The Historian

I'm scratching my head trying to find something positive to say. All that I can come up with is that the author is quite good at location description and equally good at including an endless list of historical facts. Those are this book's strengths.

Where the book stumbles, falls, and lands in an abyss of awful is plot, pacing, characterization, logic, and dialog.

Not long ago I discussed the book with a friend who has also read it. She laughed and said, "Who remembers what they had for dinner twenty years ago? Every character in The Historian." That statement goes a long way towards summarizing this book.

To be more specific about the flaws, as other reviewers have mentioned, every character sounds exactly the same. I'll add that this is because no one in the novel speaks in a believable voice. They don't have conversations. They have exposition dumps.

Also, in addition to it being nearly impossible to tell narrators apart, it's impossible to tell the decades apart. The 50s, 60s, and 70s as eras in time are virtually identical and interchangeable.

On the characterization front, relationships are uniformly clichéd and absurd from the teenager who loses her virginity to a college student because they checked into a hotel which only had one room available and that room only had one bed to the Romanian peasant (who just happens to be a descendant of Dracula) who speaks to Professor Rossi twice before giving up her virginity and promising to marry him on the spot. The soap opera level plotting continues when he leaves town for some nebulous reason never to return, leaving her pregnant and unwed and leading his illegitimate daughter to hate him... Or at least she hated him until, in one of the countless restaurants and bars in the book, someone gave her lover a drink called "amnesia" at which point she has a miraculous epiphany that her father abandoned her mother due to *amnesia*! (I'm not kidding). This, despite the fact that her fiancé didn't actually get amnesia from the drink, that her father apparently remembered everything but his trip to Romania, and that when she finally meets her father he mistakes her for her mother! Making it even more ridiculous is the fact that she's right. He did have amnesia.

Others have mentioned that the plot (what there is of it) hinges on a long list of unbelievable coincidences. This is true. What's also true is that there comes a point in the story where even the author must realize that the plot hinges on preposterous coincidences because she "hangs a lantern" on one of them by having the protagonists point out that it's a shocking coincidence that this fellow they *happen* to meet is also secretly researching Dracula. In disgust, I wondered what was supposed to be so shocking about this since every character in the book is secretly researching Dracula. When something becomes ubiquitous it's no longer coincidental.

As to the ending, another reviewer revealed Dracula's nefarious master plan. I won't reveal it again, but I will echo that reviewer's sentiment that it was laughable. I never thought I'd consider Dracula to be lame, but by the end of this novel, I considered him to be just that.

I read the Historian in hardcover. It had all that hype; first-time novelist gets huge advance...movie deal, etc. I thought, gee whiz, I MUST read her book.

I read it. It started off well. The whole shtick about finding Dracula's resting place and wondering if that nasty bloodsucker still hovered among us piqued my interest. The book is so long and I thought that would be a wonderful extended pleasure. For me, it wasn't.

Ms. Kostova really needed a better editor. The book should have been about 200 pages shorter. It drags. I felt like I was waiting for my lawn to grow in dry weather. Painful. I know this is going somewhere. Please, make it stop!

I was willing to give the book a second chance. The paperback is smaller and I hoped that an editor had gotten involved for this re-issue. NOT! It's the same overly long torture it was before.

The book has won awards. Many people liked it. It wasn't for me. I did find one good use for it. I got the hardback (it must weigh 10 pounds) and I laminated it. It makes a nifty doorstop!

Recycling, that's it!

This book certainly LOOKED fascinating. It was touted to me as a literary and wonderfully researched thriller focusing upon Vlad Tepes, and as such, I was expecting to enjoy it immensely.

But between five and ten pages in, I realised that reading it was going to be a chore, not a pleasure.

This was NOT because of the mediaeval history included in the book. (I found that one thing Ms Kostova did well was to weave her "history" in with the story.) It WAS, however, at least partly due to the fact that the much-vaunted historical research is... well, let's put it kindly. It's nonsense. Ms Kostova does not seem to realise how real historians work, and she strains credulity at one convenient "discovery" after another. She is utterly incorrect in details that can really annoy, such as saying "dialect of Church Slavonic" when any BASIC historian into this field knows Church Slavonic did not branch into various written dialects. Not only that, but the nonsensical inclusion of a "lost" Shakespearean play supposedly set in a Muslim city - please!

It's worth pointing out that Ms Kostova appears not to realise that the term "vampire" was NEVER applied to a nobleman, was not CURRENT as possibility among nobles, during the period in which Vlad Tepes flourished. Had it been, believe me, his enemies would have accused him of it - he certainly was accused of whatever his enemies could throw at him. The word "vampire" was not used in Greek theatre, although Ms Kostova states that it was. In fact, the word and concept of vampire (not Upir as a proper name) have as their earliest attestation a folk reference in the 15th century - in what's now Yugoslavia (the South Slavic area). The FIRST TIME that the peasant superstition EVER is turned around to refer to nobles is long, long, long after the time of Vlad Tepes. It is in fact a distinctly discernable process occurring in the Romantic period - Germany's Enlightenment in which writers like Goethe were creating erudite and genuinely chilling tales about this newly-"discovered" monster of legend. From there, it did not take long before the English got into the act and the first full-length works were written - both trash and treasure in quality.

So the mere IDEA of suspecting a nobleman to be a vampire is specifically 19th century, not mediaeval.

It seems that Ms Kostova didn't do her vampire research very thoroughly. There's a huge amount of truly fascinating material there waiting to be treated in a novel, but "The Historian" is not that novel.

And in terms of writing... Ms Kostova's style does not take wing. She writes about some gorgeous places in the world, and some fascinating events, but the details often annoy by being wrong, and the gorgeous places are not vividly drawn in front of our eyes. What I mean is this: a great writer does not say, "I was breathless and taken aback. It was magnificent. It was beautiful", and so on. Rather, he/she convinces us by our visualisation that the place is one of dizzying grandeur, astonishing beauty, etc. Don't tell us; show us - that is good advice to keep in mind.

The characters are so unclearly delineated that they all seemed to meld into one. When reading the so-called letters of John, the girl's father, his vocabulary, style, ways of thinking, etc., are all exactly the same as the writing of the girl, and the writing of Rossi.

The character of Dracula himself is the biggest disappointment. To learn that his secret great plan is (yes, believe it) to get hold of scholars so that he can make them his librarians because he wants his library catalogued... well, it's frankly ludicrous.

And what a fizzled-out finale. We never see Dracula's power - he is never frightening. In fact, chills and thrills were virtually entirely absent from this novel, whereas Bram Stoker's Dracula is genuinely psychologicalliy terrifying.

THIS Dracula is killed because he's distracted by someone else? He's killed by a quick shot from a gun with a silver bullet? Oh dear. Originality is not the hallmark here, nor is nail-biting tension.

The epistolary device does not work well here - there's simply no NEED for letters. The notion of letters doesn't even make sense, but Ms Kostova clearly used the device because she intended to draw out the story and use the end of a letter as an excuse to break off the story at one point, presumably to make the reader salivate for more. (Clearly she modelled the device upon its use in Stoker's novel - but there the device made literary and plot sense. Here... it doesn't.)

This novel, then, failed to captivate me. I finished it in a mood of grim resignation, determined to base my increasing uninterest in it upon a full knowledge of it, rather than to stop half-way. The style of writing is a little too prosaic to really merit being called "literary". The thrills that should have been there... weren't. The denouement was frankly silly. The characters did not leap off the page into my mind's eye. And the research was wrong in so many details that I cannot even begin to describe it. And this was annoying because those wrong details did not impact on the STORY - they could have been written with CORRECT information without negatively impacting on the novel. They were wrong, then, because Ms Kostova made assumptions and did not do the research she is vaunted to have done.

In short - disappointing.

This was the most boring book that I've ever read.

Six hundred pages of secondhand accounts of parts of the plot and absolutely unbelieveable chance meetings bored me to death.

I love vampire books, I love history. I hated this book.

I'm sure a lot of people will disagree with me, and that's fine, but trust me, this book was as boring as the title.

Elizabeth Kostova was on to something. At long last, a vampire tale is presented free of inane melodrama and mindless seduction; at long last, a horror novel comes forward from a fresh perspective: an historian/scholar's perspective. And what's more, the novel is brilliantly and masterfully written; its prose is lyrical and majestic--it's a delight to read. As a bonus, the reader is able to learn so much--learn about European history, the Balkans, the Ottoman Empire, Transylvania, Bulgaria. . .learn about Vlad the Impaler, the actual historical figure. And finally, the story starts with such promise, such heart-racing suspense; the reader is eagerly turning the pages, longing to see what happens next.

So what happened? Unfortunately, several things. THE HISTORIAN is perhaps the most disappointing read I have ever experienced, because it starts with such promise, yet Kostova's story unravels and fails dismally to suspend disbelief. Several plot developments and writing devices created problems (for me), and here are the most glaring ones (spoiler alert!):

*The recklessness of Paul (the father). Based on all we learn about the dangers of coming across one of the ancient books with the woodcut engraving of the Dragon, why on earth would Paul leave his copy (along with letters and notes) on a shelf in his study? What father in his right mind would dare expose his teenage daughter (our unnamed protagonist) to such diabolical evil and danger? When the librarian in the Amsterdam library is viciously attacked and killed in an adjacent room next to the study where the daughter (our unnamed protagonist) is doing her own Vlad Tepes research, I said to myself, "Well, there had better be a reasonable explanation why Paul would allow his daughter to be placed in so much danger." Yet no explanation--after some 700 pages--was ever given or provided.

*Paul's "letters" to his daughter (our unnamed protagonist). The bulk of the narrative in this novel is comprised of so-called letters Paul has written to his daughter (our unnamed protagonist); these letters recall the events, some twenty years before, of Paul and Helen (who will become the mother of our unnamed protagonist) as they travel eastern Europe and Turkey in search of Paul's recently-kidnapped mentor, Professor Rossi. These letters were ostensibly written by Paul late at night, over the course of some 18 months, as Paul and our unnamed protagonist travel the European continent. These letters total well over 200,000 words; the logistics of such a Herculean task just don't jive. Supposedly these letters were discovered in a "packet"; one can only imagine the size of such a packet of letters. And finally, these letters don't read like letters; they read like narrative, including dialogue, inflection, and facial expressions. No one (not even an historian) writes letters this way, and Kostova's employment of such a device rings hollow.

*The fragility of Dracula. Vlad Tepes has wreaked havoc throughout the world for more than 500 years. He appears and disappears mysteriously; he possesses superhuman strength; throughout this story he is virtually indestructible. So when he is so quickly dispatched at the end of the novel with little more than a whimper, I actually laughed out loud. It was better than crying, anyway.

*Helen's explanation for running away from her family was lame. Okay, we get it: She's a distant descendant of Dracula, and she's been bitten twice (and according to the story a third bite is fatal, and also an invitation to Undeadville), so she feels the urge to go on a quest to find Vlad before he finds her. Yet she never presents a convincing explanation for just dropping out of her husband's and her daughter's (our unnamed protagonist) lives without a trace--allowing both to assume she's been killed. This subplot just doesn't hold up, and it makes Helen the character look petulant and whiney (as do her unmailed "postcards" to our unnamed protagonist).

Again, these were the major problems I had with this novel; there were several more, but I'm writing a review, not a dissertation. Kostova's Epilogue does feature a nice touch, but it was insufficient to overcome the myriad of problems and unworkable devices utilized to tell the story. THE HISTORIAN certainly reads well, yet the story disappoints, over and over again.
--D. Mikels, Author, [[ASIN:142573152X The Reckoning]]

Okay, I admit it: I've forced myself through far worse books than "The Historian." But sad to say that's about the best I can report about this hysterically accomplished bestseller. In this volume, historical novel meets romance fiction meets Gothic adventure, with a healthy dose of conspiracy narrative tossed in (along the lines of "The DaVinci Code"). I'm bemused at how this powerfully complex constellation of interests merges whenever this early time period comes into question. In short, nobody cares about the Middle Ages unless it has something to do with the Holy Grail or perhaps, as here, with the vampire Prince, Vlad Tepes. Whenever anyone confronts an era prior to 1500, it must be to "figure out" how some figure or another pulled the wool over the eyes of the rest of (Western) civilization. One must wonder if the popularity of such books is really a function of their intrinsic excellence or of the desire of readers to stake their claim on an early mystery of literary history.

In addition to being a historically and geographically pretentious piece, "The Historian" also over-reaches in various other registrars. The fact that the narrator (and main character) is never given a proper name is but one of the many ways in which this novel seems to insist on its own precocity. Since most other characters have recognizable and oft-repeated names -- Helen, Paul, Elena, Turgut, etc. -- there seems no reason to withhold the moniker of the main figure in the book, except to call attention to the author's cleverness.

In addition, while some of the travel descriptions are quite mesmerizing, the overall effect of endless romantic representations of misty Balkan mountains is to make the geographical detail an additional effect of the over-wrought narrative method. In brief, 700 pages is too long for this book.

Lyrical and lovely, the author does a masterful job of creating a story within a story. Both stories were compelling and the characters were well drawn, especially that of the father and daughter.

For those interested in stories about the myth of vampires, this book is one of the best written and interesting available. Whether you are interested in stories with a basis in historical facts, such as Vlad the Impaler, or in folklore passed through generations in the dark, hidden corners of the world, The Historian delivers a well researched and entertaining narrative on this topic.

The tone of this novel vacillates between suspense and academic. Some may find that one tone suits them, but not the other. However, I felt that she found a relatively comfortable marriage between the two. I would only criticize the trope of including a cliff-hanger within the last page or so of nearly every chapter. I understand that suspense novels use this to keep the reader hooked, but it made the format feel a little forced at times and took the magic a bit out of the suspense. Many may have a problem with the academic turn. Some reviewers have remarked that they felt bogged down at times on account of this. I did not feel that way, but I recognize the danger is there for some people. So be warned. It is not, however, enough to put the book down entirely.

I immediately appreciated Kostova's writing style. It felt smooth, so that those gripped in suspense wouldn't get tripped up in the hurry to get answers. But moreover, I enjoyed the way she played with language in structure and meaning. The length and structure of her sentences varied in interesting ways, as well as her grammar patterns. And did anyone else get a warm feeling in his heart when he saw that Kostova used the word "translate" in its more etymological meaning (as a synonym for "transfer," which is etymologically the same word)? It's clear that Kostova loves the English language, and that's the kind of writer I want to read.

Kostova's research was especially impressive. Not only was it thorough, but she and her characters seem intimately familiar with the historical method, so I didn't feel like I needed to worry about shoddy research. However, the lines were blurred as to when the documents and research in the story were real and when they were fabricated to further the plot. Just enjoy it for what it is: a fictional historical narrative.

I will only take issue with one aspect of the plot. I did not feel that any of Vlad's motivations for his actions were viable. In order to avoid spoilers this criticism may sound paltry, but whenever I took a proposed motivation to its logical end in my head, it ended up in contradiction. And I also do not believe that someone could live that long and be the exact same man he was in the beginning.

I had a hard time deciding whether to give this novel three stars or four stars. Why three? This novel did not permanently affect me and my life. It was a fun read, but I don't see the world from a new or different angle because of it. The novels meant to last should make that sort of impression on us.

Nevertheless, why did I give it four stars? Because of the format. What a work of art! A great majority of the novel is told through letters, collected by the nameless Historian. These letters, written in a different epistolary style depending on the author, connect people, places, and times together into one cohesive plot. The reader becomes immersed in numerous levels of development at the same time, and yet without feeling overcome. This book ought to be read just to experience those levels. It is an unusual feat of language engineering.

I have never been very hip with the attraction everyone has with vampires. There are many a book on the subject out there; they seem to fill an entire section of every bookstore. Just not my thing. But trusting a recommendation, I found myself burning through this book.

This was a beautifully disguised history lesson with a little Dracula thrown in for a powerful kick. I enjoyed this educational thriller through all of its wonderings. I know some critics bemoan it lackadaisical coasting but it is that same leisurely pace that paints such lovely pictures and powerfully lends itself in the development of the suspense. For surly the evil darkness waits around the corner...

This book is incredibly long. 650 pages to be exact, so you get your money's worth. However, I was very dissapointed in this book. The plot, in a nutshell, is a vampire hunt, which is a very entertaining and facinating topic. However, this book is so chocked full of "research" - one can only assume that the author did her homework and the research is accurate, but who knows, I haven't the time or the inclination to fact check it - that it reads more like a history book or a PhD dissertation than a novel, which is unfortunate because as the story begins to unfold, it shows great promise, but somewhere in the middle the research overwhelms the plot.

This book would have benifited from a quarter less rambling on about research and twice as much action. Most of the action that is in the book is passive and told in the form of letters. If you are into vampires and want to know the history of Vlad the Impaler (assuming the research is accurate, of course) than this is a great book. However, if you're looking for something intresting, compelling and a fast paced, action read, this is not your book.