But, when Tonio’s elderly father dies, all the certainties of his young life are overturned. Trained in all the arts of the gentleman, he grows up captivated by the theatrical rituals of the Serenissima, knowing that he is destined to succeed his father as a Senator of the Republic and to take part in all these mysteries himself. Marc Antonio Treschi is the last of his line: the son of an old Venetian family, born to a childlike, emotionally unstable mother and her much older husband. Rice has brilliantly brought to life the world of these children mutilated to make a choir of seraphim, their voice a cry to heaven that heaven did not hear.
Passion, despair, darkness, sensuality, lust and transcendent beauty are her calling and, although this book frequently strays over the line between the dramatic and the melodramatic, it is a compelling read. To be honest, few authors could handle all that is tied up in such a story quite as well as Rice. Initially introduced to Europe as a solution to the rules of Papal Rome, which forbade female actors on the stage, the castrati became the superstars of eighteenth-century Europe ~~ able to create just as much of a stir as Beyoncé does today. Despite all this, I feel like a part of my youth has been taken from me with her passing. Lastly, she began to focus more and more on promoting her son's work as she slowly withdrew from the world.
Then, Rice began to harass her critics, encouraging her fans to publicly attack those who poorly reviewed her books. I read Prince Lestat but sadly, Rice was simply repeating herself. And just like that she abandoned Christianity and returned horror. Later, when she turned her back on horror and made her highly publicized return to Catholicism, I tried to read Rice’s The Songs of the Seraphim series, but they were terrible. The best of these was Cry to Heaven, now a lesser known work of Rice’s. Interspersed among these reads, I read Rice’s stand alone novels. I read the Vampire Chronicles in order ~~ Lives of the Mayfair Witches too. She unlocked an entirely new world for me as I traveled with Lestat and Amadeo. Rice shaped me not only as a reader, but as a person. I first read Anne Rice at 13 ~~ soon I devoured everything of hers that she had written. Slowly, slowly he swelled it, slowly he let it pulse from his throat, this very limit of what the human voice could attain, yet so velvet smooth and soft it seemed the loveliest sigh of grief drawn out and out and until one could not endure it.Īnne Rice has died.
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