One word: Boring
Written: Aug 26 '05 (Updated Nov 13 '07)
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Pros: Good detail, accurate and interesting travelogue at times.
Cons: Derivative and boring.
The Bottom Line: Email me and I'll give you a list of 100 books more worth your time than this one.
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| xgollum's Full Review: Elizabeth Kostova - The Historian |
A good friend of mine bought me this book on impulse from Costco, saying that he'd heard something good about it. The dust jacket talks about finding codes hidden in books and tracking a historical mystery. The author photo is terrible, and she looks like she has an 'I have a secret' smirk.
This book won the Hopwood prize for novel in progress. How, I'm sure I'll never know. It is tedious, derivative, and in the end, completely not worth the rather significant time investment required.
Vlad Tepes, Vlad the Impaler, Drakulya, Dracula, or the Demon, or the Dragon, depending on your interpretation of the original language, was a real historical figure. He has gained far more power in his fictional existence, running in a head to head race with Sherlock Holmes for character about whom the most films have been made. Some of the oldest films were made about vampires, notably Nosferatu. Many ancient historical records refer to creatures of the night, immortal beings that feed off of others. This book references all of them, and tragically, in an age where almost every vampire movie, TV show, or book manages to bring something new to the table, doesn't have a single original thought.
The Historian is, tentatively, historical fiction. I say that because all of the action still takes place after WWII, so the 'historical' aspect of it is questionable. The title, however, is quite apt, speaking of almost all the main characters as intellectuals and professors of history, and also of Dracula himself, as a kind of living history, with his almost 600 years of experience. Sadly, the cleverness ends there.
The novel is told entirely in first person, although, to it's weakness, it is told from several different points of view. The narrator, a young woman whose story is secondary at best, goes to look for her father, while at the same time reading a series of letters and journals he made about the search for his mentor, a professor named Rossi. Every main character in this book is bound together by discoveries of a secret book, a volume that is blank but for an illustration of a dragon in the center, a secret recruiting tool used by Dracula himself, in hopes of finding a pet intellectual, a historian, a librarian he can keep and associate with in his immortality.
Many different quests for information merge into a very slow race to find Rossi and the girl's father, both potentially kidnapped by Dracula. A great weakness of this book, which I promise I do not state out of sexism, as I don't always find this to be the case, is the author's inability to write as a man. More than two thirds of this book unravel from the narrator's father's perspective, and Elizabeth Kostova does not do him justice. She would have done better writing the whole book as the girl looking for her father. When she writes of love, the language is appropriately flowery, but the rest of the time, it is not convincingly written in the male voice.
Much time is wasted in the narrative. The first two hundred pages are spent convincing us that there is, in fact, a vampire named Dracula, as person after person confronts the hard reality of people bitten and becoming seemingly immortal. From the dust jacket we know that this is a story about vampires, but we must still struggle gamely onward through page after page of people's reality being challenged by the notion of blood-sucking immortals. The second two hundred pages is all research, historical context, the story of the real Vlad, etc. The last two hundred pages, the two parallel stories, the two quests for missing people, come hurtling together with the speed of molasses to an abrupt conclusion, and an even less satisfying climax.
Packed, admittedly, with amazing physical detail on a dozen different cities and cultures, as a travelogue of Europe, this book could keep your attention to a degree on it's own. And, at many times, it seems the reason for writing the book in the first place, as if the quest for Vlad is simply an excuse to globetrot.
The portrayal of this book as anything like a historical 'mystery,' like The DaVinci Code, or god help us all, like Umberto Eco's unparalleled Foucault's Pendulum, is preposterous. This book has much more in common with Byatt's Possession, a meditation on the power of books, the written word, of the impact historical events can have on the present. But Kostova lacks Byatt's inherent gifts, and there are no surprises here. Every great reveal seems obvious to a reader with any grounding in Buffy, Anne Rice, et al. The vampire mythology has been tapped quite deeply, and apparently Kostova was drilling in the wrong place to come up with anything original.
Ultimately, at 642 pages, this book is top heavy with self-satisfied detail, and horrifically short on story. The dust jacket proclaims that the book builds unbearable suspense, and I haven't heard anything so preposterous in quite some time. There are, I should point out, NO positive reviews, press, or quotes on the dust jacket. I now see why. It took me forever to keep moving my way through this book, and I finished it waiting for the unbearable suspense to appear. If I'd got it from the library instead of having it bought for me, I wouldn't have even bothered finishing.
The other reviewers on this site all seemed to like it, so perhaps there is a romantically-inclined, vampire mythology loving target audience for this book, but it sure as hell isn't me.
Thanks for reading.
Recommended:
No
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xgollum
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Member: Beau Prichard
Location: Seattle.WA
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