Oh Calkin, what have you done to me?

Alright...so far I LOVE this book. I haven't been able to put it down. I can relate to Daniel so well because that's what books were for me when I was little. I always thought the friends I made in literature were so much more fascinating than the ones I had in life. The Last of the Really Great Wangdoodles. That was the book I read that I wanted to be swept away in, that I read over and over and over. There were other books that I loved before it and after it but that book was it really, the reason why I think books are so wonderful. Anyway, I did not come on here to blubber....

Maybe it has to do with reading King Lear or maybe I just like him, but the beggar Danny boy meets on the streets...Fermin Romero de Torres... could he be the wise fool, the one that will reveal to Daniel what he cannot see through the blindness of love or just plain naivety of youth? The way Daniel passes him off as crazy so aburptly, being such an observant and passionate individual making such a harsh remark, made me take notice of this funny character. Opinion Rebecca? Insult? Gay joke?

Armand Through the Centuries

So, Armand falls in love with Louis because he represents a new age. He is a tie to that century...

Armand claims that Louis represents his century in his desire to find evil in the world, and in himself. So long as there is evil to hate, he is satisfied. Or, perhaps, he longs to find evil in the world because he does not want to admit that he still loathes himself and his life.

And then you have the contrast between Louis's desire to be deemed evil, for that's the real reason he tells his story, and the reporter's quick love for the life Louis has lead. The reporter hears the horrors of Louis's life and wants it for himself! Anything, anything to avoid the simple life. He wants /some/ sort of passion, romance and drama in his life.

But really, aren't both of those ideals so very present in our society? Have we inherrited the obsessions and disorders of our past, or is Armand just dumb?

And if there is some twisted ideal like that for every century, what is ours?

Love and Lust

I'm not going to get through with this post before the bell, I bet you.


Anyway, I just wanted to get this topic out in the open. I know we've mentioned some of this in our more verbal discussions, but... love and lust for Vampires.

I know that at some point, in our first day of reading, Louis compared drinking Lestat's blood to sex. I also know that later on, Louis was--

Oh, lord, I'll do this at home.

Lestat

Lestat's character is an interesting one, isn't it? Especially when compared to Louis's. Louis almost instantly dislikes him as soon as he has a feeling for what it is to be a vampire... he despises the way Lestat goes about things, simply because it seems disrespectful to the experience of being an undead.

Now, Louis did not seem to be particularly high-strung before his transformation. He was well-off, I suppose, and uses the term "vicious egotism" in reference to himself... and he mentions that he had looked down on his black workers before the transformation. Still, he didn't seem to think of himself as a higher, special class. Perhaps he wanted to, perhaps he longed to be... but he was grounded on some level. As a vampire, though, he automatically sees it as a sort of beautiful thing... and he automatically feels as if he is a special, privileged being and that Lestat disrespects that.

Lestat, meanwhile, seems so far to be very engaged with human matters. His father. The plantation. He doesn't care to highlight the transformation in Louis, and probably not simply because he doesn't care for Louis, but that he doesn't care for being a vampire.

Are they foils of each other?

Interview with the Vampire was written in 1976, but in 1985 Anne Rice published a second novel in a "series"... the Vampire Lestat. I haven't done much research on it, but when I saw this, I looked briefly at what Wikipedia had to say. Evidently, the events of the two books contradict each other... ... so that it is clear that the narrators are unreliable.

Perhaps this is why the story is told the way it is?

And perhaps we should note the interplay between Louis and Lestat when reading, so we can try to decide what's really going on... and whether Lestat is really as bad as he's made out to be so far.

More comparisons...

What really catches my attention with this novel is the style in which it was written. Its much more modern text. The descriptions of Louis's first kill truly sent a shiver down my spine and made my stomach queasy. I think it is because it is written in the way that my mind thinks, therefore, I am able to feel the descriptions in a much stronger sense than I am when reading something written in classic text. Perhaps its because when reading classic literature, I am always going to be detatched, ever so slightly...
Which brings me to my next point: Rice's vampire story is much more graphic than Dracula. In Dracula, I was caught up in the delicate way it was written-craving to find out the mystery it presented. Will Dracula kill Jonathan? Is Lucy going to die or be saved in time? The entire book was blanketed in a suspense that Stoker so intricatedly wove. This complicated and romatic plot fascinated me. In Interview with the Vampire, I feel more raw fear. Whenever I came across any description of Louis sucking blood, I was disgusted... and yet, I enjoyed this feeling because rarely do I get that strong of an emotion from a book. Does this have to do with our soceity today? Am I just so desensitized that I need vivid descriptions of murder and deception to feel anything? This notion makes me sad...

The Process

Are the early losses of blood that Louis suffers before going through the more officially mentioned steps that Lestat puts him through important? If not, we start with:

Step One: Death of the overseer. It is sort of ironic, actually... Louis watches as Lestat kills the overseer... he "oversees" that death, and is made to approve of it. Hahaha, fun.

+ Remove the body. Probably not for the purpose of the change, but for the purpose of concealing what happened. Eh.

+ Beating the body. Same. They made it look like robbers had done the deed...

Step Two: Somewhat necessary for the whole mentality... the discovery that Louis secretly does desire life.

Step Three: Exchange of blood. We all know what this is about...

+ The world, for Louis, is changed.

Step Four and Five: The slow removal of "living" fluids from the body/the death of the body and the first kill...



How much of that is really, truthfully the process and how much of it is just what Louis encountered? How is this the same, or different, from other processes we encounter in other novels?

I really have no idea what to talk about.

Although, I do really like the way that the book is set up. Like, I wasn't imagining a literal interview with a vampire. But that's what it is. And it looks like it keeps that up the whole book though, since the majority of the book is marked as dialogue. It's sort of an interesting set-up. Third-person, but also a first-person narrative in most ways.

So, uh, a discussion question, though, so you all have something to respond to: Why do you think Anne Rice set the book up that way? I mean, obvious this is supposed to be the story that a particular vampire wanted to get out to the world, but the vampire also could have just "told" the story himself. Are the boy's reactions important? So far they keep things moving, but eventually I think they'll become less frequent as Louis becomes more involved in his memories...