Violin - Anne Rice

I am an avid reader, and have no problem wading through page upon page of lengthy description and rarely used words. In fact, I revel in a tough novel, as I feel like I am being challenged. Sometimes though, challenges are just not worthy of the effort. I am a huge Anne Rice fan. I think her descriptions are haunting, her characters beautiful. Because of this, when I was on holiday in France a few years ago, I was excited to see "Violin", one of the only English books in the store. I took it back to my hotel, and began to read. Within the two weeks, I put the book down, and forgot to pick it up until I got home, when I began ...  Read the complete review

Violin is my favourite of Anne Rice's books, although it had me in tears more times than I could count. Being a fan of Anne Rice, I was very aware that the child's death she reocunted was almost certainly bosed on the loss of her own daughter, and the journey through grief and into peace was a personal one. This is a heartrending account of berevement, often disturbing in its dismal gloom, but finally hopeful. I love the plot and the obbsessive focus on the violin - perhaps you have to be a musician to understand the seductive power that certain individual instruments can possess. The ghostly young man who haunts the central figure is a strange fellow, and i ...  Read the complete review

Violin is one of the latest offerings from Anne Rice, author of the famous Vampire Chronicles. I would say I'm a big Rice fan, I loved Interview with the Vampire, Lestat and Queen of the Damned. They were beautifully written and spell-binding in parts. But Violin is awful. Its painfully slow for about the first ten chapters and it is so hard to read I found I couldn't manage more than a chapter at a time. The main character is Triana, whose husband has just died of aids. In her desperate grief Triana hears the music of a haunted violin and falls in love with the sound. The violinist is a dead Russian aristocratic come to comfort and ...  Read the complete review