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
Why the reference to Dostoyevski?
ReplyDeleteOr was that merely a teaser?
Dear Fred,
ReplyDeleteOther than Joyce Carol Oates (and in the recent past Isaac Asimov) Alexander McCall Smith is one of the most prolific authors writing. He's relatively recent author who is producing a tremendous amount of material all the time--several books a year. That's the reference to Dostoevsky--sheer output. So much so that Dostoevsky is suspected of having temporal lobe epilepsy, which manifests in quite a different way than what we are used to for epilepsy.
shalom,
Steven
Steven,
ReplyDeleteOK. I was wondering. I have read some of Smith's works, and he never struck me as being especially Dostoyevskian in his writings.