The Town Herald

The netpaper about Elftowners, by Elftowners, for Elftowners.

The Historian

written by [irulan]


The Historian - Elizabeth Kostova

"My dear and unfortunate successor..."
These words pull you into The Historian from the start. In 1972, a teenage girl (the narrator) finds an old mysterious book and letters in her father's library. The letters are addressed to "My dear and unfortunate successor" and the pages of the book are empty except for the woodcut of a dragon. This piques her curiosity and her widowed father, Paul, reluctantly tells the story behind the book and letters. Twenty years earlier, the book mysteriously appeared in his work alcove in the library. He took it to his graduate school mentor, Bartolomew Rossi. Rossi has a book just like it and explains to Paul the book's connection to Vlad Tepes and his quest for the truth about Vlad/Dracula. Rossi disappears that night just after confiding to Paul that he is certain that Dracula - Vlad the Impaler - is still alive. Using Rossi's notes, Paul sets off to find him. He collaborates with a fellow student, Helen Rossi (the unacknowledged daughter of Bartolomew Rossi and the narrator's long dead mother). Paul relates the story of his and Helen's quest for his mentor and her father - then he disappears himself. Paul leaves his daughter more letters and using them, she searches for her father. So there are three basic story lines - one from 1930 when Bartolomew Rossi begins his research into Dracula, one from 1950 when Rossi's student Paul searches for his mentor and becomes obsessed with finding Dracula, and then the main narrative from 1972 in which Paul tells the story to his daughter, and his daughter searches from him. Whew.

I enjoyed it immensely. The book is suspenseful, and even the minor characters are written vividly so that they are all memorable. And Dracula is chillingly frightening from the moment his name is even mentioned. She does such an excellent job weaving the story with fascinating historical information. There is just enough to make the story more gripping, to get the reader more involved - yet not bore non-history buff people. It imparts a sense of how real historians work (sifting through archives of ancient ledgers to find that crucial and revealing letter, etc.) and relates to the reader a sizable chunk of information about Central Europe's ravaged past as a borderland between Christendom and the encroaching Ottoman Empire. Also the way Kostova reveals information through the letters, bit by bit, is very clever. It often had me looking ahead to see how long one particular letter was and then saying "I'll just read one more tonight." Finally, the Western European countries she takes the reader through on the searches take on an almost mythical quality - not too different from Middle-earth. She describes them eloquently, somehow evoking memory-like images with only a few words.

"The Historian" has been compared to the DaVinci Code frequently. And though it lacks the exciting chase scenes and "aha" moments, the characters are much more 3-dimensional. By then end of the book, you truly care about the heroic narrator and her father. I recommend it.

-[irulan]


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