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The realisation that an American grad student would experience some difficulty travelling in the Soviet bloc in , and that nice girls still wore gloves then, seems to be more or less the limit of the author's historical sense. While the plot follows the same lines as Stoker's masterpiece Dracula is found to be at large in the modern world, eventually tracked to his lair, and destroyed , the updating of the narrative takes the genocidal medieval monster into the world of Stalin and Hitler, to somewhat queasy effect.

The implication is that Dracula not only takes his place at the head of a procession of eastern European predators ruling by terror which runs through Ivan the Terrible to Stalin, but has actively influenced his successors' career development. In the narrative strand, he is glimpsed cheering on a national socialist manifestation in the backwoods of Transylvania; and in the s, the Bulgarian communist party seems to be trying to get him on-side in order to secure a future in which communist leaders will become literal vampires, and rule for ever.

Thus the spectre which is haunting Europe turns out to be not communism, but Count Dracula, a distasteful simplification of the problems of European history. Kostova, unlike Stoker, does not end her novel with 19th-century, all-ends-well closure. Her book has a Hollywood ending, that is, one which prepares the ground for a sequel, The Historian II, though at pages, The Historian has actually gone on for quite long enough. Topics Books The Observer. You learned about symbolism, foreshadowing, all that good shit, but really, it does you no fucking good unless you are able to identify it when you see it.

And clearly, you did not see the tremendous, horrifying, abominable that's a hyperbole overuse of deus ex fucking machina upon your first perusal of this book. You will realize that a good epistolary book involving several different characters should have the characters be actually fucking distinct. Did you seriously think this book was realistic in any way, when you cannot distinguish between the narrative of an old man, an older man, and that of a girl as she grows from her early teens?

Did you ever for a moment think upon the complete absurdity of the letters and the storytelling, particularly when said letters and spoken stories were told in excruciating minutiae. Is that realistic in any way? In your letters, have you ever once mentioned the trivialities of your evening routine, particularly when it made absolutely no relevance whatsoever to whatever point you were trying to make? While I waited I poked up the fire, added another log, set out two glasses, and surveyed my desk. My study also served me for a sitting room, and I made sure it was kept as orderly and comfortable as the solidity of its nineteenth-century furnishings demanded.

When you tell a story to your friends, have you ever once mentioned the drumming of your fingertips when you're trying to tell a story ofsupposedlythe utmost importance? I drummed my fingers on the desktop. The clock in my study seemed to be ticking unusually loudly tonight, and the urban half darkness seemed too still behind my venetian blinds.

I know you are young and stupid, but you are not that stupid. Please don't tell me that this book fooled you in any way. Did you seriously buy into the letters and the "stories? Bullshit attempts at letters and storytelling and an epistolary timeline that is everything overwrought, all that is overdramatic and completely devoid of sense and rationality.

I would beg for a little bit of sensationalism over sense, because overall, the plot of this story is entirely lacking in anything remotely resembling fascination, anything that would captivate and hold the imagination rather than lulls it to sleep. You endured over pages of this balderdash for a story that doesn't even bring any sense of excitement. Vlad Tepes holds no danger. He is the equivalent of a grown-up high school bully. Once powerful, he no longer holds any amount of thrall. The only remnants of his power are the few close hangers on, the few douchebags foolish enough to cling onto the remains of a long-diminished power.

That high school bully might scare a few odd child here and there, with his posturing, with his scowls. You, as an adult, are no longer afraid. You, as an adult, should know better than to buy into this book's aesthetically pleasing, inconsequential claptrap. Reluctantly yours, An older, a more erudite, a considerably more critical - Khanh View all 77 comments. This novel is better than I had any anticipation of it being. Having just come off three weeks of nineteenth century novelists, I thought, Oh, something light would be a nice change.

After all, I thought. The book is about vampires. And not just any vampire, but the mack daddy himself, Dracula, the real Vlad the Impaler, who turns out to be the undead. Six hundred and fifty pages of vampires that This novel is better than I had any anticipation of it being. Six hundred and fifty pages of vampires that is less concerned with torn pulsing arteries than with the minutiae of historical research. As this sum surpasses well over pages in type, obvious plausibility considerations of scale arise, but only if you stop to think about it long enough.

As their stories take them further and further into Eastern and Central Europe, the texts begin to shelter one inside the other inside the other like Russian nesting dolls. Part of what sends her out are the letters she is reading left to her by her father after he vanishes, telling of his travels and investigations into the Dracula legend in the s Eastern Bloc.

Along the way as we try to find Rossi, we are told of his s investigations into the Dracula legend in Romania. On top of that, there are vast stores of erudition on fifteenth century monasteries, the cultural divide betwixt Romanians and Transylvanians, the Walechian court, medieval church politics, central European folk songs, Bulgarian religious rituals based around old pagan traditions, historian cataloging and research methodology, and the overlapping history of Central Europe with its shifting rulers of Ottomans, the Orthodox church and its tiny fiefdoms, and the Soviet Union. For, thinking about it as an historian, the undead would have lived through an impressive array of eras.

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The Historian by Elizabeth Kostova | bahana-line.com?

Consider this rather late passage: It resurfaced in Bulgaria in , when the Bulgarian historian Atanas Angelov discovered it hidden in the cover of an eighteenth-century folio treatise on the life of Saint George Georgi Not your average vampire book, eh? At times, you have to remind yourself that this is a book about vampires. Kostova knows well enough to keep the monsters off the stage as long as possible, merely make suggestive shadows lurk here and there on the periphery and affect a rather creepy atmosphere.

After a point there are a hair too many overt murders that sap some of the menace, surprisingly, as they make the gathering darkness all too palpably concrete. Then there are a number of vampire staples that might turn up normally anyway. A bat flitters across a night sky. In the woods near a ruin, a wolf approaches the edge of the firelight.

These stand-ins for the vampire are pleasantly unsettling without being accompanied by shrieking violins. Throughout the novel we find that each character who has become obsessed with the legend of Vlad Tepes possesses a similar book that came to them under curious circumstances. Why and how these volumes keep turning up is one of the novel's mysteries an it's one of Kostova's rather clever conclusions in her own well-thought out realization of the character of Dracula.

And there is throughout the book an enormous cast of characters, not merely just historical personages, but various researchers and students and librarians and bureaucrats and all of them are well-drawn, interesting, and fully fleshed. We know, of course, from the very beginning, before the narrator even informs us, that when her father Paul speaks of a young beauty named Helen who he meets while trying to track down his missing mentor, that this will be the overtly absent mother of the young narrator.

And, of course, since she is absent, we know there is a reason for that, and of course, as this is a horror novel, we know she is dead — or worse. Kostova manages to keep even that particularly familiar angle surprising. The author is at least a thorough-going plotter and she paces everything beautifully, setting up revelations with periodic sparks. The actual climax of the novel as our heroes close in on Dracula and his daytime resting place seems rather rushed, ending just all abruptly as if Kostova had opted just to skip overt dramatics, which feels a bit of a cheat, though she does make up for this lack of action with a final pages reversal that is as unsettling as it is quiet.

View all 15 comments. This is actually the second time I've read this book. For a first novel, it is outstanding. I was completely engrossed in the story. I really love history and the whole Dracula lore. I thought it was a great mix of both. It added a lot of suspense that made me read it with the lights on.

I think I read it in about four days, I just couldn't put it down. I will say this though, if you are not really into history or researching, I would skip it. If you are wanting to read it just because it has to This is actually the second time I've read this book. If you are wanting to read it just because it has to do with Dracula, I would pick a much smaller book.

However, I just love history and research duh, I work in a library so it was right up my alley. Actually, I'm doing a little research on it myself. I did read some of the comments on Amazon. It was either a "love it" or "hate it" book. That is why I throw my caution out there. Basically, people who didn't enjoy it were out for a Dracula story and thought the history was "a drag". I'm really into history so I thought it was pretty damn good. I will say I did discover a few historical inaccuracies, but I think I'll let them fly for now. View all 8 comments. I think I read some review here on GoodReads that called this a book to be conquered.

You know, one where after a time you feel so invested that you MUST finish it, you must defeat the book, you will NOT give up, no matter how much you are suffering. Whoever said that about Kostova's The Historian, I salute you. I kept telling my friends I was reading " Am I destined for some kind of literary hell if I say I wish Dan Brown would rewrite this story with the spark and intensity of the Da Vinci Code? I kept telling my friends I was reading "a book about hunting for Dracula through libraries across Europe," and that it was about as exciting as it sounds.

I also needed to conquer this book because I wanted to figure out why so many people, good friends of mine included, loved this book. Maybe the long, hard, snoozy slog, occasionally punctuated by some good old fashioned undead suspense every hundred pages or so, would have a really terrific ending that made it all worth it. Clearly Kostova is very influenced by Gothic and Victorian writers like Stoker, so maybe this book would have a grand payoff of an ending to merit the praise and best-sellerness.

Instead, Dracula is a librarian. Just as boring as it sounds. It wasn't completely terrible - many charicterizations are off the charts for their specificity and originality. The thing about the books with the Drakulya print was really intriguing. Except that's not enough. The Drakulya books, which could be counted as a premise, with the intrinsic map that is hammered on as a significant discovery, amount to nothing. The map doesn't even figure into the conclusion! Not even with a character saying, "we were totally wrong about that map. I wish I'd read an Actual Gothic novel - maybe even by Bram Stoker - instead of wasting way too long on this frustrating book.

View all 16 comments. Torturers, both medieval and contemporary. Tentatively, my hand crept towards the mouse. What dark and unholy specter could be contained in other people's reviews of Elizabeth Kostova's The Historian? I was filled with passive-voiced dread as the link was clicked by me. I was horrified to read: Could the novel I had just read really have been a confounding multi-tiered multiple first-person narrative with lack-luster voices which the author clearly mistook for a clever attempt at recreating a sense of research?

With much hesitation, I read on. I wish Brien had read the book at the same time as I did, I would liked to have talked to him about it. I too wondered what xdragonladyx's mother and friend Brien would have thought! If only she could have included a detailed transcription of their own reviews! I may now never know if either of them viewed The Historian as an attempt to capitalize on the fad of Dan Brown-style mysteries and the vampire genre! Suddenly, a wayward link caught my eye and I clicked.

It was dead and without the risk of ever returning to life, so that no one would ever have to read it again. View all 21 comments. This book is impossible to resist. It has fairly leapt to the top shelf, where it's nestled down deep with my all time favourites. I confess to being initially reluctant to delve into this story, I mean who really needs another campy, vampire tale? Lucky for me I put these feelings aside long enough to read the first chapter after which there was no looking back.

Step into the pages and begin an eerie, haunted, hypnotic adventure thoroughly saturated in ancient history and wondrous, exotic, old This book is impossible to resist. Step into the pages and begin an eerie, haunted, hypnotic adventure thoroughly saturated in ancient history and wondrous, exotic, old European churches, monasteries and libraries that are positively brimming with ancient parchment and long, forgotten maps and books.

Kostova's historical tracking of the real Vlad Drakulya is flawless and she is able to describe with a chilling, atmospheric eye for detail, the many settings as well as the political climate in which this story unfolds. A full speed ahead rich, historical thriller with enough gothic images, cultural folklore, ancient crypts and creaking stairs that it is sure to raise the hair on the back of your neck and no doubt a compulsive, insatiable interest in this age old tale.

View all 20 comments. It had to have gone something like this: She must have paused here, expecting, perhaps, to be thrown from the room. Allowed to remain, she plunged forward. My main character is a historian. All the action takes place in libraries, and consists of primary source research. Yes, primary source research. As in, looking at really old writings, and then discussing them, a lot. Also, it is over pages long. Clearly, that meeting went well. It came with a huge advance and big expectations and a national promotional tour. From the start it was a bestseller, capitalizing on the success of The Da Vinci Code , with which is shares more than a few similarities.

I purchased The Historian back in , and it has sat on my bookshelf ever since. A lot of time has passed since then. All that time sitting has been rough on The Historian. It now looks as old and worn as one of the ancient documents fondled so lovingly by the characters who populate the novel. The story unfolds in three different time periods. The central thread is set in the s and is narrated by the unnamed daughter of a historian-turned-diplomat named Paul.

The daughter stumbles upon an old book that, like the VHS tape in The Ring , brings nothing but trouble to the reader. Paul eventually leaves his daughter to embark on some unfinished business; the daughter, needless to say, pursues him. The second timeline is set in the s. These portions are comprised of letters written by Paul to his daughter. They detail his pursuit — along with a companion named Helen — of both Dracula, and his mentor, Professor Bartholomew Rossi, who has gone missing. Finally, there is a briefer arc set in the s, made up by letters written by Rossi himself.

The plot contrivances and temporal leaps are not inherently difficult to follow. However, the aesthetics of The Historian lead to confusion. I didn't have any problem with the Rossi letters set in the s. The Paul letters, on the other hand, are given only quotation marks. This means quotation marks. A lot of quotation marks. Both are told in first person, with little use of proper nouns. This not only causes uncertainty, but annoyance.

I had to keep rereading sentences to separate narration from dialogue. At one point, the Paul letters decide to get a little meta, so that there is a letter within a letter. You know what that means, right? Quotation marks on top of quotation marks. Just quotation marks all the way down! One of the interesting things about The Historian is its languorous pacing.

Those first couple hundred pages were more like a European travel guide than a historical thriller. Paul and his daughter travel around, seeing cool sights, eating various biscuits, and having long conversations. Despite the lack of inertia, these pages were my favorite. Kostova also has a Tolkien-esque thing for food and drink. The reader is treated to many vicarious meals as the characters hopscotch around the globe. Even as the plot gradually tightens, there is never much action. Sure, there are bursts of movement. Mostly, though, The Historian takes on a predictable pattern. They learn a clue, make their plans, and then head to the next destination.

One is tempted to say that The Historian attempts to do for historians what Indiana Jones did for archaeologists. The historians in this novel really act a lot like real historians, except on meth. Paul and Helen visit archives, peruse old-timey documents, and attempt to decipher the past. This is rather typical for a researcher, save for the part about being stalked by the undead. Neat tourist locales and sumptuous repasts cannot entirely hide the fact that everything else is thin gruel. The characters are props, not people. Nobody has any personality, or depth, or even a quirk.

His only reaction is to groan, or to stifle a groan. Jeez, Paul, grow up! Paul sets out to find Rossi, his mentor, because…Why? To drive the story. The book tells us how to feel, instead of convinces us with rich characterizations. A brief rant about epistolary novels. Am I really supposed to believe that a character would write a letter hundreds of pages long?

Or that this letter would be structured as a novel, replete with withheld information, reams of dialogue, internal monologues, telling details, and cliffhangers? The characters are not helped by the leaden dialogue. Just about everything spoken is exposition. This is a summertime read, so I grade it on that curve. This should be over-the-top goofy. There should be grand guignol violence. There should be sex, or at least half a million double entendres. There should be a realization that this material is fundamentally lowbrow, then go even lower but with class.

Instead, Kostova handles this with portentous seriousness. View all 5 comments. This is my favorite book of ALL time from any genre! At its core this is a book about Drakulya, about his history and his impact on those that knew him and those that have hunted the truth about him for centuries. The novel opens with an unnamed female voice informing the reader in the year that she's about to tell the story of what happened to her thirty years before. The story is mostly about her father Paul, a historian turned diplomat, and his search for Dracula, Vlad the Impaler.

This n This is my favorite book of ALL time from any genre! This narrator, raised alone by her father after her mother's death, finds a book in her father's study when she was The book has no text, but at its center, is a woodcut image of a dragon carrying a banner with the single word Drakulya.

In addition, she finds letters dated from , and we get to read them and thus become part of the fabulous journey to find out where the letters came from and what they mean. Kostova had me at mysterious book and Dracula. Soon Paul is searching a library in Istanbul when he finds a map that suggests that Vlad's grave is not where conventional historical wisdom says it is, but he can't tell from the map where it might actually be. An encounter with an evil and mysterious stranger makes him decide that it's a research topic that he should drop.

He doesn't drop it and he takes us on an atmospheric and historical jaunt all over Europe. Of course Dracula being Dracula he and his undead minions will stop at nothing to protect their secrets, including the location of Vlad the Impaler's grave. For me this book reads like a travelogue, a paean to history, and a love story, with the horror of unspeakable evil and the race to save loved ones the glue that binds it all together.

View all 13 comments. Wow, was I ever disappointed in this one! I initially read the dust jacket on one of my many excursions to the book store and was very excited. It had been a long time since I read a really good scary story with vampires. The dust jacket alluded to sleepless nights filled with suspense and horror. I eagerly bought my very own copy and returned home to crawl into bed and begin reading this tale of terror. Okay, so sometimes books have to start slow. You've got to get the setting right, introduce Wow, was I ever disappointed in this one!

You've got to get the setting right, introduce the characters, outline the plot While the research is necessary especially for a story involving an actual historical figure , it is NOT, I repeat: NOT, a requirement to include every scrap of research as part of the novel itself. Oh, how angry I got when the story finally started getting good, Ms.

Kostova would interject a page dissertation on the history of the church in the times of Vlad the Impaler! It did nothing to further the plot, and only served to make me feel like I was back in college studying for an exam. Where are the sleepless nights I was promised? When do we get introduced to Dracula?????? Don't worry, he's somewhere in those pages, but if you blink you might miss him! The research goes so far as to include a number of "fake" source documents.

Had these "documents" been merely mentioned and perhaps summarized, I would be all for it.

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Heck, I AM an archaeologist and historian, remember? One even takes an entire chapter. Don't get me wrong, I'm all about well-researched books. In fact, a well-researched and planned book only brings credibility to your story. However, The Historian proved to be nothing more than an over-zealous researcher's attempt to create a story from a subject that she is obviously passionate about.

The voluminous research is a real turn-off. I don't want to read a vampire story and have to sit through a hundred "mountainous countryside" descriptions. Get on with the story. Unfortunately, she never does. It has been some time since I read this, so my recollections may not be that accurate. I tend to make these decisions do I like or not like a book? But I figured that any book that merited my little used "pissed me off" category, deserved an explanation.

Kostova sets her book partly in the 70s, partly in history, and she tries to write in a flowery language, like the great masters of novel from the 19th century- but to me, she really just comes It has been some time since I read this, so my recollections may not be that accurate. Kostova sets her book partly in the 70s, partly in history, and she tries to write in a flowery language, like the great masters of novel from the 19th century- but to me, she really just comes off sounding pretentious, overwrought and juvenile. Yes, her character is supposed to be young, but the writing can be elegant, even with a young and immature subject.

In addition, everyone in the whole story speaks with the same voice. Many times I had to backtrack because I'd lost the thread of who was speaking. Then, she writes about Vlad, Dracula, attempting to add new lore to the story, but never really gives us any surprises. At the most "suspenseful" moments, I often found myself feeling irritatingly amused at the author's attempt to create tension.

One moment she is in fear of her life, and the next, she's what? And I don't recall that Kostova mixes her scenes well. She creates tension, but then breaks it too soon, or holds back from stretching it out, or drops into the completely mundane, instead of just pulling back a little. Even her main character doesn't seem to be driven by anything except one-upmanship, the desire to solve this mystery that her father couldn't, not for anyone's sake except proving that she's a better historian?

Lastly, the stories of Dracula are supposed to be horrific, but also reluctantly romantic. She rarely rises above twittering, and it was never at any junction a book that I devoured. Mostly I just got through it, only to discover at the very end, when everything is supposedly wrapped up, with no foreshadowing, she tacks on a "oh by the way, he could still be alive! To comment specifically, I'd probably have to reread, or at least review, the book, which I'm not willing to do when there are still so many thousands of brilliantly written stories out there that I haven't discovered yet.

View all 14 comments.

JAY WORTHY/ALCHEMIST TYPE BEAT Prod. THE HISTORIAN

What I really enjoyed about this book was the strong, vivid descriptions of the gothic architecture and all these sights around the world. I also enjoyed the folklore and mystery surrounding Vlad III of Wallachia which subsequently gave rise to the Dracula story. However, all that did was try to make up for a very thin and shallow plot that didn't really interest me as much. I'd recommend it more for updating your TripAdvisor as opposed to reading it for the fiction. View all 6 comments.

The Historian

This book reminded me of the DaVinci code in some ways, but was much more interesting and better written. All of the research and historical documents were fascinating. Not because I'm interested in vampires, but because I served my mission in Romania and was interested in Vlad himself. Evil and terrible as he was, the Romanians actually a This book reminded me of the DaVinci code in some ways, but was much more interesting and better written.

Evil and terrible as he was, the Romanians actually are very proud of him because he saved their country from the Turks. They do not like it at all that he is construed to be Dracula. His father was called Vlad Dracul, which is where that name comes from. Dracul is the Romanian word for the dragon. The Historian goes with the belief that he is definitely a Vampire, and that he is still alive. Or "undead" as it were. There are three different stories weaved together into one about three people who are trying to find Dracula: The narrator, who is telling her story from her viewpoint as a 16 year old girl in , her father, whose story is told through letters to his daughter as well as conversations about his experiences in and finally, Professor Rossi, who was the father's advisor in college.

Rossi's story is also told through letters and conversations and occurred in Every once in a while it is difficult to figure out which story you are reading as they jump around so much, but after the first few chapters you start to get a feel for it and it seemed really ingenious the way she chose to combine the three stories. I loved reading so much about the history of Eastern Europe during the rule of the Ottomans as well as during Communist times.

The author is obviously an excellent researcher and really knew her stuff. I was slightly annoyed by the fact that the Romanian language wasn't always written accurately I guess she didn't research that quite enough. It was almost always missing diacritical markings, except for in place names. Her Hungarian seemed to have all the diacritical markings in it, and I am unsure of the Bulgarian, since she used our alphabet rather than cyrillic. So I was just bugged by that, although I know most people wouldn't even care!

It also bothered me that we never know the name of the narrator. Her father never refers to her by name, and neither does anyone else it seems. We know she was named for "Helen's mother" but "Helen's mother" is another character whose name we never actually hear. I don't know why this bothered me so much, but it did.

I guess we get to make up her name, and since we know it was Romanian, I choose Anca. The epilogue was a little unsettling, and the final resolution of the story seems comical when I think about it now, but it was completely fitting and totally acceptable in the framework of the story. I did have to chuckle every time I read the phrase "evil librarian. Kostova has a lovely, almost Victorian style of writing. The book also scared me out of my wits at times. Loved it, despite all my above annoyances.

View all 11 comments. Recommended to Shovelmonkey1 by: I read this at work and one of the builders in the break room looked over the top of his copy of the Daily Star and asked if this was some sort of "how to" book he understood that I was an archaeologist and thus interpreted The Historian to be some sort of quick guide to well, being a historian.

And I sighed my deepest sigh yet, as another tiny particle of my soul curled up, died and flaked off and floated away into the ether. Obviously if I was a vampire I wouldn't have to worry about the Hmmm. Obviously if I was a vampire I wouldn't have to worry about the condition of my soul because that would be long gone, along with worries about iron supplements and dental hygiene.

Maybe not a bad thing in the long run.

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Neckrophilia

The Historian