The Historian in Reading with Style

Mar 02, 2024 Wendy rated it did not like it

Shelves: doorstops, armchair-travel, 2024

For the first half of this doorstop of a book, I thought for sure this would end up as a 4-star read. The narrator's travels through 1970s Europe with her father are lush and evocative, and meanwhile tension builds as she stumbles across some mysterious letters which her father is reluctant to discuss. At length, we learn that in the 1950s a friend of the father, Professor Rossi, disappeared mysteriously -- locked room, blood on ceiling -- suggesting dark things lurking among the dusty medieval For the first half of this doorstop of a book, I thought for sure this would end up as a 4-star read. The narrator's travels through 1970s Europe with her father are lush and evocative, and meanwhile tension builds as she stumbles across some mysterious letters which her father is reluctant to discuss. At length, we learn that in the 1950s a friend of the father, Professor Rossi, disappeared mysteriously -- locked room, blood on ceiling -- suggesting dark things lurking among the dusty medieval books of library shelves. The characters aren't particularly developed, but the book seems to promise a "dark academia" type of mystery through monasteries and libraries of Eastern Europe with some unexpected twists along the way, and a satisfying conclusion. This book made a lot of intriguing promises early on, and ultimately delivered none of them in a satisfying way.

I was immersed in this novel for the first half, and I'm trying to pinpoint when I started to turn on the book -- or perhaps it was the other way around. First came an accumulation of unlikely coincidences. Then I realized that the tension from the beginning had completely disappeared. The characters have a few run-ins with suspicious strangers/librarians/officials who appear deathly sallow and have strange wounds on their necks. These run-ins were a bit cartoonish, but it fits for a thriller type of book and serves to keep the main characters moving. Suddenly these strangers stopped showing up. There's no ticking clock with finding Rossi either, so the characters moon about Eastern Block countries gathering a lot of historical material, much of which isn't ultimately relevant to the plot later. There was an interesting moment where the characters comment on the vampiric likeness of certain embalmed Soviet leaders and I got my hopes up for an interesting turn, but nothing came of it. And then little things started bothering me, overwrought passages that emphasized the most minute details, things that hadn't bothered me early in the story when I was still "in it". I was annoyed by a letter writer who wrote out another character's Scottish accent in dialogue (who writes like that?). I rolled my eyes at a cliff described as having "meteoric steepness" and boots that were "indescribably different from any I'd ever seen". Oh well, I thought, clearly the book needed an editor and I'm getting impatient, but the ending will pull everything together.

It didn't. The final encounters completely deflated any semblance of tension that the book managed to maintain up to that point. (view spoiler)

So, I finished this novel feeling miffed, to put it gently. I wanted a twist, not a deus ex machina. And I wanted some kind of explanation that tied all the admittedly interesting stuff about the historical Vlad guy with actual vampires. The book contains a lot of primary (and "primary") sources about him, but only who he was as a man, not as a vampire, and not how he got to be a vampire (at least until the last few lines of the book). In our world, Vlad became associated with vampires because Bram Stoker thought his patronymic "Dracula" sounded epic and slapped it on his vampire count. But it's not clear in this novel what is going on here. Lots of the characters are reading Stoker's Dracula. Is it a historical document in this world? And how do these historians seem to know the arbitrary vampire "rules", that you need to be bitten three times to become a vampire for example? There's none of that in the primary sources, it sounds like something only our resident anthropologist (Helen) who studies Romanian peasant superstitions would know, and it might have been neat if she could have told all these stuffy old librarians a thing or two. Oh well. I feel like The Historian failed to deliver on too many of its promises, and I'd recommend The Da Vinci Code over this, as it actually maintains tension through the historical asides and delivers a much better twist. ...more

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Feb 24, 2011 Emily rated it really liked it · review of another edition

This book was extremely long, but the author did an excellent job of keeping one intrigued the entire way through the adventure. With so much historical background and so much of the action taking place in the past, the narrative could have easily gotten off track, and it did not.
The payoff at the end was slightly less than I had looked forward to after investing so much time into this book. I thought it could have been more climactic.
Overall, an entertaining read, which put many more European c ...more

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Jul 28, 2011 Kristina Simon rated it it was ok · review of another edition

I finally finished The Historian by Elizabeth Kostova and it took WAY too long! While the story was interesting and Kostova's descriptions of European cities were often lovely, I found the book unnecessarily wordy and not as gripping as I would have liked. And the ending? No idea what that was all about.... but I didn't like it at all. ...more

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Jul 04, 2010 Kathleen rated it really liked it · review of another edition

In a time when vampire novels are a dime a dozen, this novel came as a pleasant surprise. This is not an easy read and took me much longer to read than expected. The novel jumps between time periods through letters and verbal stories. It covers a great deal of historical events and places. This novel makes me think of the classic gothic novels. The characters are well developed and the suspense is built slowly through the expanse of the novel. My only complaint would be that at times it was a bi ...more

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