|
The Historian | 
 enlarge | Author: Elizabeth Kostova
Publisher: Little, Brown and Company
Category: Book
List Price: $9.99
Buy Used: $1.47
You Save: $8.52 (85%)
New (40) Used (39) from $1.47
Rating:  1436 reviews
Sales Rank: 10845
Media: Mass Market Paperback
Pages: 928
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.1
Dimensions (in): 7.4 x 4.2 x 1.6
ISBN: 0316067946
EAN: 9780316067942
ASIN: 0316067946
Publication Date: June 1, 2008
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
| |
| Also Available In:
|
| Similar Items:
|
| 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
Product Description
Breathtakingly suspenseful and beautifully written, The Historian is the story of a young woman plunged into a labyrinth where the secrets of her family's past connect to an inconceivable evil: the dark fifteenth-century reign of Vlad the Impaler and a time-defying pact that may have kept his awful work alive through the ages. The search for the truth becomes an adventure of monumental proportions, taking us from monasteries and dusty libraries to the capitals of Eastern Europe - in a feat of storytelling so rich, so hypnotic, so exciting that it has enthralled readers around the world.
"Never was a ghost story so casually erudite, nor a historical travelogue such gripping entertainment." ---New York Magazine
"Impossible to resist. . . . Kostova blends fact and fantasy to remind us that the original Dracula legend is rooted in monstrous acts of unblinking evil." ---Miami Herald
"A richly told story about family and the dark side of human nature. . . . This cry of the heart will appeal to readers beyond those who are drawn by a fascaination with the legend of Dracula." ---Chicago Tribune
"Genuinely terrifying." ---Boston Globe
"Nearly impossible to put down once you crack the spine. . . . It won't take you long to get to the end." ---Houston Chronicle
|
| Customer Reviews: Read 1431 more reviews...
 What might have been January 4, 2009
callmebecks (Kansas City, USA)
This book was hugely hyped even before it was even published, with Kostova getting a big fat $2 million advance from Little, Brown. (Note to self: Between Kostova and Meyer, LB apparently likes giving ridiculously big paychecks to debut authors and then spending even more to buy glowing advance reviews. V. successful. Must get on board.)
A friend loaned this to me weeks ago because we both like vampires and history - he claimed that after a slow start I would love it. My conclusion is this: It could've been a much better book.
It's part historical feature on Vlad Tepes, part ode to the noble cause and work of historians, and part travelogue of Europe. Either one of these separate would have been very good, but all of them together in a work that is considered to be fiction? It's just too massive. Kostova was very ambitious, and her 9-10 years of wonderfully detailed research is apparent, but it just wasn't successful.
There were definitely good things. Kostova has a very poetic way with description. She likes to linger over the way the light of 1950s Budapest glances off the Danube, the sounds and smells of Tuscany in the summer, the mysteriousness of the Bulgarian mountains, and she does it well. Oh, this book can definitely make you want to travel, to see Romania and Istanbul and the Pyrenees. Kostova also builds up a fascinating historical look at Vlad as he was in life and how that may have influenced his undeath, and there were moments, especially in the beginning when the mystery is starting to unravel, where I was genuinely and deliciously almost creeped out. It was subtle, like mist sneaking in under the door. I was ready for a whole lot more of that. And the author also succeeds in painting one character very clearly - a woman named Helen, who is edgy and smart (until that, too, jumps the shark).
Unfortunately, all of this is buried under things I really just couldn't get past. For one, the majority of the story is about Paul's search for his mentor, told to his daughter in a series of supposedly hastily written letters just before his disappearance. And yet, these recountings detail specific dinners eaten, excessive descriptions of trees standing next to monastery walls, shoes changed into - all things that happened 20 years ago that no one would ever remember, let alone bother to write down to their endangered daughter when all she really needs to know is that, "Yup, we found Dracula, dearest child. He's buried at Such-and-Such Super Historical Site, he was scary, and he's still out there. Keep your head down and go find a girl named Buffy Summers. Dinner's in the oven."
Oftentimes, Kostova seems more interested in exposition dumping all of her marvelous research onto the page, which would be fine in historical nonfiction, but here it muffles the plot. You try to absorb all of this information with the idea that it will be important later, but almost none of it is. I found myself having to skim big blocks of text describing things like the stone in one of the fountains in the courtyard just to stay sane. Every now and then a tidbit of creepiness kept me going, and I powered through, believing that the payoff once we found Vlad himself would be worth it.
It wasn't.
I'm a payoff kind of girl. I'm willing to put up with a lot of crap if, in the end, you give me a good climatic ending and a resolution that makes sense. And after 600 pages, we finally meet Dracula...and I'm underwhelmed. All the potential for the delicious creepiness was gone. The characters in the book were terrified of him, but add some Hot Topic sparkle glitter and I would've been about as afraid of Kostova's Dracula as I was of the Cullens. His powers - much debated over the course of the book - seemed spotty and ludicrous. He can make full meals appear out of thin air while asleep? He knows when anyone anywhere in the world starts to research him? He will appear when you just say his name (but not always because sometimes it would inconvenience the plot)? And yet, when the final faceoff finally arrives, and you think that finally, finally you're getting your massively awesome award for trucking through 620 pages...it all takes 2 pages. Tops. o_O I kept rereading them to see if I had missed something in the poetic-y treatment of an action scene.
The resolution afterward was equally muddy. A few pages of characters talking about things, a quick but irritatingly befuddling epilogue, and then that was it. And with such a poor payoff, I could only think about the other things I had trouble with - like how every noble historian they conveniently met also conveniently had a convenient part of the convenient puzzle. Like how, with the exception of Helen, all the characters sound the same. I would've loved it for one of them to have had a real flaw, but those dedicated to the craft of piecing together history are, according to Kostova, more perfectible creatures than the rest of us present-day folk. Like how many loose threads went absolutely nowhere. Like how, even when there were creepy parts, I was never concerned about the characters and what happened to them because they were mere sketches of people, vessels by which we traveled through history.
Like I said, Kostova was very ambitious - trying to write a history, a love story, a horror tale, a travelogue...all at once. I wish for her an equally ambitious editor with a large supply of red pens and a gung-ho attitude, who says, "Fabulous research, darling - now lets find the plot under all that, shall we?"
 Perfect for Students of History or Literature December 30, 2008
Lovely Reader (Seattle, WA)
As a university student about to return to classes in a few weeks, I found an enthusiasm for this very scholarly novel, which I ultimately needed. The main problem with this book is that is stays true to the nature of historical research: searching through libraries with painstaking care, reading ancient texts, puzzling through inconsistencies. This is detective work at its finest, but even my study-starved mind became a little impatient at all the studying required to solve the mystery of Dracula.
Nevertheless, I thoroughly enjoyed the story and the way Kostova weaves her way through time, from stories from ancient Turkey, Romania, and Bulgaria, to the fevered investigations spanning two generations in the 20th century. Secrets long buried in history are constantly being revealed and there's a twist in almost every chapter. Kostova is also adept at bringing the environment in which these incredible events take place beautifully to life. I almost felt as if I were traveling through the streets of Istanbul and the countryside of Romania. Kostova also brings this intensity to her storytelling. It was at one moment incredibly frightening, and at another moment so moving it brought tears to my eyes.
I recommend this book to anyone who is interested in history, including the history of Dracula. The Historian is a wonderful and cerebral twist on the traditional Dracula legend.
Applause for what it could have been. Depression for what it actually was. December 24, 2008
C. Gilbert (Amsterdam, the Netherlands)
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
My sister gave me this book. I was quite skeptical. I remain quite skeptical, even though there are several aspects to the book that I actually really liked.
I liked it better than I thought I would after reading some pretty snarky reviews from friends. I liked it rather less than I thought I would based on the first 200 pages or so.
If you have been living under a rock, then here's the run down of the book: a young girl finds a mysterious book in her even-more mysterious father's library. It leads her into a massive search through research, primary sources and history. Who knew? Scholars can be warriors too. In the researching of what seemed a historical mystery, she peels back layers of truth about her family, history and the nature of evil itself.
See now, I'm already getting snarky about it myself.
The problem here is that those of us who are kind of librarian like and bookish get all excited by the first third of the book. Initially, I wanted to be her-- to live in her book-filled and exciting world. Kostova gets the itch for research right on. Lovely.
It all starts to fall apart in the second half of the book. The romantic scenes are nearly funny. Then it becomes clear that while Kostova is great at the history, she really isn't very good at characters. The voices of all the different characters start to run together. They sound and feel exactly the same. And the ending-- oh, what can I say without spoiling it? It stank. The motivation of the Great Evil is the silliest motivation in the history of Great Evils. And with the stinky ending, holes appear like flowers in the spring through the rest of the plot. It is actually amazing how the lack of a satisfactory wind-up can retroactivly destroy a book. Pfft.
I also was deeply irritated that she used the corny plot device of never telling us the name of the narrator. Oh, the mystery of it all!
Anyhow, I applaud it for what it could have been. I'm dismayed by what it actually turned out to be. I really do not get how so many people love it as much as they seem to do.
(To explain my star rating-- Four stars for what it could have been, plus one star for the actually execution and irritating ending. Divide by two gives you two and a half stars and I rounded it up to three because I'm willing to acknowledge that perhaps other people wouldn't get as annoyed as I did by the plot.)
 Disappointed December 23, 2008
moonstar (Roseville, CA)
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
I was expecting an exciting story about vampire and vampire history. I could barely get through the first few chapters, it just rambled on and on, I got so bored, I didn't even want to skim through it. I ended up selling the book. I shouldn't really give it a one star because I didn't even finish reading it, so it might not be fair. BUT on the other hand I spent good money on this book and couldn't get through it shows me that it wasn't even worth the one star.
 Dracula is Gonna Rip Up Your Card Catalog December 22, 2008
Melissa McCauley (North Little Rock, AR)
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
This LONG tale about a search for Dracula is narrated by the teenaged daughter of a diplomat/historian living in Amsterdam in the 1970s. The story slowly unfolds through a series of letters and flashbacks - The mysterious appearance of a book with a woodcut of a dragon, her parents' search for the truth of the paper trail all over Europe and Eastern Europe in the 1950s, and the father's academic advisor's same search in the 1930s.
It is really (REALLY) hard to refrain from being incredibly snarky about this book. The one positive thing I can say is that I commend the author's ability to portray the ambience and beauty of European scenery. I believe Ms. Kostova should turn her attention to travel writing.
Every single character in this novel has the *exact same* voice, and the plot leaves much to be desired, to say the least. Dracula, the supposed object of the story, does not show up until page 569. I think I can sum this up with the plot summary I gave my husband when I was approx 150 pages into this: "Dracula's minions are terrorizing them by stealing their maps and ripping cards out of the card catalog".
If you like historical mysteries and would love a challenging read with a multitude of different voices and reproductions of poems, letters, and novellas, you must try Possession: A Romance by A.S. Byatt. It is one of the most brilliant novels I have ever read.
|
|
|
| |
