Book #10: The Historian

Title: The Historian
Author: Elizabeth Kostova

Did you like The DaVinci Code? Did you wish it had been better written? Did you enjoy the historical puzzle of the novel more than the action?

If you answered "yes" to the above questions, Elizabeth Kostova's The Historian is for you. The main premise of the novel (two scholars go on a hunt to unlock a mystery from the past and risk their lives to do so) reminded me a lot if Dan Brown's novel. But Kostova's novel doesn't have the same potboiler-style writing. In fact, it took Kostova more than ten years to complete the exhaustingly researched novel, and she won an award in her MFA program for best novel in progress for her work. I read the 650+ page book in five days, which is saying a lot considering that we had company visiting. I also loved that the two scholars (Paul and Helen) searched for Dracula as equals, not as the older professor/younger ingenue roles found in Da Vinci.

Dracula, you say? Yeah, Dracula. And no, I'm not normally into stories about vampires and werewolves, so I really wasn't expecting that much when I picked up the book, but I really did find myself hooked as Paul and Helen chased all over Europe and the Middle East for the undead form of Vlad the Impaler. It also helped that Paul and Helen (and the other scholars they ran into in the course of their chase) were skeptical of the idea of Dracula themselves.

But even though it was an exciting read, it definitely wasn't a perfect novel. It bugged me that I never found the name of the narrator (we find at the end that she's named for her grandmother, but I couldn't remember her grandmother ever being given a name). Paul isn't given a last name, either. I thought the lack of names would be important for some reason, but it never became apparent to me as the novel closed. Furthermore, for more than 50% of the story, the narrator recounts things Paul (her father) and Helen did as they chased Dracula. As a result, everything that was originally spoken by the father is written within quotation marks in the novel. And I mean there are whole chapters which begin where every paragraph begins with a quotation mark. Accurate according to MLA? Probably. Annoying? Definitely. There were some unlikely coincidences, most notably Paul and Helen being randomly seated at a restaurant table next to a lonely and talkative Dracula scholar in Istanbul. Also, I must admit that there were parts where the history dragged (15 pages of a letter written in 1477 eventually got skimmed), but unlike some of the reviewers on Amazon, I thought the novel was pretty quick-paced all the way through (but I also loved Vikram Seth's doorstop A Suitable Boy).

Love it or hate it, I'll tell you one thing: after reading The Historian you'll never look at librarians the same way ever again.

--originally published 2/19/06