Interview with the Vampire by Anne Rice
My rating: 4 of 5 stars The Sad Vampire: "A Silver Clock Ticking in a Void" You might think that having immortality, a perfect complexion, and super strength, speed, healing, and senses would be a gift. But wait--imagine eternal nocturnal life: an endless series of years comprised of a never-ending series of nights (the sun and daytime are off limits to vampires). After the intoxication of heightened perceptions wore off, you might come to feel bored or out of touch with a given century. You might come to dread the prospect of never dying. And if you saw the taking of human life as a horrible crime, being a vampire might become a curse. Perhaps all that's why in the world of Anne Rice's Interview with the Vampire (1976), the oldest vampire is a mere 400 years old. The novel consists of Louis, a nearly 200-year-old vampire, telling his unhappy life story to a mortal "boy" interviewer who is rather clumsily recording it on cassette tapes (it is the 1970s after all). Louis begins by recounting how he became a vampire near New Orleans in 1791 and began a strange and strained relationship with the vampire who turned him, Lestat. While Louis is a reluctant predator of humans, revering life and retaining his human feeling (it takes him four years to start feeding on mortals, and he feels guilty once he starts), Lestat is a callous and wanton killer seemingly intent on revenging himself for his immortality on the mortality of humans. Lestat can't understand why Louis must always be so reluctant and remorseful in his new life: "You look the gift horse of immortality in the mouth." Louis cannot understand why Lestat refuses to explain the meaning of it all to him. Did God or the devil make vampires? And why? Although Louis finds Lestat repugnant and Lestat finds Louis exasperating, they stay together because Louis continues to hope for answers from Lestat, because Lestat needs a financial provider like Louis (who is a wealthy plantation and land owner), and because they appear to be the only vampires around. The most interesting development in the novel occurs when Louis and Lestat become fathers when Lestat turns a five-year-old girl into their vampire daughter in order to keep Louis with him: quite the modern (19th-century) family! Claudia is a fascinating character because becoming a vampire froze her physical growth as a little girl, so she must rely on her cuteness to trick human prey and comes to resent having been made a vampire before her body could mature to a size and strength that would enable her to take care of herself. But although Claudia's physical growth has been arrested, her emotional and intellectual growth (given her vampiric advantages and limitations) continues, her two fathers educating her, Louis in his appreciation of life, Lestat in his enjoyment of killing. And as her mind matures, her feelings for Louis and his for her morph into a kind of romantic love. Rice heats the discreet sensuality of the vampire genre (circa 1976) and to an sensual and psychological fever. This happens not only when Louis is drinking a mortal and feeling his heart beat synchronize with the person's--sexual intercourse is replaced for vampires by blood drinking, which is called in the novel "taking" a victim--but also when he is holding Claudia and nuzzling her hair or kissing her eyelids and inner arms and smooth palms or looking up "into my paramour's eyes." That most of the love in the novel occurs between male vampires and between an "adult" male vampire and a "child" female vampire adds to the strange nature of it all. As I read, I thought, "OK, she's an immortal vampire and vampires don't have sex," but then, "Louis sure likes touching her five-year-old body!" Love takes odd forms. Rice puts us in Louis' head so deeply that we often forget that he's rather reprehensible. Ever searching for the meaning of his existence, ever prizing life but loathing his, he feels sorry for himself in being so "alone" (an eternal exile in the world) and believes that he is more human than other vampires but doesn't shirk from killing people when he could survive on animals. Rice's novel is more provocative and moving than the movie (compelling though young Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt's vampires are), for the film downplays the sensual and romantic nature of the love between Claudia and Louis and the homosexual love between Louis and Armand and cuts out potentially upsetting moments like when Louis "takes" a priest on his altar after a botched confession. Although homosexual vampire romance must have been pretty new for 1976, Rice follows the tradition of white vampires (still maintained in Twilight et al). In her world becoming a vampire makes white people whiter, vampires of color don't appear, and she doesn't interrogate the slavery-source of Louis' wealth and power. She also gives no biological or other explanation for vampire powers, limitations, and physiology. The reader of the audiobook, Simon Vance, reads Rice's style and story with understanding and a smooth and appealing voice and manner. However, the "French" accent he assumes for Louis sounds more Cinema Transylvanian than New Orleans French, and his interviewer sounds like a Brit trying to sound like an American. Finally, although Rice's vampires are inhuman monsters, they also represent us to the extent that "the only power that exists is inside ourselves." Readers not averse to the vampire genre should give Rice's highly wrought, sensual and emotional, moving and appalling novel a try. View all my reviews
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