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Loading... The Historianby Elizabeth Kostova
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will love Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book. sacrain | Jul 9, 2009 |   A little slow at times, but intruiging none the less. Great ending! (  )leb62 | Jul 9, 2009 | Although I enjoy vampires and Dracula as much as anyone, I did find it went into a little too much detail at times - I found myself skipping paragraphs of unnecessary information and details. Some parts I found difficult to follow as it switches between three different stories (her father's, his dissertation supervisor, and her own), often with long gaps between each. However, it is fairly well-written and quickly paced, it is certainly gripping. Probably will be enjoyable to those who liked 'the DaVinci Code' or similar. ( )lecari | Jul 9, 2009 | Fascinating book that sometimes feels like a travelogue during its protracted search through international academia in quest of the great vampire. In some ways this reminds me of some of the styles and techniques used and perfected by M.R.James in many of his sublime ghost stories. (  )Finxy | Jul 7, 2009 | I loved this book and found it almost impossible to put down. The tale is told in an elegant, graceful style that brings to mind some of the great nineteenth century classics, and the characters are very real and believable. The Historian is set against the background of contemporary communist politics, yet it is filled with the rich details of Eastern European history. I love how we are invited to share the exciting, frustrating, and sometimes mundane life of historians - trying to piece together clues, some incomplete, others so tiny as to be almost missed, and come up with a plausible theory of how things once were. Despite this plodding journey, there is not a page of this book that is dull. Rather it is filled with a lingering feeling of menace, as though something sinister is peering over our shoulder this very minute. The Dracula legend is old, tired, jaded. Many modern authors have tried to freshen it up by remaking the genre - portraying vampires as mis-understood creatures. Kostova returns to the image of vampires as evil, damned, terrifyingly seductive, yet she has done so in such a way that we are reminded of the bone-chilling fear these creatures can inspire. I find it hard to believe that this is Kostova's first novel. With a talent this large, we can expect great things from her in future. My only fault with this book is that, after our slow piecing together of the facts, the ending seems a little fast and squashed together. No doubt this will improve as she gains experience. All in all, I feel The Historian, like Bram Stoker's Dracula, will live on as a classic of the vampire genre. ( )fairy-whispers | Jul 5, 2009 | 5  0.043 seconds to build listing  no reviews | add a review
Amazon.com (ISBN 0751537284, Paperback)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 (retrieved from Amazon Fri, 24 Apr 2009 07:58:03 -0400) The first test round has been closed. Visit the Open Shelves Classification group for details. |
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I thought her writing was very detailed, genuine and captivating. The scenery and history were beautifully laid out as well. She also did a great job on the dialogue. All in all, it's definitely worth getting from the library. (