The Historian
by Elizabeth Kostova
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Book Summary Information
Author: Elizabeth KostovaEdition: Mass Market Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2008-06-01
ISBN: 0316067946
Number of pages: 909
Publisher: Little, Brown and Company
Book Reviews of The Historian
Book Review: What might have been
Summary: 3 Stars
This book was hugely hyped even before it was even published, with Kostova getting a big fat $2 million advance from Little, Brown. (Note to self: Between Kostova and Meyer, LB apparently likes giving ridiculously big paychecks to debut authors and then spending even more to buy glowing advance reviews. V. successful. Must get on board.)
A friend loaned this to me weeks ago because we both like vampires and history - he claimed that after a slow start I would love it. My conclusion is this: It could've been a much better book.
It's part historical feature on Vlad Tepes, part ode to the noble cause and work of historians, and part travelogue of Europe. Either one of these separate would have been very good, but all of them together in a work that is considered to be fiction? It's just too massive. Kostova was very ambitious, and her 9-10 years of wonderfully detailed research is apparent, but it just wasn't successful.
There were definitely good things. Kostova has a very poetic way with description. She likes to linger over the way the light of 1950s Budapest glances off the Danube, the sounds and smells of Tuscany in the summer, the mysteriousness of the Bulgarian mountains, and she does it well. Oh, this book can definitely make you want to travel, to see Romania and Istanbul and the Pyrenees. Kostova also builds up a fascinating historical look at Vlad as he was in life and how that may have influenced his undeath, and there were moments, especially in the beginning when the mystery is starting to unravel, where I was genuinely and deliciously almost creeped out. It was subtle, like mist sneaking in under the door. I was ready for a whole lot more of that. And the author also succeeds in painting one character very clearly - a woman named Helen, who is edgy and smart (until that, too, jumps the shark).
Unfortunately, all of this is buried under things I really just couldn't get past. For one, the majority of the story is about Paul's search for his mentor, told to his daughter in a series of supposedly hastily written letters just before his disappearance. And yet, these recountings detail specific dinners eaten, excessive descriptions of trees standing next to monastery walls, shoes changed into - all things that happened 20 years ago that no one would ever remember, let alone bother to write down to their endangered daughter when all she really needs to know is that, "Yup, we found Dracula, dearest child. He's buried at Such-and-Such Super Historical Site, he was scary, and he's still out there. Keep your head down and go find a girl named Buffy Summers. Dinner's in the oven."
Oftentimes, Kostova seems more interested in exposition dumping all of her marvelous research onto the page, which would be fine in historical nonfiction, but here it muffles the plot. You try to absorb all of this information with the idea that it will be important later, but almost none of it is. I found myself having to skim big blocks of text describing things like the stone in one of the fountains in the courtyard just to stay sane. Every now and then a tidbit of creepiness kept me going, and I powered through, believing that the payoff once we found Vlad himself would be worth it.
It wasn't.
I'm a payoff kind of girl. I'm willing to put up with a lot of crap if, in the end, you give me a good climatic ending and a resolution that makes sense. And after 600 pages, we finally meet Dracula...and I'm underwhelmed. All the potential for the delicious creepiness was gone. The characters in the book were terrified of him, but add some Hot Topic sparkle glitter and I would've been about as afraid of Kostova's Dracula as I was of the Cullens. His powers - much debated over the course of the book - seemed spotty and ludicrous. He can make full meals appear out of thin air while asleep? He knows when anyone anywhere in the world starts to research him? He will appear when you just say his name (but not always because sometimes it would inconvenience the plot)? And yet, when the final faceoff finally arrives, and you think that finally, finally you're getting your massively awesome award for trucking through 620 pages...it all takes 2 pages. Tops. o_O I kept rereading them to see if I had missed something in the poetic-y treatment of an action scene.
The resolution afterward was equally muddy. A few pages of characters talking about things, a quick but irritatingly befuddling epilogue, and then that was it. And with such a poor payoff, I could only think about the other things I had trouble with - like how every noble historian they conveniently met also conveniently had a convenient part of the convenient puzzle. Like how, with the exception of Helen, all the characters sound the same. I would've loved it for one of them to have had a real flaw, but those dedicated to the craft of piecing together history are, according to Kostova, more perfectible creatures than the rest of us present-day folk. Like how many loose threads went absolutely nowhere. Like how, even when there were creepy parts, I was never concerned about the characters and what happened to them because they were mere sketches of people, vessels by which we traveled through history.
Like I said, Kostova was very ambitious - trying to write a history, a love story, a horror tale, a travelogue...all at once. I wish for her an equally ambitious editor with a large supply of red pens and a gung-ho attitude, who says, "Fabulous research, darling - now lets find the plot under all that, shall we?"
Summary of The Historian
Breathtakingly suspenseful and beautifully written, The Historian is the story of a young woman plunged into a labyrinth where the secrets of her family's past connect to an inconceivable evil: the dark fifteenth-century reign of Vlad the Impaler and a time-defying pact that may have kept his awful work alive through the ages. The search for the truth becomes an adventure of monumental proportions, taking us from monasteries and dusty libraries to the capitals of Eastern Europe - in a feat of storytelling so rich, so hypnotic, so exciting that it has enthralled readers around the world."Never was a ghost story so casually erudite, nor a historical travelogue such gripping entertainment." ---New York Magazine
"Impossible to resist. . . . Kostova blends fact and fantasy to remind us that the original Dracula legend is rooted in monstrous acts of unblinking evil." ---Miami Herald
"A richly told story about family and the dark side of human nature. . . . This cry of the heart will appeal to readers beyond those who are drawn by a fascaination with the legend of Dracula." ---Chicago Tribune
"Genuinely terrifying." ---Boston Globe
"Nearly impossible to put down once you crack the spine. . . . It won't take you long to get to the end." ---Houston Chronicle
If your pulse flutters at the thought of castle ruins and descents into crypts by moonlight, you will savor every creepy page of Elizabeth Kostova's long but beautifully structured thriller The Historian. 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.
As well as numerous settings, both in and out of the East Bloc, 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.
Although the book is appropriately suspenseful and a delight to read--even the minor characters are distinctive and vividly seen--its most powerful moments are those that describe real horrors. 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." The reader, although given a satisfying ending, gets a strong enough dose of European history to temper the usual comforts of the closing words. --Regina Marler
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