The reincarnation of human nature

  All human history can be summed up as a vast history of human nature.

Through the fog of vicissitudes, the author takes us back to the Age of Machine 18th century, where billowing dense smoke rises everywhere with damp haze. More somber than the weather is the vampire Louis' memories of his first half of life.

Lester, Claudia, and Amadio—all three, like Louis, are key figures in the book. The life and death entanglements, love, and hate between them four for more than two centuries showed us the mutual alienation and interdependence between people. Sartre once said, "Others are hell." Darwin, however, insisted that man is a social animal. So under the above kind of estrangement and dependence, different people repeatedly read this story with tragic color and each one of readers has their own unique insight.

The vampire described by the author is transformed from people with profound humanization feature. For them, all emotions are amplified, everyone pays attention to different affective factors. Different emotional concerns also cause them to have different thinking, therefore, contradictions and conflicts arise. Everyone wants to change the other to make the "whole world" going on for his or her own needs: Lester wants to change Louis' "useless" sympathies so that each killing will be less disturbing; Louis wants to change Lester's love of killing in order to save himself from suffering from compassion for human; Claudia wants Louis to abandon Lester so that he can be fully her own; Amadio wants Louis to give up Claudia and always keep her company. Each one of them has their own mind, nobody never said a word but they seem to reach a tacit understanding.

Finally, in order to escape the harm brought to him by the repeated killing of Lester, Louis chose to leave Lester. For retaining Louis, Lester turned five-year-old Claudia into a vampire and made her their common daughter. Meanwhile, in order to change Louis' compassion for human beings, Lester trained Claudia to be a "natural killer"— put Claudia up to play with the prey ferociously and then drain their blood in an attempt to corrupt Louis. As she grew older, Claudia began to resent Lester for ruining her whole childhood. Of course, she also hated Louis, but she needed someone to take care of her. So Claudia killed Lester and took Louis by herself. But when they arrived in Paris, they met Amadio, where Claudia was extinguished by the sun and transformed into a statue. Louis, who filled with remorse, set off with Amadio on a journey to find their same peers.

We read about the selfishness, arrogance, cruelty, and greed of human nature in this book; in contrast, we also see the desire for love and good, discontent, and melancholy with the status quo and the wish of go-beyond-oneself, even the care and love of others from vampires. Throughout history, human beings have gone through many disasters caused by greed. But the more we witness the kindness and love in human nature, the more glory of human nature we look forward to seizing in the future — even in such an endless cycle and reincarnation.