The Vampire Armand by Anne RiceMy rating: 5 of 5 stars
My last reading session was 39 minutes. I finished reading this book for the second time in my life on Friday, March 31, 2023 at 12:28 a.m.
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I got this book from Savers for $3.99! It is quite a heavy, good-looking book! The pages smell very fresh.
Damn this book was super erotic! 😳
Cool AI pic of Marius
Cool fanart of TV!Armand
“‘A handsome gent,’ I went on, ‘the color of caramel, moving with such catlike ease and gilded glances that he makes me think of all things once delectable, and now a potpourri of scent: cinnamon, clove, mild peppers and other spices golden, brown or red, whose fragrances can spike my brain and plunge me into erotic yearnings that live now, more than ever, to play themselves out. His skin must smell like cashew nuts and thick almond creams. It does.’
He laughed. ‘I get your point’” (12).
Damn! This description of David is so good! I can smell him now thanks to Armand! XD Yum!
“‘What I think is that when you make a book, you tell the tale as you would like to know it!’
‘I see no great wisdom in that.’
‘Well, then think, for most speech is a mere issue of our feelings, a mere explosion. Listen, note the way that you make these outbursts.’
‘I don't want to.’
‘But you do, but they are not the words you want to read. When you write, something different happens. You make a tale, no matter how fragmented or experimental or how disregarding of all conventional and helpful forms. Try this for me. No, no, I have a better idea’” (15).
“You know, my blessed mortal Sybelle, when she is not playing the Sonata by Beethoven called the Appassionata” (21).
* I just wanted to say that I think Armand talks and acts like the teenager he appears to be.
“I vowed I'd never get drunk again.
I got drunk the next day” (48).
That’s the funny quote I saw on Twitter! XD
“‘How can you know?’ I asked him. ‘I have it in my heart. It's mine alone, this pain’” (54).
“I couldn't help but smile. Kill them, I thought, slaughter them. I felt fetching and even beautiful. Come on, somebody, tell me I make you think of Mercury chasing away the clouds in Botticelli's Primavera, but the red-haired man, fixing me with an impish playful glance, said:
‘Ah, he is Verrocchio's David, the very model for the bronze statue. Don't try to tell me he is not. And immortal, ah, yes, I can see it, immortal. He shall never die’” (99).
Primavera painting by Sandro Botticelli.
David statue by Andrea del Verrocchio.
I can’t believe this! Considering the time period I suppose these kind of behaviors are accurate, but it is still hard to imagine and discomforting. Armand out here smiling and feeling pretty cuz everyone wants to gangbang him?! Damn, boy! OMG! How are people not okay with Memnoch the Devil and fine with this?! Did Mrs. Rice write this so erotic just in spite for all those negative reviews. I wonder. I’m listening to Assad Zaman’s Spotify playlist called, “The Vampire Armand,” and it is perfect! It’s mostly or all classical music and it has the exact vibe of this book and character. I saw those two artworks mentioned in the quote and I can clearly picture Armand now. I just feel really uncomfortable knowing that these are fully grown men lusting after a teenage boy. It is very disturbing to me, but I guess I just have to take into account the time period that this story is set in. Also, the immortal part of the quote is almost like a foreshadowing but not really because we already know that Armand will become immortal by Marius De Romanus. I really like how Marius’ name looks written out and how it sounds, by the way.
“We stood in the room of Benozzo Gozzoli's great work, from the Medici Chapel in Florence: The Procession of the Magi” (140).
The Procession of the Magi artwork by Benozzo Gozzoli.
http://www.travelingintuscany.com/images/art/benozzogozzoli/cappelledeimagi.jpg
Looking at this artwork I can picture more clearly how Armand dressed in his time. Those outfits on the men were quite a thing to look at ;)
“Marius must have seen this hesitation. He passed his right hand through the very fire of the torch, and touched his warmed fingers to my cheek. Then he kissed me where this warmth hovered, and his kiss was warm” (179).
I was thinking that maybe Armand touched the fire in the movie because he saw Marius do it.
“Life is a tragedy, one way or another. What is certain is that you die” (193).
This is completely and utterly true!
This quote is from my Google Keep note collection. It was created July 26, 2017.
“Marius knew of my struggle, he knew of the hold which Kiev had upon me, and he knew of the crucial importance of all this to me. He understood better than anyone I've ever known that each being wars with his own angels and devils, each being succumbs to an essential set of values, a theme, as it were, which is inseparable from living a proper life” (204).
* I don't know why, but that one scene where Armand is spying on his family through the cracks in the walls of their house reminds of a similar scene in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein.
“Still bound in the net, I listened to hollow preternatural voices chanting with a villainous gusto the awful hymn, Dies Irae, or Day of Wrath” (230).
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| https://twitter.com/hahghahthah/status/1688922596581294080?s=20 |
“We can’t stand it, to be alone. We cannot bear it, any more than the monks of old could bear it, men who though they had renounced all else for Christ’s sake, nevertheless came together in congregations to be with one another, even as they enforced upon themselves the harsh rules of single solitary cells and unbroken silence. They couldn’t bear to be alone.
We are too much men and women; we are yet formed in the image of the Creator, and what can we say of Him with any certainty except that He, whoever He may be—Christ, Yahweh, Allah—He made us, did He not, because even He in His Infinite Perfection could not bear to be alone” (273).
I agree with what Andrei (his birth name)/Amadeo (his name given by Marius)/Armand (his final name given by Allesandra) says here. Loneliness is the weakness of all earthbound creatures that can become unbearable, which could lead them to do* desperate actions.
This quote is from my Google Keep note collection. It was created July 29, 2017.
I was wondering what Armand’s last name was and someone on Twitter said that he goes by, “Armand le Russe,” (in later books) which means, “Armand the Russian,” in French. Just like how Marius de Romanus means Marius of Romanus, Romanus means a male from Rome. Mrs. Rice has a pattern here with names it seems.
“Louis standing in the rain on a slick deserted downtown street watching through the store window the brilliant young actor Leonardo DiCaprio as Shakespeare's Romeo kissing his tender and lovely Juliet (Claire Danes) on a television screen” (277).
“I remember the coroner's assistant saying soulfully to me that I was awfully young to have to see such a thing. She thought I was Dora's little brother. What a sweet woman she was. Perhaps it's worth it to make a foray into the official mortal world once in a while in order to be called ‘a real trouper’ instead of a Botticelli angel, which has become my tag line among the Undead” (288).
XD OMG! Her little brother?! No way! XD HA!
* I was really shocked when Armand was trapped in the underground Rome vampire coven lair and he was starved for six days. They gave him a boy to feed on and only after he finished drinking did Armand notice that it was his brother, Riccardo. I gasped when I discovered that! It was so scary in there! 😱
“...that Beethoven had written her sweet masterpiece, that it was Sonata No. 23 in F Minor, Opus 57” (318).
* Who are Benjamin and Sybelle? I don’t get how Armand met them.
“The other sonatas I love, the Moonlight, the Pathétique,” (335).
“If I had ever tasted blood this strong, this sweet and salty, I had no memory of it; there was no way in which memory could record such deliciousness, the absolute rapture of thirst slaked, of hunger cured, of loneliness dissolved in this hot and intimate embrace, in which the sound of my own seething, straining breath would have horrified me if I had cared about it.
Such a noise I made, such a dreadful feasting noise. My fingers massaged his thick muscles, my nostrils were pressed into his pampered soap-scented skin.
‘Hmmm, love you, wouldn't hurt you for the world, you feel it, it's sweet, isn't it?’ I whispered to him over the shallows of gorgeous blood. ‘Hmmm, yes, so sweet, better than the finest brandy, hmmm…’” (340).
“‘Stay alive, you don't want to die, no, stay alive,’ I crooned, rubbing my fingers up through his hair, feeling that they were fingers now, not the pterodactyl digits they'd been moments before” (341).
“‘Ah, yes, alive, you're so strong, so wonderfully strong …’ I whispered. ‘Hmmm, no, don't go ... not yet, it's not time.’
His knees buckled. He sank slowly to the carpet, and I with him, pulling him gently over with me against the side of the bed, and then letting him fall beside me, so that we lay like lovers entangled” (341).
“‘Oh, you are so precious, yes, yes’” (341).
* I thought it was so cool that the audiobook played the Appassionata at the beginning and end of the audiobook. It played in the background while the narrator read. That was a really really nice touch!
“I had to get the thoughts out of my mind. I banished all reverberations of this experience and let myself fall into Sybelle's music again, merely standing under the oaks, with the eternal river breeze, which can reach you anywhere in this place, cooling me and soothing me and making me feel that the Earth itself was filled with irrepressible beauty, even for someone such as I” (374-375).
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