Dracula (1897)

I found the book easily digestible for an older book. The format felt quite modern, being a combination of letters and journal entries from various narrators. The descriptions and emotions were lush and enveloping. The entries written from VanHelsing’s point of view were the only ones I had difficulty getting through- the language choices are meant to portray a highly intelligent person for whom English is not native, but for me it wound up being repetitive and harder to relate to. Also, the portrayal of women was hard to swallow at times. Baring in mind that it was another time, and that it might even hold a hint of satire against chauvinism, it was still at times irking. Overall, glad I finally read this classic and would definitely recommend! ( )

I was expounding on my love of Dracula to my poor long-suffering mother yesterday, and realized I should probably confine my effusions to a more opt-in format.

I first read Dracula as a teenager, breathlessly turning pages of a library edition late at night while coyotes howled around the little bungalow where I was staying alone. Even as an adult, in less conducive conditions, the story holds up for me.

It is in deadly earnest, and the emotions are grand, the stakes high: if you can't put your cynicism aside, it probably isn't for you. It builds slowly, accumulating unease and unearthliness, until you reach the first vertiginous climax -- and then again, you return to normalcy, waiting to be slowly, sickly drawn to the next dramatic break in the fabric of the world. It takes a while to reach a breakneck pace, but it's well worth it.

I'd call Dracula an anxious book. Not just tense, or thrilling, but profoundly anxious. As a teenager, I found the Victorian anxiety about carnality and sex dripping from the pages interesting: Jonathan's revulsion from the incongruously lush lips of the Count, the menace of the castle ladies, and above all the hectic loveliness of Lucy. It's a terrifically clear look into the Victorian psyche, bringing the cultural subtext so close to the surface it pulses like an exposed vein.

As an adult, I've enjoyed the other thematic obsessions: the clash of science/technology/modernity with magic/superstition/occult; the West versus the East; the train and the typewriter set against ancestral earth and the evil eye; the pagan versus the holy; eternal carnal life at the cost of the heavenly beyond.

Perhaps others who aren't English majors, history readers, or obsessed with Victorian foibles and fables won't find those contrasts as compelling as I do, or greet the intrusion of shorthand, typewriters and railroad time tables with the same affection. But these themes play out on characters we care about, for all their occasional preciousness: the slightly fussy Jonathan, the garrulous Lucy, the careful and self-reliant Mina. They play out in deliciously high drama, memorable scenes, iconic images. A hundred years of progress and easing (or replacement) of cultural neuroses can't rob Dracula of its charm, its pathos, or its terror.


P.S. To audiobook readers: A multitude of unabridged productions exist, many of them with multiple readers to bring the diaries and letters of the various characters, male and female, English and Dutch, to life. I have bought, and often return to, the Brilliance Audio version. Most of the readers and accents are quite good, although Michael Page, who reads Seward's journals, is as usual scenery-chewing. I haven't tried the Audible original, chock full of famous names, so that might be another option -- but I do recommend getting one with multiple narrators, to really do the epistolary style justice. And do listen to samples -- there are some very fake English accents running around claiming to be Jonathan Harker of Exeter. ( )

Van Helsing sat with the Harker child on his lap; Van Helsing was momentarily pensive as his breathing continued stertorously. He was thankful that the child's breathing was normal, not stertorous. His suspicions had been numbed since the events with the Count some seven years before. He was also aware that both Jonathan and Mina would conscript this every instant to their journals. It was a shame he still spoke German. Why didn't anyone notice this? Yes, they had encountered True Evil and prevailed through serial implausibility on the part of Undead genius and reduced him to ashes with a Bowie knife. ( )

I've read this twice now and my estimation of it has lowered, but it is still a great novel.

Dracula is such a powerful pop culture figure who's taken on a strange life of his own forever outside the boundaries of his pages that I don't need to go into the actual plot of this, do I? The hairy, profane beast from the East, hankering for western women to despoil, comes to England and will cause irreparable harm if not stopped by the resourceful Van Helsing and friends.

The novel's real urgency comes from the quest to put a stop to Dracula in time to save the soul of their delightful and frail, but useful!, female compatriot. They despair at times, but is it ever in doubt that these strapping exemplars of Western masculinity could fail to quell the Eastern menace, slave to his dark passions?

Dracula's Victorian morality is what makes it such an effective book, and the introduction to this Bantam Classics gives an excellent overview of Stoker's life, his unusually low opinion of women and the novel's context. ( )

Pretty captivating. I liked the presentation by letters/diaries. ( )