Angel Time--Anne Rice
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 sp...
I was a bit confused by the article. What was the "misprint or mis-edit" of James' quotation? James's comment was about Hammett, whereas Nicole's review was about Chandler.
ReplyDeleteDear Fred,
ReplyDeleteThe misprint is that the James quotation as printed reads:
"ruthlessly pruned of all essentials. . ."
and it should read "ruthlessly pruned of all non-essentials."
And yes, the writer starts with a very brief foray mentioned Hammett's _The Thin Man_ and then spends much of the article talking about how Chandler's style is more evocative before returning to _The Thin Man_.
I suppose I'm one of those who thinks that everyone ought to read more Hammett AND Chandler, and reasonable articles that tell us why.
Thanks for your note.
shalom,
Steven
Steven,
ReplyDeleteThanks for clearing up the misprint.
I also think we should read more of Hammett and Chandler.
Two different writers--two different styles...
Both get the job done, as far as I'm concerned.