Pandora (New Tales of the Vampires)
by Anne Rice
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Book Summary Information
Author: Anne RiceEdition: Mass Market Paperback
Published: 1998-12-26
ISBN: 0345422384
Number of pages: 368
Publisher: Ballantine Books
Book Reviews of Pandora (New Tales of the Vampires)
Book Review: Pandora, finally unveiled
Summary: 4 Stars
I have always been interested in the character Pandora ever since first reading about her in Queen of the Damned. I caught the glimpses of her and her relationship to Marius and was so curious to find out more about her. She was intriguing to me, even with the very little that Anne wrote. So I was delighted that a book soley on Pandora was being written. The book is more of a novella, it is a quick read, but so full of information. Everything you could have possibly wanted to know about her. It delves deep into her ancient past and you get to see her before becoming immortal, meeting Marius, getting into trouble. Its fascinating. Its just great to break away from the Lestat Centric novels and into something new and refreshing. Its a great book and very informative as well. Anne really does a great amount of research when she writes anything. Especially about history, the architecture or a particular period, the style of clothing, it really goes on and on. She did a fantastic job with this book.
I'd like to say that you can read this as a stand-alone book without having to read the other Vampire Chronicles, but, though not in depth, it does go into some of the other books and might be a tad confusing for readers who have never read them. However, as to an order of reading, its not terribly important. But definitely read IWTV, TVL and QOTD, before reading this one.
Summary of Pandora (New Tales of the Vampires)
Anne Rice fans will greet Pandora: New Tales of the Vampires, the first of her new vampire chronicles, as hungrily as the Fang Gang facing a fresh new neck. Our heroine, Pandora, a senator's daughter in Augustus Caesar's day, flees to Antioch when her family gets killed and discovers the antidote to stern Roman rationalism in the occult wisdom of the East. "Something attacked my reason," Pandora writes. "The very thing the Roman Emperors had so feared in Egyptian cults and Oriental cults swept over me: mystery and emotion which claim a superiority to reason and law."Pandora gets her sexy vampire initiation at the fangs of handsome Marius (who later inducted Rice's famed vampire Lestat). Pandora tells how a nice Roman girl became a vampire in modern Paris, but mostly the book celebrates the sights and sounds (and philosophical bloodlettings) of the classical world. Pandora is more like Robert Graves's sublime I, Claudius than Rice's The Complete Vampire Chronicles.
Yet Pandora is a logical extension of Rice's work, and Pandora is a combination of her past vampire heroes and the nakedly, horrifyingly autobiographical heroine of Rice's 1997 novel Violin. Now, Violin is remarkably messy, but it captures the volcanic passion that erupts in her best work--Rice calls it "a study in pain." Pandora is really a dramatized debate between passion and reason, which Pandora calls "male reason." She teases her vampire mentor: "Marius guarded his delicate rationality as a Vestal Virgin guards a sacred flame. If ever any ecstatic emotion took hold of me, he [would] tell me in no uncertain terms that it was irrational, irrational, irrational!" (To hear how close Pandora's voice is to her passionate creator, listen to the 1997 audiocassette Interview with Anne Rice.)
Rice's research gives fresh blood to her storytelling. Even her chronic third-act problem scarcely slows down this brisk romp of a novel. Pandora has intellectual thirst as well as blood lust, and she conveys the high old time Rice obviously had imbibing historical lore. "It is fun to read these mad Gnostics!" exults Pandora in the early Christian era. It is also fun to read this mad Pandora. Anne Rice hasn't been this fun to read in years.
Anne Rice, creator of the Vampire Lestat, the Mayfair witches and the amazing worlds they inhabit, now gives us the first in a new series of novels linked together by the fledgling vampire David Talbot, who has set out to become a chronicler of his fellow Undead.
The novel opens in present-day Paris in a crowded caf?, where David meets Pandora. She is two thousand years old, a Child of the Millennia, the first vampire ever made by the great Marius. David persuades her to tell the story of her life.
Pandora begins, reluctantly at first and then with increasing passion, to recount her mesmerizing tale, which takes us through the ages, from Imperial Rome to eighteenth-century France to twentieth-century Paris and New Orleans. She carries us back to her mortal girlhood in the world of Caesar Augustus, a world chronicled by Ovid and Petronius. This is where Pandora meets and falls in love with the handsome, charismatic, lighthearted, still-mortal Marius. This is the Rome she is forced to flee in fear of assassination by conspirators plotting to take over the city. And we follow her to the exotic port of Antioch, where she is destined to be reunited with Marius, now immortal and haunted by his vampire nature, who will bestow on her the Dark Gift as they set out on the fraught and fantastic adventure of their two turbulent centuries together.
From the Hardcover edition.
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