Interview With The Vampire

I’m glad I got a chance to read this book. I had only recently seen the movie for the first time a year ago, and I did love it. I have to say though that if it wasn’t assigned I probably wouldn’t have read it. I sadly don’t get to read very often. And I used to all the time when I was in earlier school. But now in college with the computer screen taking over my life I don’t often look to books when I come home at night. Harry Potter is the only thing I had been keeping up with on a regular basis (although sadly it’s over.) This class is the motivator that had me spend my summer reading more books than I have in a long time, it’s crazy. And I’m glad, because I got to read some things that would have taken me a while to get around to or never at all.

Interview with a Vampire was great to read. I didn’t mind that I already knew what happened because of the film (which was a fairly accurate interpretation) because I had the delightful images of Brad Pitt and Antonio Banderas as vampires. Yes yes I also imagined Lestat as his same actor but only because he was good at it and decently costumed. We don’t talk about him here. Ah well. Anyway the first difference I noticed was the fact that Louie has much more of a back story here, and is not the same as the one with the movie. The movie summarizes his suicidal thoughts at the beginning with “his wife and kids died” when in fact he was never married and it was all about his little brother. What I also loved about the book was the very vividly painted picture of old time New Orleans, for example when Louie takes Lestat’s body out to Lake Ponchartrain. We get much more of a sense of the Louisiana swamp land and the creatures there when we have these nice long descriptions, as opposed to sets that were probably not filmed anywhere near there. Something that was also vastly different in my view was the treatment of Claudia. In the movie, we have a very young Kirsten Dunst playing the woman-child vampire and she is their hot tempered child. But in the book we learn much more about her mature tendencies, and her dualistic personality, and the sexual tones that even come in which the movie doesn’t go close to touching due to the odd nature of the film issue that would arise between such a child actress and an adult male actor. But in the book, with Anne Rice behind the wheel of Claudia, she is a woman who knows how to write as a woman, as opposed to Kirsten Dunst who has never been a woman who knows how to be a child and be directed as she was told to do. Claudia is just a completely different experience to me when reading as opposed to viewing.

I also enjoyed the part that we do not get to see in the movie, where Louie and Claudia search the rural European country side and find the feral corpse-like vampires. There was one part in fact that I did not quite understand where they witness a vampiress, or a supposed one, being dug up from her coffin and staked through the heart. My question is, seeing as the Anne Rice vampire rules seem to be clear that they can’t teleport, how did this vampiress get into a coffin that’s buried in the ground? If I remember, Louie seems to be sure that she was in fact a real one, and not just a dead body mistaken. Ah well. It wasn’t that important. And the scene where the dead wife is on the table at the inn and the man is mourning her and Louie comforts him, I love that!

I particularly love time pieces. Period pieces, what have you. I love thinking about men and women in historical costume. At inns. In carriages. Out and about. With most of their worldly concerns about death. I love books like that. I love anything like that. And this was a delightful experience.