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Hardcover
Publisher: Knopf
In 2005, Anne Rice startled her readers with her novel Christ the Lord: Out of Egypt, and by revealing that, after years as an atheist, she had returned to her Catholic faith.
Christ the Lord: The Road to Cana followed.
And now, in her powerful and haunting memoir, Rice tells the story of the spiritual transformation that produced a complete change in her literary goals.
She begins with her girlhood in New Orleans as the devout child in a deeply religious Irish Catholic family. She describes how, as she grew up, she lost her belief in God, but not her desire for a meaningful life.
She writes about her years in radical Berkeley, where her career as a novelist began with the publication of Interview with the Vampire, soon to be followed by more novels about otherworldly beings, about the realms of good and evil, love and alienation, pageantry and ritual, each reflecting aspects of her often agonizing moral quest.
She writes about loss and tragedy (her mother’s drinking; the death of her daughter and, later, her beloved husband, Stan Rice); about new joys; about the birth of her son, Christopher; about the family’s return in 1988 to the city of New Orleans, the city that inspired so much of her work. She tells how after an adult lifetime of questioning, she experienced the intense conversion and consecration to Christ that lie behind her most recent novels.
For her readers old and new, this book explores her continuing interior pilgrimage.
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| Interesting |
| Customer Rating: 3 out of 5 |
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First, let me say how happy I am that Anne has found Christ again, or as I think she would say, that He has refound her.
This was an interesting book on several counts. The first part, about her childhood, seemed overly detailed, and I found myself skipping forward. But two points were worth retaining. First, Anne was a poor reader, and her information came to her via visual stimuli or the spoken word. I found it amazingly ironic that so colorful a wordsmith would start out life that way. The importance of the visual in Anne's life probably accounts for the level of detail in her descriptions.
Second, young Anne perceived her all-encompassing Catholicism to be at perfect peace with the world's scientific, intellectual, and cultural pursuits. I'm not sure I fully agree with that, considering the Legion of Decency, which she mentions, never mind the RCC's dealings with the Galileos of history. But I do see much of contemporary Catholicism, anyway, embracing man's search for knowledge.
Once Anne began being drawn back to Christ the pages turned faster. I think my big takeaway here was that her conversion mirrored the dynamics of her childhood experience, in that it was initially driven by the visual rather than by the word. No one reasoned with her regarding the claims of Christ. No sermon convicted her. She didn't repent. Her wooing came via visual impressions of the religious statues to which she became addicted. Later it came via the spoken word of the masses she would watch on TV.
The impression I have is a deeper-than-words yearning of the soul for its lover. Words come only afterward, to describe the relationship. And their ability to describe must be, as she admits, imperfect.
The Body of Christ is diverse, as Scripture tells us. There are different gifts and callings, there are different perspectives on received truth. There are, Anne writes, Christmas Christians and Passion Christians. And each of us is at different stages of our growth in the reality of Christ. Yet the paradox is that Christians have the central unity of Christ in us, even as we work out our salvation.
Anne's tells her story differently from the way I would tell mine, but there were enough touchpoints that it gave me some things to think about.
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| Ignorance is Bliss |
| Customer Rating: 1 out of 5 |
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Called Out of Darkness by Anne Rice is not for the non-believer. The author admits repeatedly that she is a devout Catholic/Christian despite the status of the church. As an author of twenty-plus novels focusing on witches, vampires and evil forces, she attempts to twist her "past" into an excuse, a "path" if you will, back to religion.
Considering the author's age and correlation of her sudden change of heart with her onset of nearly dying from a diabetes induced coma and the loss of her long time husband, one can only "expect" such a transition.
The book is of interest if you want to know the present day Anne Rice. If you are a lover of religious non-fiction this is definately the book for you. The religious imagery is present, but only in the dry and droning descriptions of the various churches she has attended and visited throughout the world. The combination of a first person narration, multiple references to the many buildings she has purchased in New Orleans, her purchasing of things "regardless of price" and learning that she had/has a real issue with reading I have lost my interest in her work, present and past.
If you are a devout "vampire" fan, free of religious barriers and ties, you probably won't want to read this one. I must admit that barring this dry read, I own every stick of literature Anne Rice has written, from the vamps to the witches and even her sultry sexual interludes (which are honestly, some of her best writing in my honest opinion.) I even own the two "Christ" books, however I had not read them yet, and will not do so now. Everything but the "Beauty" books is going to be donated to a library or charity. I wonder if the church down the street would like them?
I have not read every thing she has written, but I have read most and do own all but this one. (Saved myself $24 - support your local library!) I have always been short on time and a slight sigh often escaped me when I would gaze upon my collection of Rice. If I'd had more time I would have certainly read those I have not read yet. That was until today, until I read "Called Out of Darkness." I have no interest now. I know I would be distracted, looking for undertones of christianity and her divergent path. But now which path was she really on?
She claims that she was close to God and the church before she started reading, and that books basically led her to athiesm. Isn't it odd that books also (the ones she wrote) now also led her back to the church? This book is a dangerous double entendre! This books speaks of ignoring/not caring about the sins that the church has committed. She certainly can not cast the first stone, however I think her take on the church is irresponsible and blind.
"In the face of all the reading material on these questions, I have to remind myself of my central vocation. It is not to learn church history or become involved with church politics. It is not to discover the reasons for the widespread pedophilia scandal, or even to discover why so many clergymen chose to break their vows, not with consenting adults, but with adolescents and children." (Rice, A (2008). Called Out of Darkness. New York: Knopf.)
I don't know if she has many books left to write, but if she does, they'd really have to be quite a change from "Called Out of Darkness" for me to bother.
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| Not What I Expected |
| Customer Rating: 2 out of 5 |
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The premise of the book was very interesting to me. How does an atheist convert to Christ? Sadly, we never really find out.
Much of this book is devoted a painfully detailed description of Anne's early years and her experiences as a child in the Catholic church. Regarding the process of her conversion (or reconversion if you will), I'm not really sure how it happened - it just sort of happened according to Anne.
In the end, she connects to Christ and her Catholic roots but without really accepting the church doctrine which she disagrees with in many important respects. Is she in? Or is she out? Has she returned to her Catholic faith only because it is a comfortable place to be once she reconnects with Christ? Would she be happier as a Baptist, a Methodist or as a member of some other Christian faith?
Too many questions left unanswered for me to give this book more than two stars.
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| This books is a moving brilliant read! |
| Customer Rating: 5 out of 5 |
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I'm a huge fan of all of Anne Rice's books. When I heard that she was wrote a spiritual memoir I ordered it right away. I wasn't disappointed; and I ended up staying up half the night so I could finish the book, I couldn't put it down! Her descriptions of her early spiritual experiences at Church were beautiful and almost brought me to tears. Thank you for sharing your story!
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| An Intimate Account of a Return to Catholicism |
| Customer Rating: 5 out of 5 |
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How can a Berkley-educated intellectual who has achieved fame by writing blood and gore novels about vampires return to Catholicism after 38 years of being a proclaimed atheist? I had to find out!
Anne Rice's childhood experience of the Catholic religion was similar to mine: religion was present in all aspects of our lives and it felt good. When she wrote about her response to the rich symbolism of her religion as a child attending Mass at the magnificent cathedrals of New Orleans in the 1940s, I remembered how I felt when attending my little church in Wisconsin, also a beautiful place, full of statues and stained-glass windows and symbolic art that told magnificent stories.
When Rice wrote about how she then, as an adult, abandoned the church and God to become a proclaimed atheist, I connected to the empty feelings she described so creatively. As an adult, I have also abandoned the church, but not as an atheist.
I couldn't connect with Rice's claim that her vampire books were an important part of her search for her lost god. However, I was in awe of her complex mind as she wrote about this relationship and her atheism. "When people refer to me as a 'prodigal daughter' because I have given up writing 'about vampires and witches,' I am confused," she writes. "I feel no guilt whatsoever for anything I ever wrote. The sincerity of my writings removes them completely from what I hold to be sin. I also feel no real contrition for my years as an atheist, because my departure from the church was not only painful, but also completely sincere."
Rice begins her memoir by saying that it is about faith and that the heart is absolutely essential to faith. Her elaboration of this theme was important, as she confesses that her greatest challenge of all has been to love: "All that gossip, all that criticism, all that spitefulness, all that meanness, all the verbal sparring, all that anger--all that failure to love."
I was deeply curious to see how Rice reasons her way through the modern-day controversies within the Catholic Church. She writes: "I hadn't thought it radical, for instance, for a deeply orthodox Catholic to hope for the eventual ordination of women. Or for a Catholic to believe that our gay Christian brothers and sisters would soon be accepted into the fold."
Rice has recently published two books about Jesus: Christ the Lord: Out of Egypt and The Road to Cana. I will read these books and feel enormous gratitude to Anne Rice for having written them, as well as her intimate memoir about her search for God.
by Donna Van Straten Remmert
for Story Circle Book Reviews
reviewing books by, for, and about women
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