Pandora (New Tales of the Vampires)
Average Rating: 4.0 Stars
by Anne Rice
List Price: $7.99
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Binding: Mass Market Paperback
Publisher: Ballantine Books
ISBN: 0345422384
Amazon.com Review
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.
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Product Description
"Eerily vibrant. . . . The title character is a highborn woman of Augustan Rome who later names herself after the Pandora of mythology, opening her own box of surprises. Sitting in a modern-day Paris cafe in the aftermath of a fresh kill, the vampire Pandora accepts the challenge of recounting her history and immediately sets to work, filling the blank pages of an elegant leatherbound notebook. . . . A wealth of narrative twists and period detail".--"The New York Times Book Review".
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Customer Reviews
I would love to see a movie made of this book!
5 Stars
I can picture a movie made of this book. This is rich and full of history, religion and philosophy. It is also rich with the smart beautiful Marius who adores Pandora, not just for her beauty, but for her brain. He can't have any other woman in life, but this smart beautiful one, who is his match in intellect. However, Marius has to be such a know it all and be the one who is always right and the teacher. Pandora can't stand for this and will have none of this. She wants equality and will not be his pupil. This is so rich and so much how it has always been for women and still, even in the world today. No matter how smart women are, some men can't handle it and have to be right. I'd like to know, if after two thousand years, will Marius chill out? Has he learned anything from his life to be with the woman he loves? We are left to guess and hope it all turns out in the end. Reading Blood and Gold before this is worth it, so you know how Marius feels also. We root for Pandora to get her man in the end and for Marius to get his woman and learn to stop being Mr. know it all!
~ Jaga,
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Not my favorite
3 Stars
I love Anne Rice, so don't get me wrong, but this was not her best story. It starts out a bit scatter brained on Pandora's part so I found it a little hard to follow until it really got into the story. I guess I was just expecting to read about happenings between Pandora and Marius, or Pandora and her Asian vampire that she spent a great deal of time with, but there isn't any of that really. You are basically reading a few new things from Pandora's point of view during Roman times; it doesn't go past that age much. I still liked it because it was Anne Rice, but it was definitely not my favorite of her work. It's a short story so it's not like it will be a complete waste of your time if you like Anne Rice.
~ C. Hollingshead, Michigan, USA
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Pandora should have been 5 times longer
4 Stars
I wasn't really all that familiar with Anne Rice except through the Mayfair series (Blood Canticle, for me, was part 4 of the Mayfair Witch series, though I knew of Lestat from the movies). This was given to me as a gift when it first came out. I liked it. That whole Taltos thing was a bit Lovecraftian in the way Anne told this. A big Rice fan liked my novel, "Other Nations", and said that if Anne had written my novel, it would have been 6 books and not 6 chapters :) Ok. Now that I've read more Anne, maybe my novel would have been 10 books in her hands :) At least I can see what this fan meant. I didn't quite see that when I only read the Mayfair/Taltos stories. I see it with the Vampire stuff, definitely. Anne is also telling it from the other side, not the human side. I did the same in my novel - from the non-human side, not the same old "good versus evil" stuff.
I like sci fi, and TV shows about Vampires are, for me, sci fi of a sort. Very recently, another Rice fan said "read Blood and Gold" and so, I tried it and LOVED LOVED LOVED it. After I read it, I checked the reviews. Negative reviews said that B and G was like rereading the first 3 books of the vampire series. Well, that was good for me. I didn't read the first 3 books! (heh, not YET...)
Next, I tried the Vampire Armand - and well, I thought it sucked - no other way to put it. Starts out with pages upon pages of gay light-porn and then hops skips jumps into something a bit more interesting, but not very well told by Armand. Perhaps that's because Armand is quite frankly nuts. And no, it's not that I didn't know what was going on - Armand is nuts; he is a bundle of mixed up confusion with all that ugliness in his childhood, "fool for God," monkish lunacy. It's very easy for me to pick up what's going on, even reading these books out of order. Glad I didn't read Armand first. SO glad I did not read that one first. And oh, phphph the Appassionata. The Pathetique is much nicer a piece! (Beethoven).
Pandora is the book I just finished. LOVED it, absolutely LOVED it, LOVED the whole detailed story about her life as a Roman girl - ALL of it. And the same sense of absolute tragedy, grief, hit me about the lost letter, the letter Marius only found hundreds of years later. Oh GOD that was so so sad, two times around, just as sad.
I gave this a 4 for one reason. It's WAY too short. WHAT HAPPENS after Pandora realizes Marius is gone? I know about Dresden because I first read Blood and Gold, but Pandora is over 2000 years old! Her "wasted days" as she puts it to David without elaborating, are days that readers would definitely want to know about. How about TELLING US?
How did she meet the fierce Asian vampire Arjun (I know his name is Arjun because I read it in Blood and Gold). Pandora didn't name him in her own narrative.
This novel should have been FIVE TIMES larger than it was. At least!
My next book, I got it from the library (I'm not a rich person...) is "The Vampire Lestat." "Interview" was out. I'll either end up reading Interview next, or Merrick - though I'd like to know the details about Claudia before reading Merrick. I know of Claudia from the movie and from what the novels I read have said.
It's REALLY too bad Anne is no longer writing this. If this were the Lovecraftian genre, someone ELSE would be able to pick up the story of Pandora - and perhaps even get REALLY far out with what happened to the twins in SEVEN THOUSAND YEARS time - and there'd be no copyright problems with it, since it's allowed in that genre! The tale would start off at the point the twins are separated, a short paraphrase of their known history as per the canon. A Pandora book starting where Marius and Pandora are separated. They'd both end at the point where Anne wrote of them meeting up with others again.
Perhaps Anne would allow someone else to tell the rest of Pandora's story? And/or tell us the story of the twins? They'd only have to write stuff that nobody else ever read about anywhere else - and not have it collide with what's already known.
I want to say something to critics that go on about Anne contradictioning herself. NO, ANNE is not doing that. Louis might contradict Lestat. Marius contradicts Pandora - Pandora addresses that! Armand might think Marius was the love of his life (so some fans thought that was "The Story"), but that is NOT what Marius feels or thinks. Marius says Pandora was THE love of his life. Critics went on about "why Anne changed it." Changed what? I don't think Anne is forgetting what "she said" elsewhere or backpeddling, or changing her mind about what she wrote. These are supposed to be books written by Lestat, Louis, Pandora, Marius, etc. The techique is called "unreliable narrator." These characters all have different voices - their narratives, so far, read to me as if different people wrote them (yet I know Anne wrote these books). Therefore, my not liking Armand's story is not a statement about Anne. It's a statement about Armand. When you read Pandora, you are not supposed to think "Anne said this, Anne said that, Anne is saying this now." No. PANDORA is speaking.
Anyway, I surely hope The Vampire Lestat is more like Pandora and Blood and Gold than like the Armand book. OH PLEASE!!
~ T. Marsh, FL United States
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Pandora
4 Stars
it's a good book, i love her vampires, they're very human and she's so detailed, that it feels like you're going through the things that happen as well.
~ Julie Schott, Kulm, ND USA
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Pandora, finally unveiled
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.
~ Val, RI
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