Violin by Anne Rice

Ok, it got to me. I yield, I suffered and mourned and longed for Stefan. I didn't think I would, not at first. How boring were those long, endless descriptions of Triana's visions, dreams, how detailed were they, the faces (their cheeks, their noses, their chins...), the colors, the shapes, the materials (the velvet and the marbles and the wood...).  The other characters thought she was crazy and I thought, if she is I won't bear with 200 and more pages like these, full of meaningless visions: maybe this is what she thinks, sees or dreams about hearing her beloved music, and remembering all her dead loved ones, but I feel nothing of it. Then, the mysterious violinist that had played for her two nights after her husband Karl had died and she had told no one, keeping his body in the house, not ready to let go, finally became more present to the story and I felt for him in many ways. His story was sad and I felt empathy, but also doubt that he actually deserved such empathy, after what he'd done, and anger at his acting badly, driving people mad with his music, being so mean to Triana, always hating; he was half desperately sad and half fiercely angry and hateful, and I couldn't bear his hate, I longed for him to let go of it. Yes, anger is often a better emotion to feel than others like fear or sadness, but not when it hurts others, that's going too far. Anger can save you, but if you let it go too far it can destroy you.
Triana is a 54 years old woman in New Orleans. Karl died of Aids and she stayed inside the house with him two days, curling next to him the night and spending the daytime listening to Beethoven or Mozart. She wasn't rational, she seemed crazy and couldn't follow on a normal conversation. She started to think only of the tall man with the violin, that had played so beautifully. She has great pain inside for all her losses: the father she nursed to the end, the drunk mother that died away from her, her little daughter Lily that died so young of cancer and now her husband Karl, and all her regrets and guilt connected to them, but she also has great love for her sisters: Rosalind, so good like her husband, Katrinka so full of hate but who loved Lily so much, and Faye who disappeared and nobody heard of her again. She knows about pain, about love and about music. When the violinist comes, she embraces his music at first, but pulls away in time. He comes to her, as real as a mortal man and yet nothing more than the ghost of a man who lived over a century before her time. He could not drive her crazy, and yet he came back to her, playing again, making her re-live sad memories, until she remembered when her drunk mother had beaten her, kicking her in the stomach, filling him with a pain we could not yet understand. It was then, when she noticed this, that she caught him off-guard and took his violin, his long Stradivarius, and kept it away from him, refusing to give it back, so that he could use it to keep driving people mad. That prolonged holding of the violin created a connection between them. As he had been able to read her thoughts and feelings, now she's to witness his life story. She sees young Prince Stefan in Vienna with his maestro Beethoven; when his house burn down but he managed to save this very violin he held so precious; when he played for and with Paganini who accepted to 'teach' him if his father gave permission; when he asked his father but could not obtain it so he tried to take the violin and go away and then his father hit him and hit his hands and broke them both, and Stefan went into a fury and kicked down his father, in the stomach and in the head and the father died; she saw him run away from the guards who had orders from the Czar to shoot him on sight, and she saw him going back to the house to get his violin, only to get caught by the guards and be shot together with it.  Both him and the violin 'died' there, and when he ran away from that place they were both ghosts already, yet he never let go of it. Triana watches while he wanders, desperately alone, invisible to everybody, until he plays at Beethoven's grave for tribute, and a woman grieving hears him and sees him, and there he started. He wants his violin back, so precious to him, but she won't let him have it. Suddenly, instead of waking up at her house again, she finds herself in modern Vienna. She feels lost and starts playing, and people are gripped; she could never play as she dreamed of, but now she finds the music in her, in all her emotions that she lets flow in music form. She can't repeat existent music, every time is a new original improvisation. Her family comes to get her and they start touring the world, Triana makes one concert after the other, has great success. She's happy, and her family now is happy with her. When she receives a formal invitation from Stefan to go play in Brazil, she goes, she can't refuse him, she feels a strong connection. She knows Stefan wants to break her, for his violin, and he tries, giving her visions of her little girl pleading for her to stop, and all her dead, and she puts in music all her emotions, knowing it's not real. She sees Stefan and a light behind him. In her mind she screams for him to go into it, to find peace at last, but he doesn't. Later on, he sends her a message "I must see you. I promise you, I will not try to hurt you. Your Stefan" and she rushes to him. They meet and talk, and he says he always saw that light, and never went into it. He says, what if my violin goes with me, when I go away? And that he's afraid. She gives him his violin, tells him she's afraid too and they say goodbye. He goes into the warm light. She goes back to the hotel, to tell her family that she gave back the long Strad, and will now play one of the violins they bought, hoping the music inside her is still there. She arrives to find that Faye came back to her family, and Triana plays for her, and it was a beautiful happy music, and so it ends, with a happy ending for all. The music didn't come from a magic violin, but from the souls of those who played it.
I liked the connection between Triana and Stefan, I liked this ghost so full of violent emotions: the guilt for his father's murder which he never intended to do, his passion for his music, the loneliness of his condition, the anger for the injustice of the world that didn't let him have the life he wanted, the fear to go away forever. I liked Triana, who knew pain and guilt and love and music so intimately she was not overwhelmed by his visions, she did not lose herself into them, because she had always known she had all those emotions inside her, and knew them so well they could not drive her mad. She had thought of killing herself after Karl died, but never did it to not break her family, to not leave the ones she loved with the guilt and the sorrow. She learned to live with those emotions, as she had all her life.
Only one thing I didn't love: it was the story of her first husband Lev: yes, it helps understand what kind of a woman she is, but the fact that after their daughter died Triana understood that he needed comfort and graciously left him to her friend Chelsea that gave him three sons and she now loves them all makes her look like an alien to normal people. She did a good thing, and now she knows he would always help her at a single word from her, but normal people of this world would have said instead 'oh you need to sleep with other women, don't you? And what about what I need? I won't let you go be happy with another woman while I have nothing'. Triana understood his need to feel alive and have other children, that they never stopped loving each other. In a way this is more unrealistic than her young handsome ghost with a talent for music that was praised by Paganini himself. But I liked her for that.