Violin - Anne Rice

In this confessional novel Anne Rice conjures up another seductive, dangerous and ambivalent ghost - one of the eternally undead whose restless spirit is caught between heaven and hell. The heroine narrator, Triana, is in her fifties, short, plumpish, with a pretty face and long dark hair; she's one of four sisters of a Catholic family; her alcoholic mother died when she was 14; her own daughter has died of leukemia. . . . Stefan, the Byronic violin playing ghost appears to her as she's grieving for the death from AIDS of her husband, takes her back to 19th century Vienna, where Beethoven was his teacher, and to the moment when he violently killed his own father and had to flee to Venice. Triana tricks him and takes his precious violin, and herself becomes an international virtuoso and superstar. But her fear is that when he lets her go and she has to give back the violin, she may never be able to play again. She incorporates painful and shocking memories of her mother's death, her daughter's death, the passionate, ambivalent relationships between four sisters, the unreal life of a wealthy superstar - all of which seems to come from Anne's own life - with a savage, glittering tale of violence and music in 19th century Vienna, and the shifting power struggle between Triana and Stefan, the genius in thrall to the