Violin: A Novel

"Sit back and enjoy. . . . The story flows like blood--the life-giving, life-celebrating kind."--San Francisco Chronicle"A PASSIONATE MIXTURE OF EARTHLY FEARS AND SUPERNATURAL TERRORS."--The Baltimore Sun"[AN] ABSORBING NOVEL THAT TAKES THE READER ON A SUSPENSEFUL JOURNEY THROUGH TIME, PLACE, AND MIND . . . The instrument of the title belongs to a ghost, the brooding 19th-century aristocrat Stefan, who ventures to 20th-century New Orleans to brew up mischief and seek release from his torment. Told from the point of view of Triana, the humane woman drawn into Stefan's nefarious plot, the tale charts two lives touched by tragedy and alienation. . . . A rich, detailed literary symphony."--The Cleveland Plain Dealer"THE TALE OF A DEVILISHLY HAUNTING STRADIVARIUS . . . HER BEST WORK SINCE 1990'S THE WITCHING HOUR."--The Dallas Morning News"FULL OF EVOCATIVE IMAGERY . . . THIS IS A BOOK THAT UNDRESSES ITS CHARACTERS LAYER BY LAYER."--USA Today From the Paperback edition. From the Inside Flap Anne Rice's Violin tells the story of two charismatic figures bound to each other by a passionate commitment to music as a means of rapture, seduction, and liberation.At the novel's center: a uniquely fascinating woman, Triana, and the demonic fiddler Stefan, a tormented ghost who begins to prey upon her, using his magic violin to draw her into a state of madness. But Triana sets out to resist Stefan, and the struggle thrusts them both into a terrifying supernatural realm.Violin flows abundant with the history, the drama, and the romantic intensity that have become synonymous with Anne Rice at her incomparable best.Anne Rice is the author of eighteen books. She lives in New Orleans.Also available as a Random House AudioBook From the Trade Paperback edition. --This text refers to the hardcover edition. Anne Rice is the author of eighteen books. She lives in New Orleans with her husband, the poet and painter Stan Rice. --This text refers to the hardcover edition. "Sit back and enjoy. . . . The story flows like blood--the life-giving, life-celebrating kind."--San Francisco Chronicle"A PASSIONATE MIXTURE OF EARTHLY FEARS AND SUPERNATURAL TERRORS."--The Baltimore Sun"[AN] ABSORBING NOVEL THAT TAKES THE READER ON A SUSPENSEFUL JOURNEY THROUGH TIME, PLACE, AND MIND . . . The instrument of the title belongs to a ghost, the brooding 19th-century aristocrat Stefan, who ventures to 20th-century New Orleans to brew up mischief and seek release from his torment. Told from the point of view of Triana, the humane woman drawn into Stefan's nefarious plot, the tale charts two lives touched by tragedy and alienation. . . . A rich, detailed literary symphony."--The Cleveland Plain Dealer"THE TALE OF A DEVILISHLY HAUNTING STRADIVARIUS . . . HER BEST WORK SINCE 1990'S THE WITCHING HOUR."--The Dallas Morning News"FULL OF EVOCATIVE IMAGERY . . . THIS IS A BOOK THAT UNDRESSES ITS CHARACTERS LAYER BY LAYER."--USA Today --This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition. 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 an alternate kindle_edition edition. From Kirkus Reviews Anne Rice in her short form, and yet dreadfully in need of a caustic edit. Wavering between dream and reality, Rice (Servant of the Bones, 1996, etc.) opens with vastly wealthy Triana Becker's heartbreak in New Orleans as her husband Karl dies of AIDS. She lies embracing Karl's corpse for two days, celebrates the love he and she had, and longs to follow him into the grave: ``All the blood in our dark sweet grave is gone, gone, gone, save mine, and in our bower of earth I bleed as simply as I sigh. If blood is wanted now for any reason under God, I have enough for all of us.'' As the reader struggles for a footing in all this gush, Triana's mourning flows into a bitter argument with her sisters, Katrinka and Rosalind, as they ponder where their missing younger sister Faye has gone, noting that a vagabond violinist who has been pursuing Triana has also vanished. Triana has seen a lot of death: her father, her drunkard mother, and the young daughter she and her first husband, Lev, lost to cancer. When Prince Stefan Stefanovsky, the violinist in question and now a ghost, returns with his fiddle, she parries his advances in surprisingly wooden dialogue. She steals his Stradivarius and, vamping its phantom strings, is able to transport herself and Stefan back to Vienna and Beethoven, then to Venice and Paganini, and, in increasingly surreal sequences, to Rio de Janeiro and to triumphs as an untutored virtuoso, even as the Strad summons up all her dead from the beyond. Of the gilded pen that single-handedly revived the vampire genre much can be forgiven, but this soul-mush is worse than Marie Corelli's, who molded such lavender vapors into novels a century ago (The Sorrows of Satan, etc.) and is now well-forgotten. (First printing of 750,000; Book-of-the-Month Club main selection) -- Copyright ©1997, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved. --This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition 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 an alternate kindle_edition edition. Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. 1 xa0 HE CAME before the day Karl died. xa0 It was late afternoon, and the city had a drowsy dusty look, the traffic on St. Charles Avenue roaring as it always does, and the big magnolia leaves outside had covered the flagstones because I had not gone out to sweep them. xa0 I saw him come walking down the Avenue, and when he reached my corner he didn’t come across Third Street. Rather he stood before the florist shop, and turned and cocked his head and looked at me. xa0 I was behind the curtains at the front window. Our house has many such long windows, and wide generous porches. I was merely standing there, watching the Avenue and its cars and people for no very good reason at all, as I’ve done all my life. xa0 It isn’t too easy for someone to see me behind the curtains. The corner is busy; and the lace of the curtains, though torn, is thick because the world is always there, drifting by right around you. xa0 He had no visible violin with him then, only a sack slung over his shoulder. He merely stood and looked at the house—and turned as though he had come now to the end of his walk and would return, slowly, by foot as he had approached—just another afternoon Avenue stroller. xa0 He was tall and gaunt, but not at all in an unattractive way. His black hair was unkempt and rock musician long, with two braids tied back to keep it from his face, and I remember I liked the way it hung down his back as he turned around. I remember his coat on account of that—an old dusty black coat, terribly dusty, as though he’d been sleeping somewhere in the dust. I remember this because of the gleaming black hair and the way it broke off rough and ragged and long and so pretty. xa0 He had dark eyes; I could see that much over the distance of the corner, the kind of eyes that are deep, sculpted in the face so that they can be secretive, beneath arching brows, until you get really close and see the warmth in them. He was lanky, but not graceless. xa0 He looked at me and he looked at the house. And then off he went, with easy steps, too regular, I suppose. But then what did I know about ghosts at the time? Or how they walk when they come through? xa0 He didn’t come back until two nights after Karl died. I hadn’t told anyone Karl was dead and the telephone-answering machine was lying for me. xa0 These two days were my own. xa0 In the first few hours after Karl was gone, I mean really truly gone, with the blood draining down to the bottom of his body, and his face and hands and legs turning very white, I had been elated the way you can be after a death and I had danced and danced to Mozart. xa0 Mozart was always my happy guardian, the Little Genius, I called him, Master of His Choir of Angels, that is Mozart; but Beethoven is the Master of My Dark Heart, the captain of my broken life and all my failures. xa0 That first night when Karl was only dead five hours, after I changed the sheets and cleaned up Karl’s body and set his hands at his sides, I couldn’t listen to the angels of Mozart anymore. Let Karl be with them. Please, after so much pain. And the book Karl had compiled, almost finished, but not quite—its pages and pictures strewn across his table. Let it wait. So much pain. xa0 I turned to my Beethoven. xa0 I lay on the floor of the living room downstairs—the corner room, through which light comes from the Avenue both front and side, and I played Beethoven’s Ninth. I played the torture part. I played the Second Movement. Mozart couldn’t carry me up and out of the death; it was time for anguish, and Beethoven knew and the Second Movement of the symphony knew. xa0 No matter who dies or when, the Second Movement of the Ninth Symphony just keeps going. xa0 When I was a child, I loved the last movement of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, as does everybody. I loved the chorus singing the “Ode to Joy.” I can’t count the times I’ve seen it—here, Vienna once, San Francisco several times during the cold years when I was away from my city. xa0 But in these last few years, even before I met Karl, it was the Second Movement that really belonged to me. xa0 It’s like walking music, the music of someone walking doggedly and almost vengefully up a mountain. It just goes on and on and on, as though the person won’t stop walking. Then it comes to a quiet place, as if in the Vienna Woods, as if the person is suddenly breathless and exultant and has the view of the city that he wants, and can throw up his arms, and dance in a circle. The French horn is there, which always makes you think of woods and dales and shepherds, and you can feel the peace and the stillness of the woods and the plateau of happiness of this person standing there, but thenxa0… xa0 xa0…xa0then the drums come. And the uphill walk begins again, the determined walking and walking. Walking and walking. xa0 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 grim marching circle, fists clenched, going faster and faster, and now and 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 your eyes, before it disappears and you see the ceiling again. xa0 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 walkxa0…xa0and 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. xa0 Not till it stops. xa0 And that’s the end of the Second Movement. And I can roll over on the floor, and hit the button again, and bow my head, and let the movement go on, independent of all else, even grand and magnificent assurances that Beethoven tried to make, it seemed, to all of us, that everything would someday be understood and this life was worth it. xa0 That night, the night after Karl’s death, I played the Second Movement long into the morning; until the room was full of sunlight and the parquet floor was glaring. And the sun made big beams through the holes in the curtains. And above, the ceiling, having lost all those headlights of the long night’s traffic, became a smooth white, like a new page on which nothing is written. xa0 Once, at noon, I let the whole symphony play out. I closed my eyes. The afternoon was empty, with only the cars outside, the never ending cars that speed up and down St. Charles Avenue, too many for its narrow lanes, too fast for its old oaks and gently curved street lamps, drowning out in their alien thunder even the beautiful and regular roar of the old streetcar. A clang. A rattle. A noise that should have been a racket, and was once I suppose, though I never in all my life, which is over half a century, remember the Avenue ever truly being quiet, except in the small hours. xa0 I lay that day in silence because I couldn’t move. I couldn’t do anything. Only when it got dark again did I go upstairs. The sheets were still clean. The body was stiff. I knew it was rigor mortis; there was little change in his face; I’d wrapped his face round and round with clean white cloth to keep his mouth closed, and I’d closed his eyes myself. And though I lay there all night, curled up next to him, my hand on his cold chest, it wasn’t the same as it had been when he was soft. xa0 The softness came back by midmorning. Just a relaxing of the body all over. The sheets were soiled. Foul smells were there. But I had no intention of recognizing them. I lifted his arms easily now. I bathed him again. I changed everything, as a nurse would, rolling the body to one side for the clean sheet, then back in order to cover and tuck in the clean sheet on the other. xa0 He was white, and wasted, but he was pliant once again. And though the skin was sinking, pulling away from the features of his face, they were still his features, those of my Karl, and I could see the tiny cracks in his lips unchanged, and the pale colorless tips of his eyelashes when the sunshine hit them. xa0 The upstairs room, the western room, that was the one in which he’d wanted us to sleep, and in which he died, because the sun does come there late through the little attic windows. xa0 This is a cottage, this huge house, this house of six Corinthian columns and black cast-iron railings. It’s just a cottage really, with grand spaces on one floor, and small bedrooms carved from its once cavernous attic. When I was very little it was only attic then, and smelled so sweet, like wood all the time, like wood and attic. Bedrooms came when my younger sisters came. xa0 This western corner bedroom was a pretty room. He’d been right to choose it, dress it so bountifully, right to fix everything. It had been so simple for him. --This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition. 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. --This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition. Read more