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
I felt the same way when I checked it out, wondering if it would be an audio trainwreck. Now I'm wishing the library had more Proust audiobooks (if they are even available). I can't believe it has taken me so long to realize that reading out loud can make dense passages of Woolf or James or Proust much easier to understand.
ReplyDeleteAlthough I have to admit it took me years to get to the point where I could listen to books and enjoy them. Maybe it was finally coming to terms that it was not a substitute (for me) for actually reading the book.
Dear Dwight,
ReplyDeleteI have a serious problem with audio books--I think it results from the fact that I always try to indulge in them when I am otherwise occupied and cannot read. But I can't seem to keep the threads of the spoken story in my head long enough to get through the book. So I'm boggled that anyone could manage Proust--the mental discipline required is prodigious--by far easier to read the sentence. I suspect that, for me, it would be as easy to read and parse the sentence in French as it would be to listen to about half of that same sentence read to me in perfect English.
O, alas for my shortcomings. I need to build myself up to the ability to absorb a book in such a way. (And I'm not being ironic or sarcastic. I think that it would be lovely to go out walking and be able to hear a story that sticks in my head. But if I go out walking I'm too distracted by whatever it is I encounter on the walk. Ditto driving. Ditton cleaning the house. And just forget about laying on the couch or sitting in a chair and trying to absorb ANYTHING.
Just too restless. And yet, I continue to try. And perhaps with such a glittering and golden opportunity as to hear Proust, that might just be the ticket. Might.
But thank you for bringing it to my attention. And always, many thanks for your most excellent and entertaining blog. I'm deeply grateful for someone sharing their thoughts as they indulge in what was classically called the Classics.
shalom,
Steven