My dear and unfortunate successor...Review of The Historian

A warning to all who have not yet completed The Historian, this review will contain revealing information about the book. Don't say I didn't warn you.

I was first attracted to Elizabeth Kostova's novel The Historian when I heard that it had been purchased for just over two million dollars, a record for a first novel. I needed to know what made publishing companies feel it was worth that. I assumed that, like most of the over-hyped works gaining media recognition, it would turn out to be written by a slightly less intelligent than average baboon with an over-inflated sense of self-importance...but I'm not a cynic. Happily, it was not the next Da Vinci Code as many had promised, but rather an intricate weaving of story with history, of lives with life.

Our story is told to us by a nameless narrator, the sixteen year old daughter of an American diplomat living in Amsterdam. As she recounts the story, she pulls from not only her own experience but also from the letters of her father, her mother and her father's mentor Bartholomew Rossi. Using these letter and this perspective, the story unfolds in three separate timelines: Rossi's initial discovery (1930), the story of her mother and father (1950's), and her own quest to discover the truth (1972). She finds a strange book in her father's library; it is blank save for a woodcut in the center depicting a dragon holding a banner with a single word: Drakulya. Inside the book, she finds a letter dated 1930 that begins..."My dear and unfortunate successor."


If you have not yet completed the book, you may wish to skip the following section.

Begin Spoilers:


Once she begins to question her father about the book and letters, the story begins in earnest. Her father tells her of Professor Rossi's disappearance, how he met our heroine's mother Helen who died not long after the birth of her child, and of the search he and Helen conducted to find Rossi. The more he tells, the more obsessed with the search for Dracula he becomes again, eventually leaving his daughter with a series of letters continuing the story and the cryptic message, "If you are reading this, forgive me. I have gone to look for your mother." The story he tells explains how he and Helen went searching for the grave of Vlad Tepes in the hopes that they would also find Professor Rossi, mentor to Paul and father to Helen. Their journey takes them to Istanbul, to Hungary and finally to Bulgaria and the resting place of Dracula himself. During their travels, Helen is attacked and bitten by one of Dracula's minions, leaving both Paul and Helen with the fear that she will become undead. When they finally locate the grave of Dracula, they find Rossi, who explains to them that he was being kept there to catalog the great library of the undead Vlad. While they are too late to find Dracula or to save Rossi from death, they provide him with salvation from an eternity of undeath.

When we return to 1972, our fearless narrator is reading the letters her father had written and trying to catch up with him in his search for her mother. She chases him to a monastery in France where he believed (until recently) that Helen had jumped to her death 15 years before. This same monastery was also the origin of the secrets which helped transform Vlad, the ruler of Wallachia, into Dracula, undead, undying evil. It was now also the resting place for Dracula's sarcophagus. Rather than finding Helen, Paul and his daughter find the vampire who is still looking for a scholar to be his eternal assistant. During a struggle Dracula is shot from behind by Helen, who pierces his heart with a silver bullet (CK note: I thought that was just for werewolves). Dracula is slain and his body turns to dust. The threat is over, until the present day when our narrator, now a grown woman, visits a museum in Philadelphia. As she leaves someone runs to her with the things she has forgotten, the notebook she was sure she had just put away and a small book that was empty save for an image in the center.

While Kostova's writing did not reveal the meaning of life or give greater depth to any particular topic, the writing was done well, especially for a first novel. Each character was given a distinct personality and a purpose behind his or her actions. The story was intricately detailed, but still easily understood. I enjoyed the book and feel that it was more than worth my time and was certainly better than most popular fiction...though I'm not sure about $2,000,000 though.

While on the surface, it is a novel about Dracula, in the end we are left with the story of a young girl examining the forces that shaped her life. Over the years, her grandfather, father and mother have all been engulfed by the same obsession, an obsession that took away her mother and grandfather before she ever had a chance to know them. In the end, they overcome the obsession and she, her mother and father are reunited, then years later with the simple gift of a book, the obsession becomes hers as well.

Some things that I would like to examine a little more:

What was the purpose of kidnapping Rossi? Did Dracula really need a librarian that badly? Was he lonely? He makes note of how the library shows that the nature of man is evil and that only evil can ever be perfected. Was he simply looking for someone to assist in his research and help him perfect evil so that he could be a ruler not of a small region, but of the world?

How difficult would it be to have to put a stake through the heart of a friend or loved one? Whether they were dead, like Helen or still alive and talking to you like Rossi?

Who left the narrator the book in the library in Philadelphia? A minion of Vlad or the Impaler himself?

What about the fact that both Helen and the narrator were descendants of Vlad? Did this have some bearing on why they became involved and how things turned out or were they merely coincidental?



End Spoilers



Hopefully, I've covered all the main points. Feel free to chime in with anything I missed. Argue, discuss and comment below.