Skip to main content

Review: The Historian, by Elizabeth Kostova

This novel offers an interesting, fresh look at the infamous legend of Dracula. Covering a period of more than 500 years, this book takes its reader from the Ottoman conquest up through the Cold War.
In 1930, a British graduate student named Bartolomeo Rossi recieves a strange old book with blank pages and an imprint of a dragon in the centerfold. One evening, a close friend at the univeristy shows up at his door, dead, and with two strange marks on the back of his neck. The book takes him on a journey that takes him to Eastern Europe: to Romania, where he meets a young woman who is descended from Vlad the Impaler, also known as Dracula; and to Istambul.

The book jumps forward twenty years, to when Rossi is a professor at an American university- probably Harvard, though the author never names the university. He has a graduate advisee named Paul, who finds a book that strangely is similar to the one his advisor recieved. One evening Rossi goes missing, and Paul teams up with a young woman named Helen Rossi (daughter of the professor) in order to find him.

The book jumps again, to 1974. Paul and Helen have married, as one would have suspected from the outset. They have a daughter (unnamed), who is the narrator of part of the story. Helen went missing when the daughter was very young, and now her father believes that she might be alive. Paul goes to France, where Helen was last seen alive, and his daughter follows close at his heels. There, they face Dracula, and predictably vanquish him. The book is confusing, because it jumps back and forth in time. The first part of the book is dovoted to Rossi's letters to his "dear and unfortunate successor-" which Paul appears to be. We get bits and pieces of Paul and his relationship with his daughter, and then we get Paul's accounts of his travels through Eastern Europe.


However, the story is excellent and this book is a joy to read. It is different from Bram Stoker's tale (though it borrows some things from it), which makes it so appealing. Don't look for any Anne Rice references here, as her vampire tales postdate the setting of this book by at least ten years. Don't expect this book to be full of action; it's a "thinking" book, which is why I think that other reviewers found it to be so disagreeable to them.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Another giveaway

This time, the publicist at WW Norton sent me two copies of The Glass of Time , by Michael Cox--so I'm giving away the second copy. Cox is the author of The Meaning of Night, and this book is the follow-up to that. Leave a comment here to enter to win it! The deadline is next Sunday, 10/5/08.

A giveaway winner, and another giveaway

The winner of the Girl in a Blue Dress contest is... Anna, of Diary of An Eccentric ! My new contest is for a copy of The Shape of Mercy , by Susan Meissner. According to Publisher's Weekly : Meissner's newest novel is potentially life-changing, the kind of inspirational fiction that prompts readers to call up old friends, lost loves or fallen-away family members to tell them that all is forgiven and that life is too short for holding grudges. Achingly romantic, the novel features the legacy of Mercy Hayworth—a young woman convicted during the Salem witch trials—whose words reach out from the past to forever transform the lives of two present-day women. These book lovers—Abigail Boyles, elderly, bitter and frail, and Lauren Lars Durough, wealthy, earnest and young—become unlikely friends, drawn together over the untimely death of Mercy, whose precious diary is all that remains of her too short life. And what a diary! Mercy's words not only beguile but help Abigail and Lars

Six Degrees of Barbara Pym's Novels

This year seems to be The Year of Barbara Pym; I know some of you out there are involved in some kind of a readalong in honor of the 100th year of her birth. I’ve read most of her canon, with only The Sweet Dove Died, Civil to Strangers, An Academic Question, and Crampton Hodnet left to go (sadly). Barbara Pym’s novels feature very similar casts of characters: spinsters, clergymen, retirees, clerks, and anthropologists, with which she had direct experience. So it stands to reason that there would be overlaps in characters between the novels. You can trace that though the publication history of her books and therefore see how Pym onionizes her stories and characters. She adds layers onto layers, adding more details as her books progress. Some Tame Gazelle (1950): Archdeacon Hoccleve makes his first appearance. Excellent Women (1952): Archdeacon Hoccleve gives a sermon that is almost incomprehensible to Mildred Lathbury; Everard Bone understands it, however, and laughs