Interview with the Vampire by Anne RiceMy rating: 5 of 5 stars
My last reading session was 53 mins. I finished reading this book for the second time in my life on Thursday, October 27, 2022 at around 2:45 p.m. You can find my full review here. I finished reading this book for the third time in my life on Tuesday, April 30, 2024 at 12:31 a.m. Started 3rd time reading on August 31, 2023.
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I was going to wait a while before rereading The Vampire Chronicles again because of Anne Rice's passing, but then I saw the new TV show based on the books and I saw how much they respected Anne Rice's work and I got really inspired to reread it again! I was so excited!!!!!
I first read this book in high school.
I found this book at a Savers for $1.99 and that was such an exciting day!!! I love how this book smells too! It was the Savers on 27th Ave. and Camelback.
“You weren't always a vampire, were you?” he began.
“No,” answered the vampire. “I was a twenty-five-year-old man when I became a vampire, and the year was seventeen ninety-one” (5).
I saw the movie again on Saturday, October 1st, before the TV show came out on October 2nd. In the movie Louis said this age, but in the TV show he said 33 or 35 (I can't remember which one).
‘Ah, that's the accent . . .’ the boy said softly.
For a moment the vampire stared blankly. ‘I have an accent?’ He began to laugh” (5).
lol This part made me hehe! XD *covers mouth with hand and giggles* 🤠This line is also in the comparison vid down below.
This made me laugh! XD "I was so regular!" Haha lol XD 😄
- Louis built his brother an oratory, and I just keep thinking about my paternal grandmother's oratory that she had on her property in Mexico. That was really cool. It's like their own personal prayer space.
“I saw my life as if I stood apart from it, the vanity, the self-serving, the constant fleeing from one petty annoyance after another, the lip service to God and the Virgin and a host of saints whose names filled my prayer books, none of whom made the slightest difference in a narrow, materialistic, and selfish existence. I saw my real gods … the gods of most men. Food, drink, and security in conformity. Cinders’” (14 Part 1 of Interview with the Vampire).
Ah! "Non-discriminating!" That was in the show! <3 XD
Aroused, Louis?! Wtf?! XD I totally get it, Louis! <3 Hehe! *covers mouth & laughs*
Oh! ;)
“And with that same sensibility that you cherish you will see death in all its beauty, life as it is only known on the very point of death. Don't you understand that, Louis? You alone of all creatures can see death that way with impunity. You . . . alone . . . under the rising moon . . . can strike like the hand of God!’
…
‘Vampires are killers,’ he said now. ‘Predators. Whose all-seeing eyes were meant to give them detachment. The ability to see a human life in its entirety, not with any mawkish sorrow but with a thrilling satisfaction in being the end of that life, in having a hand in the divine plan.’
…
“ ‘Why do you do this, Lestat?’ I asked.
“ ‘I like to do it,’ he said. ‘I enjoy it.’ He looked at me. ‘I don't say that you have to enjoy it. Take your aesthete's tastes to purer things. Kill them swiftly if you will, but do it! Learn that you're a killer! Ah!’” (83-84).
“I leaned over and said, ‘I hear Claudia's tap on the stairs. Be gentle with her. It's all done’ (107).
I saw Claudia do this when I watched one of the trailers for the AMC series, “Anne Rice’s Interview with the Vampire”.
“We've tarried too long with him. Come out. Let the flesh instruct the mind.’
‘I think I felt a tremor of delight when she said these words, Let the flesh instruct the mind” (121).
The part where Louis says that he ate a lot that he couldn't hear himself think made me relate so much to him because I do that too, Louis! Sometimes I eat more than I should and I get a horrible food coma. LOL!
“I could see his profile and her small face beyond, looking up at him. ‘What is it now!’ he said, turning the page and letting his hand drop to his thigh. ‘You irritate me. Your very presence irritates me!’ His eyes moved over the page.
“ ‘Does it?’ she said in her sweetest voice” (131).
“ ‘I came to make peace with you, even if you are the father of lies. You're my father,’ she said. ‘I want to make peace with you. I want things to be as they were’ (132).
“ ‘Louis …’ he was saying. I could hear it now … ‘Louis … Louis….’
…
“ ‘Louis …’ he whispered, finally lifting his head just for an instant. It fell back on the couch. ‘Louis, it's . . . it's absinthe! Too much absinthe!’ he gasped. ‘She's poisoned them with it. She's poisoned me. Louis….’ He tried to raise his hand. I drew nearer, the table between us.
…
‘Louis . . . put me in my coffin.’ He struggled to rise.
…
He looked up at me, the hair falling down into his eyes. ‘Louis! Louis!’
…
‘Louis, Louis!’ he gasped over and over, struggling, trying desperately to throw her off” (135-137).
Lestat called out Louis’ name eleven times when he was dying! :’(((((
“He lay now on his back.
…
But his eyes, they remained the same, staring wildly at the ceiling, the irises dancing from side to side,
…
Finally the irises rolled to the top of his head, and the whites of his eyes went dim. The thing lay still.
…
and this horror that had been Lestat, and I staring helplessly at it” (137).
I thought it was scary that Louis thought that Lestat might have grabbed his ankle from underneath the water! 😱
“Now I thought of that moment; that fear in me at the very sight of the altar, the sound of the Pange Lingua. And I thought again, persistently, of my brother” (142).
“And he was perfectly miserable” (149).
I just want to say that I love that phrase: perfectly miserable. I feel that way sometimes.
“Now she said to me in such a whisper that I bent my ear to her, ‘Louis, it troubles you. You know the remedy. Let the flesh . . . let the flesh instruct the mind.’ She let my hand go, and I watched her move away from me, turning once to whisper the same command. ‘Forget him. Let the flesh instruct the mind. . .’” (152).
“But he was only Lestat, as I've described him to you: devoid of mystery, finally, his limits as familiar to me in those months in eastern Europe as his charms. I wanted to forget him, and yet it seemed I thought of him always. It was as if the empty nights were made for thinking of him. And sometimes I found myself so vividly aware of him it was as if he had only just left the room and the ring of his voice were still there. And somehow there was a disturbing comfort in that, and, despite myself, I'd envision his face—not as it had been the last night in the fire, but on other nights, that last evening he spent with us at home, his hand playing idly with the keys of the spinet, his head tilted to one side. A sickness rose in me more wretched than anguish when I saw what my dreams were doing. I wanted him alive! In the dark nights of eastern Europe, Lestat was the only vampire I'd found” (196).
<3
I feel entranced by Anne Rice's words when I read her books. It's as if I can see the atmosphere through the pages when I read her scenes.
“I think the very name of Paris brought a rush of pleasure to me that was extraordinary, a relief so near to well-being that I was amazed, not only that I could feel it, but that I'd so nearly forgotten it.
“I wonder if you can understand what it meant. My expression can't convey it now, for what Paris means to me is very different from what it meant then, in those days, at that hour; but still, even now, to think of it, I feel something akin to that happiness. And I've more reason now than ever to say that happiness is not what I will ever know, or will ever deserve to know. I am not so much in love with happiness. Yet the name Paris makes me feel it.
“Mortal beauty often makes me ache, and mortal grandeur can fill me with that longing I felt so hopelessly in the Mediterranean Sea. But Paris, Paris drew me close to her heart, so I forgot myself entirely. Forgot the damned and questing preternatural thing that doted on mortal skin and mortal clothing. Paris overwhelmed, and lightened and rewarded more richly than any promise.
“It was the mother of New Orleans, understand that first; it had given New Orleans its life, its first populace; and it was what New Orleans had for so long tried to be. But New Orleans, though beautiful and desperately alive, was desperately fragile. There was something forever savage and primitive there, something that threatened the exotic and sophisticated life both from within and without. Not an inch of those wooden streets nor a brick of the crowded Spanish houses had not been bought from the fierce wilderness that forever surrounded the city, ready to engulf it. Hurricanes, floods, fevers, the plague—and the damp of the Louisiana climate itself worked tirelessly on every hewn plank or stone facade, so that New Orleans seemed at all times like a dream in the imagination of her striving populace, a dream held intact at every second by a tenacious, though unconscious, collective will.
“But Paris, Paris was a universe whole and entire unto herself, hollowed and fashioned by history; so she seemed in this age of Napoleon III with her towering buildings, her massive cathedrals, her grand boulevards and ancient winding medieval streets—as vast and indestructible as nature itself. All was embraced by her, by her volatile and enchanted populace thronging the galleries, the theaters, the cafes, giving birth over and over to genius and sanctity, philosophy and war, frivolity and the finest art; so it seemed that if all the world outside her were to sink into darkness, what was fine, what was beautiful, what was essential might there still come to its finest flower. Even the majestic trees that graced and sheltered her streets were attuned to her—and the waters of the Seine, contained and beautiful as they wound through her heart; so that the earth on that spot, so shaped by blood and consciousness, had ceased to be the earth and had become Paris” (203-204).
After reading this passage I can understand why some people say that the city of New Orleans is a character in Anne Rice’s books. How beautiful her words are!
“...its tiny feet tinkled like a bell. ‘It's a lady doll,’ she said, looking up at me. ‘See? A lady doll.’ She put it on the dresser.
“ ‘So it is,’ I whispered.
“ ‘A woman made it,’ she said. ‘She makes baby dolls, all the same, baby dolls, a shop of baby dolls, until I said to her, “I want a lady doll” ’ (207-208).
I thought that it was cute that Claudia asked for a lady doll instead of a baby doll. Awwww ☺️
After reading the start of part three I noticed that Anne Rice’s vampires sweat.
“I sat watching, listening, one hand shielding my lowered face from anyone and no one, my elbow resting on the rail, the passion in me subsiding…” (226).
“It was the terrible ‘Triumph of Death’ by Breughel…‘The Fall of the Angels’” (227-228).
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“‘I didn't know I thought these things. I spoke them now as my thoughts. And they were my most profound feelings taking a shape they could never have taken had I not spoken them, had I not thought them out this way in conversation with another” (235).
“the wakening of a need so terrible that the very promise of its fulfillment contained the unbearable possibility of disappointment.
...
I think I put my hands to my head as mortals do when so deeply troubled that they instinctively cover the face, reach for the brain as if they could reach through the skull and massage the living organ out of its agony” (236).
“It seemed more than ever absurd to me that Lestat should have died, if in fact he had; and looking back on him, as it seemed I was always doing, I saw him more kindly than before. Lost like the rest of us. Not the jealous protector of any knowledge he was afraid to share. He knew nothing. There was nothing to know.
“Only, that was not quite the thought that was gradually coming clear to me. I had hated him for all the wrong reasons; yes, that was true. But I did not fully understand it yet.
“And yet through this sadness, this confusion, came the clear realization: Why should it be otherwise? What had I expected? What right had I to be so bitterly disappointed in Lestat that I would let him diet Because he wouldn't show me what I must find in myself? Armand's words, what had they been? The only power that exists is inside ourselves . . . . …the Madonna and Child” (253).
“I settled before his canvas, weak, at peace, gazing down at him, at his vague, graying eyes, my own hands florid, my skin so luxuriously warm. ‘I am mortal again,’ I whispered to him. ‘I am alive. With your blood I am alive.’ His eyes closed. I sank back against the wall and found myself gazing at my own face.
“A sketch was all he'd done, a series of bold black lines that nevertheless made up my face and shoulders perfectly, and the color was already begun in dabs and splashes: the green of my eyes, the white of my cheek. But the horror, the horror of seeing my expression! For he had captured it perfectly, and there was nothing of horror in it. Those green eyes gazed at me from out of that loosely drawn shape with a mindless innocence, the expressionless wonder of that overpowering craving which he had not understood. Louis of a hundred years ago lost in listening to the sermon of the priest at Mass, lips parted and slack, hair careless, a hand curved in the lap and limp. A mortal Louis. I believe I was laughing, putting my hands to my face and laughing so that the tears nearly rose in my eyes; and when I took my fingers down, there was the stain of the tears, tinged with mortal blood” (258).
“And Madeleine, on the couch, was working with that regular passion, as if immortality could not conceivably mean rest, sewing cream lace to lavender satin for the small bed, only stopping occasionally to blot the moisture tinged with blood from her white forehead” (275).
Here is another confirmation that vampires sweat blood.
“ ‘But why are you afraid?’ I asked. ‘Don't you know what these things are?’ And as I looked down at him, as I saw his yellow hair pressed against my coat, I had a vision of him from long ago, that tall, stately gentleman in the swirling black cape, with his head thrown back, his rich, flawless voice singing the lilting air of the opera from which we'd only just come, his walking stick tapping the cobblestones in time with the music, his large, sparkling eye catching the young woman who stood by, enrapt, so that a smile spread over his face as the song died on his lips; and for one moment, that one moment when his eye met hers, all evil seemed obliterated in that flush of pleasure, that passion for merely being alive” (329-330).
💔
“He stared blindly ahead, his tongue moistening his lip, his voice low, almost natural. ‘I went to Paris after you. . . .’
“ ‘What was it you wanted to tell me?’ I asked. ‘What was it you wanted to talk about?’
“I could well remember his mad insistence in the Théâtre des Vampires. I hadn't thought of it in years. No, I had never thought of it. And I was aware that I spoke of it now with great reluctance.
“But he only smiled at me, an insipid, near apologetic smile. And shook his head. I watched his eyes fill with a soft, bleary despair.
“I felt a profound, undeniable relief” (330).
What was Lestat going to say to Louis?
Update: Someone on reddit said that in "The Vampire Lestat" Lestat said that this scene never happened.
* Other Quotes I Like:
“moaned aloud”
“with the same smile playing on his lips”
“which was as simple and as satisfying as taking a person's hand. Clasping it. Letting it go gently. All this in a moment of great need and distress.”
“...her eyebrows knit as if she were coming around. A moan escaped her lips.”
“my hands pressing down on the velvet spread.”
“One night, long gone by, was as material to me as if I were in it still…”
* Here is an afterthought I had as I read Interview with the Vampire: Claudia's Story by Anne Rice, art and adaption by Ashley Marie Witter: Armand did lie to Louis! Just to have his love! Why, Armand?! No wonder Louis didn't forgive him!
* Another note to add here is that the third time I re-read this book I read the book in my head. The images in my head were more clear when I read it in this way.
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| I am so obsessed! XD |
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| Sunday, October 9, 2022 at 5:13 a.m. |
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