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| The Historian | 
 enlarge | Author: Elizabeth Kostova
Category: Book
List Price: $25.95
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Avg. Customer Rating:  1422 reviews
Sales Rank: 90959
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Media: Hardcover
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 656
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.9
Dimensions (in): 9.4 x 6.1 x 1.6
ASIN: B000EGF0OG
Publication Date: June 14, 2005
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Amazon.com Review
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
Product Description
DESCRIPTION: In this riveting debut of breathtaking scope, a young girl discovers her father's darkest secret and embarks on a harrowing journey across Europe to complete the quest he never could -- to find history's most legendary fiend: Dracula. When a motherless American girl living in Europe finds a medieval book and a package of letters, all addressed ominously to "My dear and unfortunate successor..." she begins to unravel a thread that leads back to her father's past, his mentor's career, and an evil hidden in the depths of history. In those few quiet moments, she unwittingly assumes a quest she will discover is her birthright: a hunt that nearly brought her father to ruin and may have claimed the life of his adviser and dear friend, history professor Bartholomew Rossi. What does the legend of Vlad the Impaler, the historical Dracula, have to do with the 20th century? Is it possible that Dracula has lived on in the modern world? And why have a select few historians risked reputation, sanity, and even their lives to learn the answer? So begins an epic journey to unlock the secrets of the strange medieval book, an adventure that will carry our heroine across Europe and into the past -- not only to the times of Vlad's heinous reign, but to the days when her mother was alive and her father was still a vibrant young scholar. In the end, she uncovers the startling fate of Rossi, and comes face to face with the definition of evil-- to find, ultimately, that good may not always triumph.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 1417 more reviews...
 This is an exciting novel! June 14, 2005
734 out of 801 found this review helpful
This debut novel from Kostova contains elements from many of my favorite genres - thriller, suspense, mystery, historical fiction, and vampire lore. It is no surprise then that this supremely intelligent story was a very entertaining read. Though I feel that the story concept and character development deserve five stars, I feel that there are a few important flaws in this book which put it into the four star category.
First the good: All of the characters in this tale are very believable, including Vlad Tepes himself. I really enjoyed the historical facts surrounding the Ottoman Empire and Eastern Europe that Kostova weaved into her tale. I also loved the way she used letters to reveal the more thrilling aspects of the story bit by bit. This kept me in that "I'll just read ten more pages" mode on many a late night.
Now for the problems: The first 300 pages of this book were very compelling and hard to put down. Somewhere between page 300 and 450 it began to feel like Kostova had an old graduate school dissertaion on the migration patterns of monks in the 15th century lying around so she decided to work it into the story. Wow did that slow the pace... I don't have a problem with the storyline taking the characters on a search for the history of these monks, its just that Kostova occasionally strayed across the line between entertaining fiction and dry academic research.
All of that said, my opinion as a librarian and avid reader of such stories is that this is an excellent book, well worth reading. I am sure that it will have wide appeal and is no doubt deserved of its huge marketing push. I have heard that there is already talk of a movie...
 A suspenseful, literary novel June 14, 2005
467 out of 537 found this review helpful
The marketing campaign is underway and Elizabeth Kostova's debut novel is already being hyped as the "Dracula Code" or some similar slogan. I disagree with that approach, not just because they are quite different in more ways than just storyline, but because "The Da Vinci Code" was a good thriller with elements of history mixed in, but it is not even in the same league with this book.
"The Historian" is an epic work of historical fiction that sweeps across Europe during the four decades between 1930 and the mid 1970s. It just also happens to involve the Dracula myth and a good dose of suspense. Now, some people may object to me calling this novel a work of historical fiction because it is mostly fiction and contains very few real characters. That is true, but Kostova does such an amazing job of making the Dracula myths come alive that you can't help feeling that the legends and the story are real. Her research is stunning in its attention to detail and the wide range of topics Kostova must've studied. A previous reviewer slightly criticizes Kostova for spending too many pages describing the pilgrimage routes of monks hundreds of years ago. While sections like that do slow down the pace of the novel somewhat, they don't distract from it. The last book that I read that combines elements of history, suspense, and great characters as well as "The Historian" was "The Devil in the White City".
Highly recommended!
 Long on prose poems, short on character, plot, logic and sense. September 20, 2005
168 out of 200 found this review helpful
If you've got the remotest affection for Europe, for medieval ruins, for the romance of travel and history, it's easy to fall right in love with _The Historian_. Whatever her shortcomings, Ms. Kostova has a genuine knack for evoking the way the light at sunset hits the crumbling stone towers of the monastery just _so_ as the farmers are bringing in their animals and the smoke from the cooking stoves goes wafting by. This, and the glimmer of an interesting idea--someone secretly distributing antique books to university historians, entirely blank but for a single woodcut image of a dragon and the word "DRAKULYA"--were enough to get me at least a hundred pages into the book before I started to realize that there just wasn't any meat to the story.
Dracula, it seems, has kidnapped a kindly old professor--the recipient of one of those old books--and so a student of his sets off to search for the tomb in which Dracula was buried some 500 years ago, because even though he has moved freely across continents and oceans for centuries, that is where he just _has_ to be.
So the travelogue begins, city to city, castle to monastery, library to mosque, confusing movement with progress-- England, France, Turkey, Bulgaria, Romania, Hungary...and perhaps we should be thankful that, with all the sightseeing, the plot scarcely ever has a chance to make an appearance, because it seems mostly to consist of contrivances and chance meetings that even a Victorian like Bram Stoker would have blushed at. That woman checking out Stoker's _Dracula_ in the library just as the professor's student is starting his research? The professor's long-lost daughter, of course. The Turkish fellow sitting down to dinner at the next table? A lifelong Dracula fanatic and amateur historian, of course. And his English is excellent on account of his day job as a professor of English Lit. The English historian at a random academic conference in Budapest that our heroes attend as a cover-story to score visas to Hungary? The proud recipient of yet another of those antique dragon-books. And so it goes, random meeting after chance discovery after remarkable happenstance. Nothing in the plot is organic, nothing evolves according to any kind of logic or necessity: we are only going down a list of bullet points in the author's notebook, one after another, because that is how the plot _needs_ to go in order to take us next to that incredible castle in the mountains where the wind whistles just _so_ through the mossy cracks in the stonework...
...until after about 600 pages of this nonsense, we finally pry apart the gravestones (duly pausing to note how the dust of the centuries has settled just _so_ on the fading inscriptions of the musty crypt) and learn the terrible truth of Dracula's horrible plan for the professor, to--Dun-Dun-DUUUUNNN!--CATLOG HIS LIBRARY! (As Dave Barry would say, I swear I am not making this up.) As it turns out, the Prince of the Undead is a bit of a bookworm. Who knew?
But of course, we should have been able to guess. _Everyone_ in this novel is a bookworm, for the same reason that everyone acts the same, thinks the same, and talks the same: because everyone in this novel is essentially one character, the author herself. Romanian peasant, Turkish professor, expat teenager--read a line of dialogue at random, and you'd never be able to guess who is who. When you pick up the book, it is often a bit confusing to figure out where you are, not because there are so many narrators, but because there are so few _voices_. One imagines the author perhaps putting on now a pair of Groucho glasses, now a fez, now tying a kerchief around her hair, as she evokes one character or another, but the writing never changes. Neither do the characters themselves--the protagonists are all secular, rational people, who, when they find themselves in a vampire story, simply shrug and reach for a crucifix and a silver bullet. What they are experiencing--what they are _doing_, in picking up that crucifix--and what it might mean to their deepest senses of what the world is and how it works...these are subjects that are never touched upon. Heaven knows, an author with a certain curiosity about character and psychology, to say nothing about metaphysics, might have spun a wonderful novel out of this material. But psychology and character didn't seem to make it on to those shopping lists of cities to visit and people to meet that define the plodding bulk of this book.
Even Dracula's little hobby of distributing those dragon books to young historians to rouse their curiosity, then trying to kill them if they actually start to do research on them, might have become a window into a vain and endlessly bored mind, giving himself a little thrill to while away the centuries. Here, it's just another illogical plot contrivance, vanishing into the swarming multitudes of its fellows.
I bought the hype. June 15, 2005
86 out of 142 found this review helpful
I had every reason to think I would enjoy this book. For one thing, the hype that has been lavished on it is tremendous, and from sources as respectable as "Publisher's Weekly" (a *starred* review) and "Newsweek," whose glossy full-page review left no term of hyperbole to the imagination. "The Historian" was also described, amid the extensive praise, as exactly the sort of thing I enjoy: a tale of epic scope, intricately plotted, that blends history and the supernatural with a literate sensibility. The massive proportions of the book, together with its cover design, packaging, and description, all promise a luscious and consuming epic thriller.
I also had a compelling reason to *want* to like this book: prodded by the hype, I shelled out the hefty cover price (plus tax!), and I'd like to take this opportunity to congratulate the publishing industry for inducing someone as little inclined (or equipped) to splurge such as myself to buy a book whose price approaches the $30 mark, without having previously read any works by the author and without troubling to try out the first few pages for size. If that would have made a difference.
Now for the full disclosure: I got about as far as 300 pages, though I was tempted to stop much earlier and if it had been a library book, I would have. That's as far as I'm going, so this review will pertain only to that portion of the book. While it's possible that the story becomes mind-blowing in the latter half, my argument would be that it should not take more than 300 pages to make me care. I would also argue that the problems I have had thus far with the book are relevant regardless of whether or not it improves later on.
In a way "The Historian" *is* what it has been hyped up to be: a vast plotline set in various exotic locales that draws on history (ostensibly) as its source material to deliver a new take on the "Dracula" mythology, a mythology that has intrigued generations. Stylistically, the writing is competent throughout--all the outer trappings are there. The problem is that these outer trappings never penetrate to what is essentially a hollow shell.
To begin with, the characters are flat and constantly walk the precipice of stereotype: there is the protective father with a mysterious past, the innocent, devoted daughter, the wise mentor, the romantic interest (with the face of "an angel," yet)and even--in a particularly cringeworthy turn--the goodhearted foreigner, whose broken English is apparently meant to be realistic but instead veers into an unfortunate parody.
All of these characters tend to be reactive to things that happen to them rather than taking initiative on their own, and their reactions tend to be predictable. Helen, the father's companion in the investigation, is an exception, but her character alone is not strong enough to salvage an entire book. The dialogue consists of what is strictly necessary to convey the characters from point A to point B of the plot, without idiosyncrasies that make them stand out as individuals and without entertaining exchanges of any kind. Even a vampire novel might contain a glimmer of humor or everyday moments to offset the prevailing darkness, but this concept does not seem to occur to Kostova.
That the characters are constantly traveling from one exotic location to another has been made much of in reviews. However, there is a fine line between an enthralling journey and a dry travelogue, and "The Historian" crosses that line on a regular basis. In the age of the camera, detailed descriptions of places such as Venice and Oxford are not automatically of interest; what such descriptions should do--especially in a supernatural novel--is convey atmosphere and conjoin with the story's overarching themes. In "Interview with the Vampire"--the obvious comparison--the darkly sensuous depiction of New Orleans and nineteenth century Paris are not written purely to revel in the exotic, but to create a mood that settles deep in the reader's bones. A prerequisite for any supernatural novel, particularly one with literary pretensions, and yet here too "The Historian" falls short, with its clinical and painstakingly detailed descriptions taking up a great deal of paper and yet seldom, if ever, evoking atmosphere.
I've been saving the plot for last, because in a way this is deepest of the gaping holes in this book, since an intricate plot is the centerpiece of what has been promised. The fact is that anyone who has read more than ten books in their lifetime will be able to predict nearly everything that happens and is "revealed" in this book, from the murder victims to the "secrets" about the past. Minor characters are introduced in order to be bumped off or otherwise harmed with agonizing predictability.
But it gets worse, because this allegedly intelligent book makes no sense on a number of vital points. For example, the characters are initially moved to investigate Dracula because a mysterious book appears amid their possessions. Try as they might to get rid of it, it keeps coming back. So they investigate, and as soon as they start investigating, the people helping them or people close to them start to get killed or hurt. The message from Dracula is obviously that he doesn't want them investigating him, but in that case, who has been leaving these books around so aggressively and why doesn't Dracula kill THEM, the main characters, instead of their friends and assistants? Believe me, after reading this book you won't want to be a librarian, and especially not a librarian who aids people in researching the occult. According to this book, which provides numerous examples, you'd be due for a messy end before long. Or before page 300, at any rate. The researchers themselves are inexplicably allowed to continue on their mission, but the librarians who help them are doomed.
More problems: Rossi's letter (quoted on the back flap) beginning "My dear and unfortunate successor." How did he know he would have a successor, let alone an unfortunate one? The book doesn't explain. Now it's possible--yes, I know--that after page 300 all the above questions are answered and end up making sense, but even if that's the case, why do these questions never occur to the characters, who are highly educated and presumably intelligent?
In the same vein, at one point the characters are relying on Bram Stoker's "Dracula" for information on how to deal with vampires, apparently forgetting that they are historians and that relying on one source--and a recent work of fiction, at that--doesn't make any kind of sense. These are, let me point out, people who are Ivy League educated and beyond. And they open "Dracula" for information. In the '50s, which is not even that long a time after the book was published.
Certainly there are references to other (fictitious?) sources of history, mostly pertaining to Vlad the Impaler aka Count Dracula, but they surround the most painful failure of the novel, which is that the villain is both stupid (killing off harmless librarians) and honestly, neither interesting nor scary. The story has been described as "chilling," I assume because it's creepy to find bodies of dead librarians, but even so, that's not enough darkness to fill the shoes of a creature from myth. We are given no clue as to Dracula's motives for what he does, other than that--he's evil! Which...Yawn. Again, after page 300 he might become more interesting, but that's far too late. The tension and an atmosphere of darkness should have been pervasive from page one; if it's not there yet, there's something wrong.
If you are not given to reading often and are not demanding in your choice of reading material, you might give this a try. But I would caution the more discerning reader to wait for the library copy, because while the mysteries in this book don't compel me one bit, I am greatly mystified by the extent to which it has been hyped. I bought into it. All I can do now is urge others to proceed with more caution.
Simply Put: A Classic! June 15, 2005
52 out of 66 found this review helpful
I too was well aware of the hype swirling around the release of this book. No need for me to summarize what the book is about, as just about everyone here has done that. But I loved this book so much that I'm actually taking the time to write a little something in the hopes of turning the rest of the world on too. For the first time in a very long time I can say with confidence that the publishing industry has not only got it right, they have in fact got it spot on. The Historian is more than a simple vampire novel. It is a literary masterpiece that does not drown itself in being too literary. Comparing The Historian to the DaVinci code is like comparing the Beatles to a local bar band: they are not in the same league. This book is original and fresh and will challenge your mind, all while taking you on a most exciting ride through the old and new Europe in search of a legend. It is a father daughter story, a love story and a haunting narrative spanning generations that will leave you chilled to the bone. This ought to be your big read for the summer. For my own selfish sake, I only hope Kostova doesn't take another 10 years to write her next novel.
To the reviewer below me: It would seem to me that to read only a small part of a book and post such an intense review is shamefully irresponsible. Let us not forget that someone spent 10 years of their life writing this book only to be blown off by someone who has read no more than the beginning.
As stated before, simply put: This book is a classic.
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