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
Thanks, Steven, for sharing this discovery. I am now a weekly subscriber to the LOA offerings, which are wonderful additions to my reading schedule.
ReplyDeleteSomeday, if I win the lottery, I think I will buy a complete collection of all LOA titles. The books are beautiful editions. I hope that LOA can keep its promise of keeping their books "in print" permanently.
Steven, I have linked to your posting at my blog. Here is the link:
ReplyDeletehttp://novelsandstories.blogspot.com/2010/03/something-new-from-library-of-america.html
Dear RT,
ReplyDeleteI love the LOA books and have a great many of them. I'm looking to rejoin and collect the rest because they make such a nice uniform edition and it becomes very easy for me to find certain things. For example, the Nathaneal West volume allows me to have all four major works in one volume. They're in the process of having a complete Philip Roth, and have a mostly complete Faulkner. Again, wonderful series with some interesting authors one might not otherwise find.
shalom,
Steven
Steven,
ReplyDeleteThanks for posting the LoA link. I just signed up for the story of the week.
Frankly I'm almost afraid to go browsing through the LoA offerings, if you know what I mean.
Dear Fred,
ReplyDeleteI have shelves and shelves and shelves of understanding whereof you speak--All of Henry James, All of Willa Cather, Herman Melville, Poe, Hawthorne, and a (probably too large) collection of William Dean Howells. Oh, yes, I understand completely and yet, I fly very close to that flame, thinking--I'll reup my subscription and get all the rest, in time. . .
Ah well.
shalom,
Steven
Dear RT,
ReplyDeleteWhat I should have said yesterday and failed to do so, is that while I appreciate the link and the attention, the original did come from the Whispering Gum site and he had some nice comments on the story du jour. My apologies for not making this clearer. And my thanks to you for the link.
shalom,
Steven
Steven,
ReplyDeleteI think I'll just atay with the short stories for awhile and maybe take a peek at the offerings around my birthday.