Rice gives readers the very first autobiographical look at herself. In doing so, we discover how little was actually known about the woman who gave us such gothic horror classics as INTERVIEW WITH THE VAMPIRE and THE VAMPIRE LESTAT. Conversely, her last two books have been fictionalized portrayals of Jesus Christ as a boy and young adult --- themes that presented quite a paradox for those who identify Rice as being strictly a writer of dark fantasy novels. This memoir answers all these questions and sheds light on how closely her novels have represented her personal feelings and struggles over many years.
CALLED OUT OF DARKNESS opens with the quote "This book is about Faith in God." Rice goes on to present her story, beginning with her childhood, after indicating that she had lost her faith for many years and reclaimed it again at age 57. Born with the unfortunate name of Howard Allen --- she changed it to Anne at an early age --- she lived with her family in a very Catholic section of New Orleans. Her upbringing was extremely Catholic and exclusionary of anything outside this teaching. She was in awe of Catholic churches and held those in authority in the highest regard without questioning anything she was taught or told.
The Catholic world Rice knew was one where priests were esteemed and respected with never any word of scandal surrounding them. During her youth, it was a time when the Catholic Church was deeply respected in America; as she puts it, the Catholic Church was "a cultural force." Living in the Deep South, she recognized that the people in her community were vigorously racist, even though her parents were not. They all accepted segregation as something that had to exist. Because of the moral blinders she had put upon herself, Rice was unable to know anything other than this world.
Though not a terribly good student or reader, Rice did take to writing at an early age and claims her first writing teachers to be Charles Dickens and Charlotte Bronte. She questioned, privately, why certain books were banned by the Catholic Church. As she became older and more curious, she sought out such forbidden tomes as Nabokov's LOLITA and the works of Albert Camus and Jean-Paul Sartre. Living in a family that did not believe in television and limited their radio listening to certain programs, Rice took private refuge in a local film art house that presented cinematic classics by directors Francois Truffaut, Ingmar Bergman, Federico Fellini, Michelangelo Antonioni and Luis Bunuel. A young Rice was discovering the world outside of the Catholic bubble in which she lived.
Rice's mother died of complications due to alcoholism, and her father shortly thereafter remarried and moved the family to Dallas. She was not only overcome by the culture shock of moving into a non-Catholic community but also faced with the fact that her stepmother was a Baptist. After high school, she started college at Texas Woman's University, and her eyes were opened even further when she saw all around her good, ethical, moral people who weren't Catholic. Her faith began to break apart.
Rice sought out the guidance of a local Catholic priest who told her that there was no life for her outside of the Church. These sentiments, which once consoled her, now caused her to revolt. She did not argue with him, but after that meeting she was no longer a Catholic. Following her college years was her marriage to Stan, her one and only lover, and she still kept up with her writing. Her first novel --- and probably her biggest success --- was INTERVIEW WITH THE VAMPIRE in 1976. Seen here and in several titles that followed was the theme of a protagonist suffering as an outcast and how one can feel shut out of various levels of meaning and, ultimately, life itself. Little did her early readers know how autobiographically these themes mirrored her own life.
INTERVIEW was an obvious lament for Rice's own loss of faith. The vampires she depicts live in a God-less world, and her hero, Louis, searches in vain for meaningful context to his own existence. Rice's life was not without tragedy. She lost a young daughter to leukemia at the age of seven. This pain was exhibited in her 1997 novel, VIOLIN, in which the lead character of Triana loses a six-year-old daughter to that same disease and seeks solace in the spiritual gift of a Stradivarius violin. This book reflected Rice's sudden turn back to Catholicism --- a turn that was solidified following her own health scare in December 1998, when she nearly died from a diabetic coma. She marks this event as her return to God. The themes of her succeeding books dealt with a journey through atheism back to God and showed an obsession with the possibility of a new and enlightened moral order.
Rice began to feel "Christ haunted," and there was so much personal reflection going on in her literary releases between 1998 and 2002 that readers would not understand where the motivation for them came from. Finally, on October 5, 2002, a day after her birthday, Lestat made his official farewell and Anne began her new life as a writer for Christ. The resulting works were two novels about Christ's youth and young adulthood: CHRIST THE LORD: OUT OF EGYPT and CHRIST THE LORD: THE ROAD TO CANA. They were met with mixed reviews, mainly due to the fact that her loyal readership did not understand the sudden genre shift. How would a woman who built her career on "vampire fiction" be able to write about Jesus?
CALLED OUT OF DARKNESS is a deeply personal memoir that I wish had come a lot earlier. As a long-time reader of Anne Rice's, the impetus she presents here makes me want to re-read many of her prior works. I highly recommend this book to anyone who seeks the inspiration and motivation behind the bestselling novels they've read. Even though CALLED OUT OF DARKNESS leaves several questions as to where the author will go from here unanswered, the journey she has gone through is certainly worth the trip.
--- Reviewed by Ray Palen
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45 of 52 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
An Interesting Memoir, October 7, 2008
Of all genres of books, memoirs may be the toughest to review. After all, how is a reviewer to evaluate the life experiences of another person? What is the measure of a good memoir and what is the measure of a poor one? Ultimately, as a reviewer, I can judge only the power and effectiveness of the writing, the truthfulness of what the author claims as fact, and, more subjectively, the personal impact of the person's life-story. And with these criteria in mind, I turn to Called Out of Darkness: A Spiritual Confession by novelist Anne Rice.
The fact that Rice has rediscovered the faith of her childhood is well-documented; it is seen most clearly in the transition of the subject matter of her novels. Gone are the stories of vampires and in their place is her multi-volume account of the life of Christ (click to read my review of the most recent entry in the series, Christ the Lord: The Road to Cana). In this book, a confession of sorts, she explains why she walked away from her faith to begin with and how, decades later, she recovered it. She says in the first chapter, "I want to tell, as simply as I can--and nothing with me as a writer has ever really been simple--the story of how I made my decision of the heart. So here is the story of one path to God. The story has a happy ending because I have found the Transcendent God both intellectually and emotionally. And complete belief in Him and devotion to Him, no matter how interwoven with occasional fear and constant personal failure and imperfection, has become the true story of my life."
Called Out of Darkness gets off to quite a slow start, buried in the details of Rice's earliest days growing up in ultra-Catholic New Orleans. She was raised in an extremely devout Roman Catholic family and she expends a great deal of effort in describing this period of her life. Though I found the first few chapters burdensome, I understand their importance; Rice wishes to set the stage, really clearly set the stage, for the return of her faith later in life. Despite the Church playing a crucial role in her early life, she soon pushed it aside. It was as a young adult that Rice walked away from her faith, not because of scandal or deep-rooted doubts, but because she wanted to know more of the modern world than her church would allow her to see and to experience. Like so many young people, she found that her faith could not survive her college years. It was not until she was fifty-seven that she would find it again.
As we'd expect from Anne Rice, Called Out of Darkness is largely well-written though it is perhaps a tad verbose or melodramatic or unnecessarily atmospheric at times, and especially so at the beginning (e.g. "The sky during these trips was often bloodred, or purple, and the trees were so thick that one could only see hundreds of fragments of the sky amid clusters of darkening leaves. The color of the sky seemed to me to be connected with the song of the cicadas, and the drowsy shadows playing everywhere on the margins of what was visible, and the distinct feel of the humid air. Even in winter the air was moist, so that the world itself seemed to be pulsing around us, enfolding us, holding us as we moved through it."). But Rice is a gifted author and she more than compensates for occasional verbosity with prose that is at times good and at times even exceptional.
Some of the most interesting passages in the memoir have Rice describing her own books, explaining and interpreting the characters and the themes. There is much of her and much of her life story in these books and she does a great job of showing how her characters have always been a reflection of herself. In this context we understand that, once she rediscovered the faith of her childhood, she was able to retire her faithful old characters and turn to new subject matter.
In the book's final pages, Rice describes what her faith looks like today and how she lives it out. She bewails the way Christians disagree among themselves about what she considers petty issues. This was of particular interest to me. A few weeks ago I reviewed Crossbearer, a memoir by Joe Eszterhas. One thing I noted in that review was that Eszterhas had discovered Roman Catholic faith, but had done so in a pick-and-choose manner, accepting what resonated with him and rejecting what had not. To some extent the same is true with Anne Rice; she found herself unable to consent to the Church's teaching on several issues. Of great concern to her are the issues of gender, sexuality and homosexuality (though, ironically, she says that Christians ought not to have such an interest in these matters). "Try as I might," she says, "I can find nothing in Holy Scripture that supports this contemporary obsession with sex and gender on the part of our conservative churches." She makes the rather audacious statement that "Jesus Christ Himself cared nothing about gender at all" and that he insisted upon equality for all people. This is true, in a sense, and Jesus did revolutionize the way men and women were to perceive one another. However, while Jesus insisted in equality of worth and value, this does not necessarily mean that men and women are to have identical or interchangeable roles. A look to the New Testament epistles will reveal what Jesus says through His people about how men and women are to serve in the church and it will reveal what Jesus says about sexuality. The emphasis on these subjects in both Catholic and Protestant circles proves their critical importance; the emphases on these subjects in Rice's own book proves their importance.
Called Out of Darkness will undoubtedly appeal to the bona fide card-carrying Anne Rice fans and to those who are interested in spiritual memoirs. Even to me, one who has read her works only sparingly, this was an enjoyable memoir and one I am glad I read. It is an interesting glimpse into an interesting life and, at least to this reader, sounds a warning against what seems to be a natural human tendency. It shows once again a faith that submits to some kind of transcendence and that gives its adherent peace and comfort but that, at one point or another, resists the extrinsic authority that seeks to shape and define it, whether it be the authority of Scripture or Church or, in this instance, both.
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24 of 29 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A conversion to Christ, October 10, 2008
I have just finished Called Out of Darkness: A Spiritual Confession by Anne Rice and I found it to be a quite powerful conversion to Christ beautifully written. As someone who was a fan of so many of her books and was quite pleased with her two books on Jesus I was looking forward to reading this book.
A large section of the book starts with her experiences growing up Catholic in New Orleans where the local culture was decidedly Catholic and centered around parish life. She writes about her fascination with the church as a child and her interest in architecture, statues, stained glass windows, and all that made up most Catholic churches of that period. It reminded me of what Pope Benedict said about biblia pauperum . "The bible of the poor",comprised of non-literary works, such as icons, images, hymns, windows, etc. Before she could read she was able to learn about the Church and the lives of the saints to some extent. This interest in sacred architecture and statues was also something she was interested with throughout her life, ever her 38 years as an atheist. It was also something that was a possible anchor that later helped her back into the Church, though certainly not the deciding one. I have read many conversions stories of how these images and the sacramental nature of the Church later had an effect on bringing people back to the Church. She speaks of this time with much love about growing up in this time period where pretty much every person she came in contact with was Catholic. She gives her reflections on the traditional Mass and the Latin hymns she learned to love and gives us an insight into this particular time and place of Catholics in America and her desires at one time to become a nun.
Though all is not idyllic as she enters school which she hates, though she does not hate the nuns who taught her and holds them in very high esteem. Ironically it was reading that made school the most difficult for her and it would take her quite a while to really become a reader. She really pours herself in her writing as she describes her experiences and her family and the good and the bad situations that occurred within her family. Two of her aunts were nuns and her father had gone to seminary and so the Catholic view of life permeated most of her childhood. The Catholic schools she went to were quite good, but like man schools of the time a real introduction to scripture was lacking with much memorization of the Baltimore Catechism. While this type of memorization is a great first step it must be followed up with a greater understanding of theology, scripture and Church teaching.
I must say though that I was quite surprised by what her real first name is and can easily understand why she told the nuns her name was Anne and got her sisters to call her that also. Regardless of the Catholic culture she grew up with, like so many when she left to go to college it was not long until she no longer practiced her faith and then moved onto atheism. The transition from a childhood faith to ownership of that faith is often a difficult transition and a surface understanding of the faith is usually not enough. The intellectual vastness of the faith is something that unfortunately few seem to grasp and the Church gets reduced down to laws and rules.
The thirty eight years of her atheism is not really covered in depth. She takes great care to make this book a spiritual biography and only deals with events that would make her once more think of God and the route along the way that brought her back to the Church. She does deal with her vampire novels to some extent and the worldview they came out of that was directly related to her loss of spiritual life. But this book is not about her and her triumphs as an author, but of her journey. The last section of the book deals with the events that brought her back to the Church and I must say there were often tears in my eyes as I read what she had to write. Her conversion was a real act of humility as she put aside her doubts and to truly put her trust in Christ. At one point she writes "And why should I remain apart from Him just because I couldn't grasp all this? He could grasp it. Of course! It was love that brought me to this awareness, love that brought me into a complete trust in him ..." She also discusses what she felt was her call to write of Christ which have resulted into two novels so far and the intense reading of the Gospels and other books. The famous poem of Francis Thompson the Hound of Heaven plays a part and she describes herself as Christ haunted and felt that she was being pursued by God. Her insights into much of the skeptical biblical scholarship lead her to a quite orthodox Christology that you can see in those two books.
There is much in this book to recommend it and oddly for a conversion story I found it to be a real page turner. As a conversion story it is quite moving and her efforts to follow Christ and her recognition of herself as a baby Christian shows a surprising humility. There were many things she wrote that I as an ex-atheist could readily relate to. Also interesting was an awakening to the world of faith around her that she had really not seen and how Hollywood and others manage to not see it either. That being said I had a few quibbles here and there in what she wrote. It is quite obvious that throughout the book she favors women's ordination. She once wanted to be a priest and when told she couldn't she figured that this would change at some point. A priest told her at some point that at one time theologians debated whether women have souls (which is pretty much mythical). Her son has same-sex attraction and it is evident that she does not understand the Church's teaching since she seems to confuse condemnation of homosexual acts as condemnation of those who have the cross of same-sex attraction. The same goes for her understanding of sexual morality to some extent. She has an excellent understanding of Christology and hopefully she will come to a greater understanding of ecclesiology Though even when touching on these issues there was not a "me against the Church" attitude, but an evident willingness to come to a greater understanding and that following Christ was of the greatest importance.
So despite my quibbles I highly recommend this book because it is also a book on Christian discipleship, on living the faith and letting Christ lead you even into the unknown.
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