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...
Steven, I'm inclined to think that almost ANY translation -- RSV, KJV, Confraternity of Catholic Doctrine (1954), Msgr Ronald Knox, the Douay-Rheims, any translation -- would be better than the collection of cacophonies that is the New American Bible. I mean, "Learn from the way the wild flowers grow" for "Consider the lilies of the field." What the ...?
ReplyDeleteDear Dylan,
ReplyDeleteYes, it is ear- and heart-crippling--a leaden thunder of a translation with no edge of the transcendent. As you note, I prefer to read almost any translation, or for that matter paraphrase. If there were not already enough to drive people away from the faith, this one work might prove sufficient.
shalom,
Steven