The Historian

by Elizabeth Kostova

my father hated planes, which he said took the travel out of traveling.

There, in that chair, I gradually allowed Stoker’s alternating Gothic horror and cozy Victorian love stories to engulf me.

Only read to the end, I beg you.

It touched me to be trusted with something terrible.

young, thick-necked, virile man. His hair was long; heavy black curls tumbled around his shoulders. The face was handsome and cruel in the extreme, with luminously pale skin, unnaturally bright green eyes, a long straight nose with flaring nostrils. His red lips were curved and sensual under a drooping dark mustache, but also tightly compressed as if to control a twitching of the chin. He had sharp cheekbones and heavy black eyebrows below a peaked cap of dark green velvet, with a brown-and-white feather threaded into the front. It was a face full of life but completely devoid of compassion, brimming with strength and alertness but without stability of character. The eyes were the most unnerving feature of the painting; they fixed us with a penetration almost alive in its intensity, and after a second I looked away for relief.

Before I could so much as step between Helen and the ghoulish figure, she pulled a pistol from her jacket pocket and shot him.”

‘Please explain to her that my mother’s specialties are meat loaf and macaroni-and-cheese.’

He is not kind. He does not know when to say something comforting and when to be silent. He does not really care about history. He does not have soft gray eyes or bushy eyebrows, or roll his sleeves up to the elbow.’ I stared at her, and now she looked me full in the face with a kind of determined courage. ‘In short, the biggest problem with him is that he is not you.’

“History has taught us that the nature of man is evil, sublimely so. Good is not perfectible, but evil is.