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The Historian

Elizabeth Kostova

Why we're reading this: Because is the search of the biggest vampire of all times: Drácula!
[close] Because is the search of the biggest vampire of all times: Drácula!

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Apr 12, 2009 PurplyCookie rated it liked it

Shelves: horror, vampire

The story opens in Amsterdam in 1972, when a teenage girl discovers a medieval book and a cache of yellowed letters in her diplomat father's library. The pages of the book are empty except for a woodcut of a dragon. The letters are addressed to: "My dear and unfortunate successor."

When the girl confronts her father, he reluctantly confesses an unsettling story: his involvement, twenty years earlier, in a search for his graduate school mentor, who disappeared from his office only moments after c The story opens in Amsterdam in 1972, when a teenage girl discovers a medieval book and a cache of yellowed letters in her diplomat father's library. The pages of the book are empty except for a woodcut of a dragon. The letters are addressed to: "My dear and unfortunate successor."

When the girl confronts her father, he reluctantly confesses an unsettling story: his involvement, twenty years earlier, in a search for his graduate school mentor, who disappeared from his office only moments after confiding to Paul his certainty that Dracula--Vlad the Impaler, an inventively cruel ruler of Wallachia in the mid-15th century--was still alive. The story turns out to concern our narrator directly because Paul's collaborator in the search was a fellow student named Helen Rossi (the unacknowledged daughter of his mentor) and our narrator's long-dead mother, about whom she knows almost nothing. And then her father, leaving just a note, disappears also.

Kostova has three basic story lines to keep straight--one from 1930, when Professor Bartolomew Rossi begins his dangerous research into Dracula, one from 1950, when Professor Rossi's student Paul takes up the scent, and the main narrative from 1972. The criss-crossing story lines mirror the political advances, retreats, triumphs, and losses that shaped Dracula's beleaguered homeland--sometimes with the Byzantines on top, sometimes the Ottomans, sometimes the rag-tag local tribes, or the Orthodox church, and sometimes a fresh conqueror like the Soviet Union.

So the travelogue begins, city to city, castle to monastery, library to mosque, confusing movement with progress (England, France, Turkey, Bulgaria, Romania, Hungary) and perhaps we should be thankful that, with all the sightseeing, the plot scarcely ever has a chance to make an appearance, because it seems mostly to consist of contrivances and chance meetings. And so it goes, random meeting after chance discovery after remarkable happenstance. Nothing in the plot is organic, nothing evolves according to any kind of logic or necessity: we are only going down a list of bullet points in the author's notebook, one after another, because that is how the plot needs to go in order to take us next to that incredible castle in the mountains where the wind whistles just so through the mossy cracks in the stonework.

Our narrator recalls that after reading descriptions of Vlad burning young boys or impaling a large family, she tried to forget the words: "For all his attention to my historical education, my father had neglected to tell me this: history's terrible moments were real. I understand now, decades later, that he could never have told me. Only history itself can convince you of such a truth."

Book Details:

Title The Historian
Author Elizabeth Kostova
Reviewed By Purplycookie ...more

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Dec 02, 2010 Katrina Michaels rated it liked it

A mix of history and mythology creates a new version of the Dracula myth that fans of Stoker will very much enjoy. The story did have a slow start and the switching perspectives can get a little confusing at times.

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