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Abridged, $24
Audio ISBN 0679460381
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Review by Sandy Huseby
Even before the ghost, the violinist Stefan, comes to her, Triana Becker is haunted.
Triana as child blames herself for their deaths, considers herself a murderer. Self-indulgence? Catholic pain? These are the questions that Rice unravels as she weaves the dark and desperate tapestry of Triana's life.
Triana as parent blames herself, too, for Lily -- her young daughter, dead of cancer in California.
Triana as wife believes she killed her first marriage to Lev during the agony of their grief over Lily. And she is unable to save her second husband, already infected with AIDS from a blood transfusion when they marry.
By the time Stefan appears, we are already convinced of Triana's madness. And yet, is it madness, or the bold, indomitable spirit within a person that will not yield, that will not bend, that will seek, quest, struggle in the grand search for redemption? Rice's novels are always compelling and provocative -- never more so than this, for this novel demands of the reader to reach deep into the core of Triana Becker. As Triana herself says, she is painfully sane -- "that's the problem."
From the decaying splendor of her home in New Orleans, Triana finds the gift she never knew she had: the gift of sound, of music, of symphony. But that gift comes with a price, as Stefan leads her ultimately to Brazil and her destiny.
Like a symphony, the first stage is tuneup, the awful sawing of bow against string in delicious cacophony. Rice renders that in the streaming words and phrases of a woman seemingly gone mad; words, emotions and torments seem to scamper everywhere until they are finally drawn into the first clear, clean notes of the pure violin.
Rice's writing resonates with the undercurrent of provocative questions. Is the daughter Lily actually the author's own, rendered again as she was in Rice's Vampire writing? The tormented relationships with her three sisters -- how close to the edge of memoir has Rice drawn her bow?
As the violin plays on to its certain ovation, Rice the writer and Triana the naïve violinist, the middle-aged woman, widowed and childless and beyond childbearing, renders a symphony of words. Each movement, each phase of her life is a separate whole, united by her own hand into the violinist's art. And the author's.
Sandy Huseby is a writer living in Fargo, Northa Dakota, and Nevis. She is online at SHuseby@aol.com.
©1997, ProMotion, inc.
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