Violin (Paperback)

~ (Author) "WHAT I seek to do here perhaps cannot be done in words..." (more)
Key Phrases: young ghost, cherry laurels, Miss Hardy, Anne Rice, New Orleans (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com 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. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

From Booklist

Advice to Rice: don't write so much. She could have easily skipped her latest novel. She simply doles out hackneyed Rice themes and motifs and expects them to fly. They don't. In her New Orleans home, 54-year-old Triana Becker attends her partner Karl's death by AIDS; despite her focus on this horrible experience transpiring before her eyes, she is distracted by a violin-playing figure stepping in and out of shadows. Triana, in adolescence, had wanted to be a concert violinist, but the dream never materialized. Now she is seduced by this elusive figure's playing, and his seductiveness draws her into his netherworld, where she must encounter not only troubled memories but also the apparition's troubled past. But his violin--in her hands, will it give her the star-musician status she always dreamed of possessing? By the time that question is answered, the reader is weary of Rice's clumsy prose style and her lack of inventiveness in terms of plot. But she has fans galore, so be prepared for high demand. Brad Hooper --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

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Product Details

• Paperback
• Publisher: Alfred A Knopf (January 1, 1997)
• ISBN-10: 9650397043
• ISBN-13: 978-9650397043
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6.1 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 2.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (258 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #2,220,684 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

13 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Self-indulgent emotional effusion., February 23, 2000

By	Margaret Fiore (North Granby, CT USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Violin (Hardcover)

Few authors handle the English language as musically and rhythmically as Anne Rice; this book is a beautifully flowing wash of words. However, the book is also supremely and tiresomely self-indulgent.

In this book, Rice has committed an egregious offence popular to many amateur authors: she talks directly of raw emotions rather than showing them in the actions of the characters, or building them into the atmosphere of the scenes. Unlike most of Rice' other works, which are a more even (and effective) mix of plot and introspection, Violin is simply chock-full of endless internal ponderings on death and guilt.

We begin the book with the death of Triana's AIDS-ridden husband Karl. Triana falls into a trance of despair and denial, and spends a couple of days alone in the house with the corpse and memories of all those she has loved and lost. So far so good! But somewhere in this wallowing in thoughts of death, we lose Karl. He becomes nothing more than a vanished benefactor, who paved Triana's life with money.

And then comes her ghost. From the beginning, the ghost is ambiguous. Good or evil? Bringing pleasure or pain? And for what purpose? Eventually, Triana takes up the position that the ghost intended to drive her insane. But it seems more a rationalization than a truth.

The remainder of the tale has no internal logic. Triana and her ghost ramble about from century to century, palace to palace, luxury to luxury. Triana progresses from wealth to talent to renown, and on to an ultimate victory. Why? How has she earned this? Where is the conflict or sacrifice? Should Triana's obsessive and unjustified guilt for the deaths of her loved ones earn such rewards?

Sorry Anne, it doesn't work.

27 of 33 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Painful and Torturous, June 25, 2000

By	J. B. Barton "Beth Barton" (Saint Petersburg, FL) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

This review is from: Violin (Mass Market Paperback)

I have tried and tried to read this book. The first time, I made it only to page 14. Feeling that maybe it picked up after that, I gave it another chance and, after two weeks and sixty seven pages, I am crying uncle. I think that a book should pull you in - it should be read out of entertainment, not perserverence.

Rice is usually the very best when it comes to character development but her efforts here to pull you into the main character's madness results in pages and pages of ramblings from the character's mind about classical musicians and disjointed recollections of unintroduced and/or undeveloped characters. While she convinces you of the near madness of the character, she fails to begin to develop the plot. Each little thing that happens in the story - and there have been frustratingly few of those so far - sends the character into long departures from the story line. While other writers, like Gilman (The Yellow Wallpaper) have successfully used stream of consciousness writing to portray madness, Rice's tendency towards the inadvertant ramble makes this a inadvisable attempt on her part.

Plus, new characters keep being introduced so that it is difficult to keep the 'cast' straight in your head for the main character's coherent moments when it would be nice to remember, for example, which chaffeur had always been around and which was the new one. Vague references to her life before meeting her present late husband leave the reader reeling trying to figure out where the character has been, what happened, and which of the people she talks about are actually involved with the current story line. On average, I would say that there is about one paragraph of explanations to every two to three pages of ramblings.

Having faith in Rice, who is one of my favorite fictional authors, I wouldn't be surprised if the story eventually took hold and blossomed. But it will only be the determined reader and avid Rice fan that will make the effort to find out.

11 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars One Star is TOO much, December 3, 1999

By	Virginia Rifleman "Rifleman" (Virginia) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Violin (Mass Market Paperback)

I gave this book one star because zero wasn't available.

Anne Rice has always been marvelous at drawing mental pictures for me as I read her books. This one drew mental blanks.

Actually, the story line is very good. The ghost, the history, the intertwining stories of the Russian prince and the New Orleans Socialite were intriguing. But the excess of words! Rice's flowery writing has always caused her stories to soar. In this one, the prose was a boat anchor. For a while, I reread every paragraph trying to figure out what she had said, but finally gave up. I had to force myself to finish it.