Great sense of place, but a terribly contrived plot

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	• The Historian Elizabeth Kostova, 2005 - 656 pages average customer review:based on 1384 reviews view larger image
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A Great Adventure

I loved this book! Great pace, kept me going and I couldn't get to the ending soon enough!

Great sense of place, but a terribly contrived plot

Kostova has a lot going for her in _The Historian_, particularly her ability to capture the details of Central Europe and its cities (Budapest, Sofia, Bucharest). It is a pity, then, that the story is so plodding and slow. At first I was genuinely intrigued by the idea of a historian would set on the trail of Dracula. As the story progressed, however, it became increasingly convoluted.

While it was apparent to me that she was attempting to channel Stoker by writing various chapters from the persepective of different characters (even borrowing the device of using letters and jounral entries from Stoker), the character's voices honestly read the same to me - the all blurred together. The climax of the story was similarly deflating - I was disappointed, after investing over 500 pages of reading, to have such a silly and contrived ending.

I enjoy a good vampire story and mysteries and gothic tales of horror are fun to read. This, in addition to my love of Central Europe should have made this book a slam-dunk five star read. Unfortunately, Kostova dropped the ball with her belaboured plot, monotonous characterization and plodding writing.

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Genius!

Even if you have no interest in Dracula or are not a fan of Bram Stoker this book will enthrall you the entire time you are reading and will call you back when you put it down. Just to read of the majesty of the old monasteries and the mystery of travelling through communist countries before and after the war will astound, confuse and intrigue even the most timid of readers. This author weaves a tale between generations and holds you in an intense grip of fear and anticipation until you fall back in relief when the story is finished - but wish you could wait to conclude - and then she hits you with a final fear on the last page. This is a wonderful read and I am so glad to be the owner of this collectible. One word of warning is that the binding on the book is severely bad and has a tendency to pull apart. The pages have a rip-torn appearance and the book itself is not a pleasure to hold - but a dear pleasure to read.

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A lengthy history of Dracula

The size of this book left me a bit intimidated, but I finally decided to pick it up and give it a go. I haven't read a lot of vampire novels, so I was a bit uncertain of what I should expect. The structure of the novel, with its extended flashback passages, shows us the story at three different points in time, each about twenty years apart. Sandwiched between glimpses of the novels "present" (set in the 1970's) are the stories of two historians attempting to research the life of Vlad Dracula in the 1930's and 1950's. Through these three story lines, we are drawn ever closer to the evil at the heart of the story, and the tension builds through much of the book.

Unfortunately, the pacing of the book is very uneven. There are long sections, hundreds of pages long, that draw the reader in and flash by quickly. But there are also sections where the story slows to a crawl and it almost becomes a chore to continue reading. I also found some of the typographic conventions used in the book distracting. Entire chapters are quotations, which necessitates the use of nested quotation marks that I found annoying. However, I think the biggest failure in the book, for me anyway, was the final confrontation. After all that build up, over hundreds of pages, the final confrontation was resolved far to quickly and easily. The ending simply felt like an afterthought, a way to finally bring the narrative to a close, and it really didn't satisfy me.

With its wonderful descriptions of the locations in Eastern Europe and Turkey, as well as a detailed exploration of the history of the region, there are still rewards in this book. Overall, I guess I enjoyed it, but at over 600 pages, I'm left wondering if it was worth the effort.

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fantastic

This book is amazing. I bought this book for a friend after having listened to it on audio. You will find yourself captivated by the story and wondering if the "history" of it is actually taken from true events. If you listen to this story on audio there are numerous readers and the voices are spellbinding. I normally read "light" fun mystery books and this is not something I would normally have been interested in. However, This is now one of my favorite books of all time. Please do yourself a favor and either read it or listen to it. You will not want to put it down for a second.

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reviews: page 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10

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

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