The Historian by Elizabeth Kostova
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Book Reviews of The Historian
Book Review: The Historian
Summary: 4 Stars
This is a greatly entertaining book full of mystery and intrigue. Perfect for cuddling up with on a cold day.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?"
Book Review: Wow, i only gave it three stars?
Summary: 3 Stars
Yes, its true. Three stars is all i could, in good conscience, give this 600+ page long extended travel guide. LOL. Its a story told from several different characters' points of view, spanning several different countries and decades. Could have been epic, but wasn't. Basically a man is hunting for Dracula and apparently the only way to find said vampire is to search through dusty libraries for the occasional scrap of long forgotten parchment, or get lucky enough to hear a fire walking old coot sing a folk song deep in the heart of communist Bulgaria. Go figure. The book starts with some promise when a young girl finds documents in her father's library that (long story short) indicate Dracula is still alive. Now, that's a story i can get into. What was harder to get into was the endless descriptions of Hungary and Romania and blah blah blah. If you added up all the real action that happens in this book of more than 600 pages, you'd honestly have less than 20 pages to work with. At some point around page 400 i was literally forcing myself to keep reading. And even though the book was written from various points of view, the "voice" is the same throughout. Its all very proper, very dry, very stiff english, except when a foreigner is speaking, in which case there is an occasional "how do you say" thrown in there because after all, its a foreigner. I don't know.... i wanted to like this book more than i actually do. But, the ending really killed it for me. I could have forgiven all those other things if only the ending had sealed the deal. After that many pages, to have Dracula meet his end so abruptly, with so little buildup, and the description of his actual demise be so brief after having suffered through so many pages of how great Budapest looks from a taxi cab, i felt robbed! I mean really, that's just wrong to do to a person. So, i think, skip it.Book Review: laborious at best
Summary: 3 Stars
This book was an amazon recommendation and I admit I bought it on a whim because of the title. Foolish me. When I saw on the cover this was vampire vamping, I cringed but decided to broaden my reading repertoire. About 200 pages in I got so bored with the detailed descriptions of landscape and archetectural minutia that I decided to skip forward and folded up half an inch of pages to find... more description of places and "... my father's face grimmacing, trying to hide both terror and exhaustion..." (paraphrased from repetition.) The storyteller is supposed to be a brilliant teen watching her father struggle with his research findings which were fueled by his mentor's research. It is gruelingly told in duplicitous letters meant to convey tension that instead make me think the guy writing the letter just never gets to the point. Hint, hint, this is going to be scary but I can't tell you yet. Wink, wink, watch out, for you are doomed. Skipping forward another chunk of pages, more traveling, people with barely healed fang marks on necks, and letters warning of scary stuff in the next letter. Maps that don't correspond to anything but beware, it's going to be scary when you understand. Oooo! The one thing this book makes me want to do is read the original Bram Stoker's Dracula. The one thing I won't do is finish this.
post script: Just to the publisher. This format of what used to be known as "pocket-sized paperback" comes, because of the length and the double spacing of type, in the exact shape, size and WEIGHT of a concrete brick! It is like holding a brick. Reading a brick. Fall asleep with this on your chest as I assure you, you will, and you will be conked on the face when it tips over with the force of a brick. Try to get some other version if you have to read this.
Book Review: HISTORICAL thriller. . .
Summary: 3 Stars
If you are interested in the history of Istanbul, Budapest and Romania 500 years ago, this is the book for you. If not, you are in for a long pull. The book blends its actual eastern european history with its dracula story seemlessly, so that the line between fact and vampire fantasy is wonderfully invisible. But the first 80% of the book, or so, is thoroughly dominated by that history. It reads as though someone got the idea of making a dissertation about 16th century eastern europe interesting to a popular audience by mixing in some dracula. Unless the history has intrinsic interest for you, the dracula plot moves far too slowly to keep you engaged. From a plot perspective, you could literally skip hundreds of pages and not miss much. Great history, though, if you're interested.
The last 20% of the book leaves history behind and moves to dracula thriller. You've been with the characters so long by that point, that you do care what happens, and it is reasonably, if unremarkably, well executed and tied together. The emphasis on the history is so great, however, that the thriller aspect comes up a little short from a literary perspective; the characters lack the depth of the best books in this genre. I also found the device of the narrative coming in the form of letters an unnecessary (and unreal) distraction.
What cannot be gainsaid, however, is that this book is a remarkable achievement. At the end, you feel you know the "facts" of dracula AND eastern european history.