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. ( )

Dracula, the historian of the title, is still undead and wants a librarian to catalogue his extensive collection of historical tomes. An intriguing take on the legend, but the result is more a measure of reader endurance than a satisfying revision of an old chestnut. 700 pages, five decades, three narrators and a host of cities, all liberally peppered with adjectives, does not a gripping story make.

Elizabeth Kostova's writing is easy enough to read, despite the author's literary aspirations - there are no haunting or evocative passages to linger over, and the characters are far from captivating. (Dracula, of course, and a Bulgarian translator are far more distinctive!) Descriptions of various exotic places, from Istanbul to Bulgaria via Hungary, are straight out of Baedeker, circa 1930, and patronising in tone - every picturesque view is 'lovely' or 'beautiful' or 'exquisite'. Kostova is so keen to display her research that every new destination is greeted with a potted history, followed by a neutral and non-judgmental take on the locals, who are all kindly, surprisingly intelligent (for a non-Western culture), and have either very good teeth or gold-capped dental work.

The frame story of a daughter asking her father about a mysterious book she finds in his library is laid out in the Gothic style of Shelley's 'Frankenstein' and Stoker's 'Dracula', but the epistolary device of his letters to her soon becomes redundant and unbelievable, and her involvement is also an unnecessary drag on the story. The father supposedly has to quickly jot down the recounting of his search for a missing university mentor, because he sets out on his own dangerous quest one night and fears he will never see her again. His story, however, takes up the bulk of the novel, so how did he manage to scribble all that down in one night? Why is so much detail necessary - the layout of rooms, descriptions of every person met on his travels, involved dialogue, not to mention the countless secondary sources? The daughter, once she has instigated her father's search for her missing mother, is surplus to requirements and very boring.

I also found the first person narration rather pointless, as both the daughter and her father (through his letters) are far too flat to ever reveal anything intimate through introspection. The three main narrative voice sound the same - a sort of polite, quasi-classical diction that refuses to be coloured by either background or era. The daughter, living in 1970s Amsterdam, has the same prim vocabulary as her father, an American studying in 1950s England, who echoes his mentor, a 1930s Englishman! The effect is vague, rather than timeless.

Vampires and the Dracula legend do not interest me, so there was little to keep me reading except the challenge of persevering through 700 pages in the hope of an eventual climax. This version doesn't really add to the genre - Bram Stoker's 'Dracula' is still the definitive text, and the 1980s film 'Lost Boys' covers vampiric lore (garlic, daylight, stakes) with more imagination.

Recommended as a YA book for those readers devoted to Stephanie Meyer's 'Twilight' series', perhaps, but not enough depth to merit its length. ( )

Humm, let’s see who I can tick off with this post. I’m going to warn everybody reading this review right at the beginning, there is a spoiler in it so if you have this book or are interested in reading this book and don’t want the ending ruined by me, don’t continue reading this post. I don’t normally write a review that spoils the ending, but I’m forced to in order to justify my feelings about the book.

I want to make one other point. The length of the book is not a problem. I’ve read many novels that I have loved that are far longer, so I don’t want anyone accusing me of not liking the book because of its length.

The story revolves around a father and daughter who are both historians. The prose jumps back and forth between the daughter’s perspective and the letters that her father wrote. What begins as research into the real history of Vlad the Impaler, also known to the world as Dracula, becomes a life and death struggle to find a lost colleague and while protecting themselves from the evil forces that quietly haunt them. Soon they discover that the historical figure of Dracula is very much alive (or undead if you will) and coming after anyone who dares to look into his legend.

At one level, the writing is very good. It is a slow, prolonged buildup of tension that leaves the reader wondering when it will all explode. In the mean time, the author does an excellent job of explaining the fact and fiction of Vlad’s life and death and the times he lived in. She also paints with beautiful detail the Eastern European world, especially the political situation as it existed during the Cold War.

So now you are asking “if it did all these wonderful things, what is your problem?” One small criticism of mine is that the characters are very obvious. The good guys are very good and the bad guys are obviously bad, and the reader knows which is which from the first scene. That’s not the big problem, however. Put simply, if you are going to build tension in such a long, drown out manner, there had better be a payoff at the end. This is where the tension that the author spent so long bringing to a peak falls flat on its face. Here is a simple rule – if you are going to kill off one of the emblematic characters of all time – Dracula himself – after such a buildup, it had better not end with a complete whimper. The scene of Dracula’s demise literally takes up only a few paragraphs and ends with nothing more than a gunshot, him falling and turning to dust. I read the remaining pages frantically expecting that he was not dead because there was no way he could have been dispatched so simply. Even worse, the characters afterward shrug the whole thing off as no big deal – as if offing someone who has terrorized the people of earth for 800 years happens every day. No reflection, no search for the meaning of Dracula’s life and death. The remaining pages don’t even reference Dracula again and really just go through the lives of the other characters.

It has been a very long time since I have actually finished a book and been angry, but The Historian had me stomping around the house at midnight. Why? Because this story held so much promise, such a buildup, that to have it fizzle so abruptly at the end made me feel like it was all some kind of cruel joke. I could have almost forgiven it if the book had been bad from start to finish. After all, it is her first published novel. But the even crueler twist was the amount of hype that surrounded this book when it came out and the vast number of glowing reviews that it received. Some compared it to the Da Vinci Code. Well, they did both have historians as protagonists…beyond that, they are about as different as two stories can be. The comparison is a marketing reach at best. It makes me wonder out loud if some of these reviewers actually read the whole book before jumping on the bandwagon and penning their thoughts, because if you actually enjoyed the ending that was written, I just don’t know what to say.
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In the end, I actually waited a full week after finishing the novel just to give myself some time to reflect on my feelings about the story and not review it purely on emotion. But as you can tell from what you have just read, my thoughts haven’t changed much. If you are a history buff or Dracula fan, you might find this book interesting because it does weave a great deal of historical information - including debunking a lot of myths - into a protracted story with a great deal of interesting imagery. However, the ending left such a bad taste in my mouth that it felt like an unfortunate waste. I don’t like giving a poor review to a book because I know exactly how difficult writing such a work is. But if my glowing reviews of other books are to mean anything at all, I have to be consistent when I find something I don’t like. Besides, I’m sure someone will be more than willing to tear my books to pieces in the future… ( )

Elizabeth Kostova is one clever woman. Her complex, 700-page achievement The Historian reads with the same archival feel that the original Dracula did when it was first released in 1897. The tale of everyone’s favourite legendary vampire is beautifully recreated in historic style. Stoker would either be very proud, or very cross about the serious competition. I can only speculate as to how many long hours Kostova spent piecing together the amazing breadth of research that has been incorporated into this novel.

Although 700 pages is hefty for a book of this plot type, it is not a chore to read. The writing flows well, and readers will find themselves sinking easily into Kostova’s soft style. In addition to being an interesting story, The Historian is a great way to see all the hidden splendour of Europe without even leaving your comfortable chair. It seems that in every chapter, our main characters settle down in a different picturesque European landscape, all of them described in vivid detail by Kostova.

While her style will suit some, however, it will not suit all. I may describe it as ‘leisurely’, but others will label it ‘slow’. Hastier readers will tap their feet impatiently while characters spend pages and pages analysing extensive historical documents that yield only small pieces of a very large puzzle. It took me nearly three months to read this book, which unfortunately did not have the forceful page-turning power to compete with schoolwork, drama rehearsals and exam revision. As a horror novel, it scores moderately – I’ve definitely read much scarier stories. Most of the scenes where we actually meet Dracula only seem scary because the rest of the book meanders along gently by comparison. The novel is helped greatly, however, by Kostova’s thorough research, which helps to blur the line between fantasy and reality.

On the whole, The Historian lives up to its name very well – it is historical in feel and historical in content, and draws readers in with its relaxing intrigue. Recommended for historians and bibliophiles of all backgrounds.

Spännande rysare om vampyrer. ( )