The Historian (Hardcover)

~ (Author) "In 1972 I was sixteen - young, my father said, to be traveling with him on his diplomatic missions..." (more)
Key Phrases: evil librarian, unfortunate successor, dragon book, Professor Rossi, Vlad Dracula, Baba Yanka (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

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

From Publishers Weekly

Starred Review. Considering the recent rush of door-stopping historical novels, first-timer Kostova is getting a big launch—fortunately, a lot here lives up to the hype. In 1972, a 16-year-old American living in Amsterdam finds a mysterious book in her diplomat father's library. The book is ancient, blank except for a sinister woodcut of a dragon and the word "Drakulya," but it's the letters tucked inside, dated 1930 and addressed to "My dear and unfortunate successor," that really pique her curiosity. Her widowed father, Paul, reluctantly provides pieces of a chilling story; it seems this ominous little book has a way of forcing itself on its owners, with terrifying results. Paul's former adviser at Oxford, Professor Rossi, became obsessed with researching Dracula and was convinced that he remained alive. When Rossi disappeared, Paul continued his quest with the help of another scholar, Helen, who had her own reasons for seeking the truth. As Paul relates these stories to his daughter, she secretly begins her own research. Kostova builds suspense by revealing the threads of her story as the narrator discovers them: what she's told, what she reads in old letters and, of course, what she discovers directly when the legendary threat of Dracula looms. Along with all the fascinating historical information, there's also a mounting casualty count, and the big showdown amps up the drama by pulling at the heartstrings at the same time it revels in the gruesome. Exotic locales, tantalizing history, a family legacy and a love of the bloodthirsty: it's hard to imagine that readers won't be bitten, too.
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Product Details

• Hardcover: 656 pages
• Publisher: Little, Brown and Company; 1st edition (June 14, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0316011770
• ISBN-13: 978-0316011778
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.1 x 2.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1,481 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #4,701 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

757 of 826 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars This is an exciting novel!, June 14, 2005

By	Scott Pointon "Former Marine, Librarian, Wood... (Crest Hill, IL United States) - See all my reviews (TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

This debut novel from Kostova contains elements from many of my favorite genres - thriller, suspense, mystery, historical fiction, and vampire lore. It is no surprise then that this supremely intelligent story was a very entertaining read. Though I feel that the story concept and character development deserve five stars, I feel that there are a few important flaws in this book which put it into the four star category.

First the good: All of the characters in this tale are very believable, including Vlad Tepes himself. I really enjoyed the historical facts surrounding the Ottoman Empire and Eastern Europe that Kostova weaved into her tale. I also loved the way she used letters to reveal the more thrilling aspects of the story bit by bit. This kept me in that "I'll just read ten more pages" mode on many a late night.

Now for the problems: The first 300 pages of this book were very compelling and hard to put down. Somewhere between page 300 and 450 it began to feel like Kostova had an old graduate school dissertaion on the migration patterns of monks in the 15th century lying around so she decided to work it into the story. Wow did that slow the pace... I don't have a problem with the storyline taking the characters on a search for the history of these monks, its just that Kostova occasionally strayed across the line between entertaining fiction and dry academic research.

All of that said, my opinion as a librarian and avid reader of such stories is that this is an excellent book, well worth reading. I am sure that it will have wide appeal and is no doubt deserved of its huge marketing push. I have heard that there is already talk of a movie...

481 of 552 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A suspenseful, literary novel, June 14, 2005

By	D. Bakken "dobak" (Minneapolis, MN) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

The marketing campaign is underway and Elizabeth Kostova's debut novel is already being hyped as the "Dracula Code" or some similar slogan. I disagree with that approach, not just because they are quite different in more ways than just storyline, but because "The Da Vinci Code" was a good thriller with elements of history mixed in, but it is not even in the same league with this book.

"The Historian" is an epic work of historical fiction that sweeps across Europe during the four decades between 1930 and the mid 1970s. It just also happens to involve the Dracula myth and a good dose of suspense. Now, some people may object to me calling this novel a work of historical fiction because it is mostly fiction and contains very few real characters. That is true, but Kostova does such an amazing job of making the Dracula myths come alive that you can't help feeling that the legends and the story are real. Her research is stunning in its attention to detail and the wide range of topics Kostova must've studied. A previous reviewer slightly criticizes Kostova for spending too many pages describing the pilgrimage routes of monks hundreds of years ago. While sections like that do slow down the pace of the novel somewhat, they don't distract from it. The last book that I read that combines elements of history, suspense, and great characters as well as "The Historian" was "The Devil in the White City".

Highly recommended!

222 of 265 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Long on prose poems, short on character, plot, logic and sense., September 20, 2005

By	Craig Kenneth Bryant (Atlanta, GA USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

Please note: important details of the plot are discussed in this review.

If you've got the remotest affection for Europe, for medieval ruins, for the romance of travel and history, it's easy to fall right in love with _The Historian_. Whatever her shortcomings, Ms. Kostova has a genuine knack for evoking the way the light at sunset hits the crumbling stone towers of the monastery just _so_ as the farmers are bringing in their animals and the smoke from the cooking stoves goes wafting by. This, and the glimmer of an interesting idea--someone secretly distributing antique books to university historians, entirely blank but for a single woodcut image of a dragon and the word "DRAKULYA"--were enough to get me at least a hundred pages into the book before I started to realize that there just wasn't any meat to the story.

Dracula, it seems, has kidnapped a kindly old professor--the recipient of one of those old books--and so a student of his sets off to search for the tomb in which Dracula was buried some 500 years ago, because even though he has moved freely across continents and oceans for centuries, that is where he just _has_ to be.

So the travelogue begins, city to city, castle to monastery, library to mosque, confusing movement with progress-- England, France, Turkey, Bulgaria, Romania, Hungary...and perhaps we should be thankful that, with all the sightseeing, the plot scarcely ever has a chance to make an appearance, because it seems mostly to consist of contrivances and chance meetings that even a Victorian like Bram Stoker would have blushed at. That woman checking out Stoker's _Dracula_ in the library just as the professor's student is starting his research? The professor's long-lost daughter, of course. The Turkish fellow sitting down to dinner at the next table? A lifelong Dracula fanatic and amateur historian, of course. And his English is excellent on account of his day job as a professor of English Lit. The English historian at a random academic conference in Budapest that our heroes attend as a cover-story to score visas to Hungary? The proud recipient of yet another of those antique dragon-books. And so it goes, random meeting after chance discovery after remarkable happenstance. Nothing in the plot is organic, nothing evolves according to any kind of logic or necessity: we are only going down a list of bullet points in the author's notebook, one after another, because that is how the plot _needs_ to go in order to take us next to that incredible castle in the mountains where the wind whistles just _so_ through the mossy cracks in the stonework...

...until after about 600 pages of this nonsense, we finally pry apart the gravestones (duly pausing to note how the dust of the centuries has settled just _so_ on the fading inscriptions of the musty crypt) and learn the terrible truth of Dracula's horrible plan for the professor, to--Dun-Dun-DUUUUNNN!--CATLOG HIS LIBRARY! (As Dave Barry would say, I swear I am not making this up.) As it turns out, the Prince of the Undead is a bit of a bookworm. Who knew?

But of course, we should have been able to guess. _Everyone_ in this novel is a bookworm, for the same reason that everyone acts the same, thinks the same, and talks the same: because everyone in this novel is essentially one character, the author herself. Romanian peasant, Turkish professor, expat teenager--read a line of dialogue at random, and you'd never be able to guess who is who. When you pick up the book, it is often a bit confusing to figure out where you are, not because there are so many narrators, but because there are so few _voices_. One imagines the author perhaps putting on now a pair of Groucho glasses, now a fez, now tying a kerchief around her hair, as she evokes one character or another, but the writing never changes. Neither do the characters themselves--the protagonists are all secular, rational people, who, when they find themselves in a vampire story, simply shrug and reach for a crucifix and a silver bullet. What they are experiencing--what they are _doing_, in picking up that crucifix--and what it might mean to their deepest senses of what the world is and how it works...these are subjects that are never touched upon. Heaven knows, an author with a certain curiosity about character and psychology, to say nothing about metaphysics, might have spun a wonderful novel out of this material. But psychology and character didn't seem to make it on to those shopping lists of cities to visit and people to meet that define the plodding bulk of this book.

Even Dracula's little hobby of distributing those dragon books to young historians to rouse their curiosity, then trying to kill them if they actually start to do research on them, might have become a window into a vain and endlessly bored mind, giving himself a little thrill to while away the centuries. Here, it's just another illogical plot contrivance, vanishing into the swarming multitudes of its fellows.