Review copy received 11/04/09 From the time of its announcement, I had been looking forward to this new book by Anne Rice. As I say in every review, I am not a die-hard Anne Rice fan. I found Interview with a Vampire interesting and intriguing, but in hindsight, must lay much of the responsibility of the current vampire as victim and love-object obsession at its feet. After that, I had no patience with her writing until Christ the Lord: Out of Egypt. In that book I observed a kind of control and authorial voice that I had not seen in any of the books I had sampled since Interview . So too with Christ the Lord: The Road to Cana. Perhaps because of the subject matter, perhaps for other reasons, these two books seemed to witness a level of control of language and story that the other books did not. Gone were messy florid passages that lavished two, three, four paragraphs on the description of the lace and flounce of a jabot. These new books were spare, polished, poetic. The
But he is among the greatest and most original novelists alive. Why he has not been given the Nobel is a mystery.
ReplyDeleteDear Mr. Wilson,
ReplyDeleteHow wonderful to find another who is even aware of him. The internet truly makes available the wide world of readers. I couldn't agree more with your evaluation. The only thing I can figure is that they stand for too traditional a moral view of the universe. Once upon a time Francois Mauriac could win a Nobel Prize--but now that view is no longer respectable--hence Mr. Lindgren languishes without a prize. It doesn't matter, so long as he keeps writing.
Thank you for commenting.
shalom,
Steven
Could you tell us a bit more about Torgny Lindgren?
ReplyDeleteI checked the local library, and all it has is an international short story anthology with one of his stories.
Dear Fred,
ReplyDeleteThis will require more than a simple response. I hope to compose something this evening to meet the need.
Thank you for asking.
shalom,
Steven