Violin

Rating:
Summary: Every fine author lays an egg now and then
Review: We have seen it a million times: no matter how good you are, no matter how excellent your editors are, no matter what talent you have; every now and then a fine author turns out a loser. Violin is.

Too bad. Anne Rice is excellent and her previous books have been image-filled, lush, unique and had that keep-'em-up-at-night quality. Violin, on the other hand, plays much like a concert you didn't particularly want to go to on a Friday night after a hard week. It puts you to sleep.

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Summary: Internet Herald
Review: Not to long ago there was a series of books that came out that sold amazingly well. People bought into the idea that Vampires were real, and millions of people sold their souls to get a new chapter of the Vampire Chronicles

Now Anne Rice has produced a book that is neither a Vampire Chronicle, nor a masterpiece. The new novel Violin is actually well written, but it's possible that a person who enjoyed the pace of Interview With A Vampire might get bored of Violin.

Here is the problem. Remember when you were in Grade 12 and your teacher gave you books that you knew were good, and but they were just BORING? This is A Catcher In The Rye, The Great Gatsby and Moby Dick all rolled into one.

Now that I've scared you off, I should probably explain why Violin is a great book and you should check it out. The story is about a woman who goes crazy because the music she hears is so beautiful. Anyone who has ever heard Frente's 'Accidentally Kelly Street will know that feeling oh too well.

This lady Triana has her live in boyfriend die of HIV and as Triana mourns she hears a mystic figure playing the Violin. Perhaps this is where Anne Rice really proves that she is more than just the John Grisham of the Goth set.

You can dance to this music if you want, swing from the waist, and I do, back and forth like you're crazy, making yourself dizzy, letting your hair flop to the left and then flop to the right. You can walk round and round the room in a rim marching circle, fists clenched, going faster and faster, and how then twirling when you can before you go on walking. You can bang your head back and forth, back and forth, letting your hair fly up and over and down and dark before you ryes, before it disappears and you see the ceiling again.

Anne starts off the novel stating that she has written the novel in such a way that you do not need to know the classical music she refers to, that she'll describe it in such a way that you'll just be able to appreciate it. She's right.

She describes music better than any reviewer could ever dream of, yet she does it in an entertaining way. Describing the moods that the music causes, and not the music itself. You might not know your Beethoven from your Bach from your Bjork, but you'll want to run out and buy some just to see if the moods she describes are anywhere near what really happens.

And like a true artist, the answer is YES!! The book may not be the commercial success of 1997, but I believe that any fan of Anne Rice will enjoy the book, and people who just haven't gotten into her in the past might find a new favourite.

This is relentless music. This person is not going to give up. Onward, upward, forward, it does not matter now - woods, trees, it does not matter. All that matters is that you walk - and when there comes just a little bit of happiness again - the sweet exultant happiness of the plateau - it's caught up this time in the advancing steps. Because there is no stopping.
Not till it stops

Rating:
Summary: Better than the last two.
Review: Anne Rice may need to branch out and find another genre. While this book has lovely imagery, it lacks the page turning suspense of The Witching Hour and the senuality of The Vampire Chronicles. Triana is an average heroine at best. Wait for the paperback version.

Rating:
Summary: Only the middle section is vintage Anne Rice
Review: As an Anne Rice fan through many years and books, I found the first and last sections of Violin a disappointment. Only the middle section, in which Triana travels with Stefan through his past, utilizes the talent which keeps me coming back for more: the author's ability to evoke a time and place in such detail that I come to know it as if it were my own city and era. My favorite Rice book is The Feast of All Saints, which truly made the time and place of its setting come alive. While I found the peek into Stefan's past life intriguing, it didn't make a logical connection to his later behaviors as a ghost.

The rest of the book is sometimes tedium, sometimes agony. When I read about Triana's pain over the death of her child, I didn't see the character but only the author. I would rather have read this in an autobiography than in this novel, because I don't feel it fits well with Triana. She remained a stranger to me to the end.

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Summary: A waste of trees
Review: The vampire Lestat was her last good book. Since then, she's slid farther and farther down hill and "Violin" is just awful. I couldn't finish it.

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Summary: Poeticized prose, the music to exorcise grief
Review: VIOLIN must be appreciated as a subgenre, a specialized prose, which I would term poeticized prose. The reader cannot look to this as a traditional novel replete with intricate plot structure, subplots, a span of characters and interrelationships drawn dramatically in depth. Readers who do not appreciate the intent will perceive it as tedious. Music is the medium which Triana uses to exorcise her grief at multiple losses, the most recent the death of her husband. Music has the power to awaken memories of pain, sorrow, love and joy. It is the rosary, sounding all the mysteries -- the joyful, the sorrowful, the glorious. Rice plays all these strains with her words. Granted the dialogues are long and tedious, but so are the dialogues, the internal monologues, a grief-stricken person casts in his mind, playing and replaying the might-have-beens, the should-have-beens, blaming himself, somehow believing in his tormented mind that he could have prevented the death, if he does not outright think that he caused the death of the loved one. Rice is one acquainted with grief and it takes one also acquainted with grief to fully appreciate the paean she has produced in VIOLIN. It also requires someone with a poetical frame of mind. For this is more of poetry than of mass-market fiction. The question arises why has Rice offered the public this self-indulgence. Could it have been pulled off without the heavy-handed biography? I think so. But that is not the kind of book Rice wanted to write. Her fame allows her to ring out her woe in front of us all. If the book is considered as more poetry than as mass market fiction, she pulls it off as a poet would. She is entitled to do it just as Tennyson did with IN MEMORIAM. She intended at long last to lay to rest the spirits of her dead, to free them even from the grip of her own anguish over their deaths, in sum, to free them to be dead. Music is a way of communing with our dead. I have used it myself to assuage that loss, to bridge the void between the living and the dead, which, in the end, is no void when the bereaved comes to grips with his own spirituality. I, for one, read VIOLIN, captivated from start to finish, pulled along by the music of the words. It's a symphonic piece.

Rating:
Summary: disappointed
Review: This is my first time reading Anne Rice, I usually dont read horror. just in time for holloween. I am going to try the witching hour I hope that is better. I thought the theme was intersting but it was quite wordy. Part of the book was interesting but then it slowed down. But I did like the idea of music and the gothic supernatural, but like I said too wordy.

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Summary: Rice's Violin - One too many
Review: I was a fan of Rice right from Interview with The Vampire. But have felt that since the Vampire Lestat, she has written nothing worth reading. Violin finally puts her talents into the grave she so often fixates on. This story only further solidifies what I have felt for a long time, the fact that for some reason it seems like Rice's first novels were written by someone else or these newer ones are written by someone else. I couldn't finish Violin, and I hardly ever put down a book. Don't waste your time or money. Reread her first two or three books. Its all rambling from there on.

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Summary: An allegory of the power of creativity over death
Review: Anne Rice's Violin is a remarkably brave revisitation and transformation of her own personal pain into very lyrical prose, in an allegory of the power of creativity over death. As someone who seems always to have felt haunted by mortality (and to have sought immortality at an affordable cost in many bestselling books), in Violin Ms Rice at last confronts death face to face.

In Violin, her middle-aged protagonist confronts the agonizing losses of husband, child, mother, father and perhaps sister -- goaded into ever greater pain by the ghost of a student of Beethoven. But rather than becoming bemused by the ghostly (immortal) violinist, Triana responds to his remembered pain by creating music as the true expression of her emotions. And rather than celebrating the immortal, Triana's creativity embraces pain to illuminate life, her own and many others.

Rather than seeing Violin as self-indulgent, as some of your other reviewers write, or in need of "a caustic edit" as Kirkus Review wrote, I believe that Violin is a very generous offering from a talented writer who has long worked, with greater and lesser success, around the issues expored in this book. I really hope, after reading it, that Ms Rice derives as much joy from her writing as Triana from her music. And with Beethoven as her muse, how can she not?

Louise Elliott, Los Angeles

Rating:
Summary: One word-disappointing
Review: I'm only forty pages into this book and I'm already having trouble. I feel as if though I should finish it and get my money's worth but that could be asking alot. Even if I do try and finish it I may not be getting my money's worth. Watching Rosie O'Donnell on Friday I was excited to see that Anne Rice was going to appear. One statement she made was that not one bit of her manuscript is edited before going to print. That's pretty unusual, even for a big time writer. This book is selling due to the name on the front cover not for the quality of the writing. I hope her next book is an improvement or I'm giving up on her.