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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. A quest for the dark secret behind a mysterious symbol found on a page of an ancient book. This is the literary person's Dan Brown. More Umberto Eco than Brown, actually. The plot is interesting and twisty and very fast moving. I couldn't stop reading this book until I was done. There is love, exotic secret societies, tales of Turkish conquests in later Middle Ages, and the big finale, which tops all. Not only this is a great book with a great plot, but it also has a very satisfying ending -- which is often not the case for many good books. I highly recommend to anyone who loves Umberto Eco and looks down on Dan Brown! (  )1   vzakuta | Nov 23, 2009 |  I knew I was going to love this book within just a few paragraphs because it's so beautifully, gracefully written. I am smitten by tales of taking trains through old European cities, searching through libraries... Only half way through so far... and can hardly wait to get back to it! KaterinaBead | Nov 20, 2009 | I really like this vampire book because the vampire is Dracula and the bad guy. ( ) ccavaleri | Nov 12, 2009 | I seem to have a thing lately for really long books. Although, at 642 pages in hardcover, this one wasn't all that long. But it was really good! Its narrator is a young woman who gets involved in a hunt for Vlad Tepes—Dracula. It begins when the narrator (who's never named, as far as I can recall), who's sixteen at the time the story begins, finds a strange book with a woodcut of a dragon in the middle of its otherwise blank pages in her father's library in their home in Amsterdam. Reluctantly, her father begins to tell her the story behind the book, which came to him when he was a graduate student in America. Told mostly in the form of letters and journal entries, the narrative weaves between the young woman's story, her father's, and her father's university advisor's, as they all search for the secret of the book, which appears to lead to the location of Dracula's tomb. Ranging across some fifty years and half a dozen countries, it's rich in legend and historical detail. My only problem with the book—and it's a small cavil—is that it's all written in the same style even though it has numerous different narrators, which sometimes makes it a little confusing to keep clear on whose story we're following at any given time. Otherwise, it's an engrossing new take on the Dracula legend. ( )1 codyne | Nov 10, 2009 | A very good, rich literary horror story. I loved the cultural ethos. Overall the novel is 100-150 pages too long and the sudden demise of Dracula in a brief, undramatic fashion far too matter of fact. But this is an excellent read. (  ) john257hopper | Nov 10, 2009 | 
 When, after many other allusions to historians and historicism, Kostova introduced a character whose last name is Hristova, I was tempted to run out to a pharmacy for some antihristomine. What's unfortunate about this overload is that the book -- which seems to want to do for historians what ''Possession'' did for literary scholars -- is otherwise the kind of wonderfully paced yarn that would make a suitable companion to a deck chair, a patch of sun and some socklessness.  In a ponderous, many-layered book that is exquisitely versed in the art of stalling, Ms. Kostova steeps her readers in Dracula lore. She visits many libraries, monasteries, relics of the Byzantine and Ottoman empires, crypts, restaurants, scholars and folk-song-singing peasants. Every now and then a mysterious pale, sinister figure will materialize, only to vanish bewilderingly. The book's characters find this a lot more baffling than readers will.  Stuffed with rich, incense-laden cultural history and travelogue, The Historian is a smart, bibliophilic mystery in the same vein (sorry) as A.S. Byatt's Possession--but without all that poetry.
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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