The Historian by Elizabeth Kostova
Jun. 4th, 2014 10:06 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
quippeThe Blurb On The Back:
To you, perceptive reader, I bequeath my history …
Late one night, exploring her father’s library, a young woman finds an ancient book and a cache of yellowing letters addressed ominously to ‘My dear and unfortunate successor’. Her discovery plunges her into a world she never dreamed of – a labyrinth where the secrets of her father’s past and her mother’s mysterious fate connect to an evil hidden in the depths of history.
It’s 1972. An unnamed teenage girl finds a strange book with a dragon on its cover on the shelves of her diplomat father’s library. Hidden in the book are a series of letters that tell a strange but compelling story and she slowly convinces her father, Paul, to share what happened. As a history student in 1952, he found the book placed amongst his belongings and learns that his tutor, Professor Rossi, received his own copy while a student in 1930. When Rossi goes missing, Paul teams up with Romanian anthropology student, Helen, to find him and discovers that all paths lead to Dracula …
Elizabeth Kostova’s debut novel is a slow burn gothic horror spanning three time periods that doesn’t quite pay off on its build up and premise. The plot’s complicated, taking the reader through the different investigations into Dracula and showing how each builds on and links in with the other characters’ earlier work and Kostova gives a good sense of the many cities and places her characters visit. I particularly enjoyed the scenes in Istanbul involving Professor Turgut and his wife because of the domestic feel they give to the story. However I found the narrative voices rather samey (I had particularly difficulty in believing the narrator was a teenage girl because even given her precociousness, her vocabulary is very sophisticated), I could have done with many of the food descriptions (which I didn’t think added anything) and the ending is very anti-climatic – especially the revelation as to what Dracula is up to. This is a shame because the creeping sense of menace in the first three quarters of the book is excellent and I really enjoyed the mystery of what was happening. Although this book didn’t quite come good for me, I would read Kostova’s other work.
The relationship between Rossi, Paul, Helen and the narrator for the most part this worked well for me, although some of the twists are too obvious. Less successful is the mirroring that goes on between Paul and Helen’s relationship and that of the narrator and Bailey (an underdeveloped British student who adds little to the story and doesn’t even merit a mention in the epilogue). Ultimately the big issue is Dracula who, once revealed, has a really low key motivation that simply wasn’t convincing and for that reason, the book ultimately didn’t work for me.
The Verdict:
Elizabeth Kostova’s debut novel is a slow burn gothic horror spanning three time periods that doesn’t quite pay off on its build up and premise. The plot’s complicated, taking the reader through the different investigations into Dracula and showing how each builds on and links in with the other characters’ earlier work and Kostova gives a good sense of the many cities and places her characters visit. I particularly enjoyed the scenes in Istanbul involving Professor Turgut and his wife because of the domestic feel they give to the story. However I found the narrative voices rather samey (I had particularly difficulty in believing the narrator was a teenage girl because even given her precociousness, her vocabulary is very sophisticated), I could have done with many of the food descriptions (which I didn’t think added anything) and the ending is very anti-climatic – especially the revelation as to what Dracula is up to. This is a shame because the creeping sense of menace in the first three quarters of the book is excellent and I really enjoyed the mystery of what was happening. Although this book didn’t quite come good for me, I would read Kostova’s other work.
Late one night, exploring her father’s library, a young woman finds an ancient book and a cache of yellowing letters addressed ominously to ‘My dear and unfortunate successor’. Her discovery plunges her into a world she never dreamed of – a labyrinth where the secrets of her father’s past and her mother’s mysterious fate connect to an evil hidden in the depths of history.
It’s 1972. An unnamed teenage girl finds a strange book with a dragon on its cover on the shelves of her diplomat father’s library. Hidden in the book are a series of letters that tell a strange but compelling story and she slowly convinces her father, Paul, to share what happened. As a history student in 1952, he found the book placed amongst his belongings and learns that his tutor, Professor Rossi, received his own copy while a student in 1930. When Rossi goes missing, Paul teams up with Romanian anthropology student, Helen, to find him and discovers that all paths lead to Dracula …
Elizabeth Kostova’s debut novel is a slow burn gothic horror spanning three time periods that doesn’t quite pay off on its build up and premise. The plot’s complicated, taking the reader through the different investigations into Dracula and showing how each builds on and links in with the other characters’ earlier work and Kostova gives a good sense of the many cities and places her characters visit. I particularly enjoyed the scenes in Istanbul involving Professor Turgut and his wife because of the domestic feel they give to the story. However I found the narrative voices rather samey (I had particularly difficulty in believing the narrator was a teenage girl because even given her precociousness, her vocabulary is very sophisticated), I could have done with many of the food descriptions (which I didn’t think added anything) and the ending is very anti-climatic – especially the revelation as to what Dracula is up to. This is a shame because the creeping sense of menace in the first three quarters of the book is excellent and I really enjoyed the mystery of what was happening. Although this book didn’t quite come good for me, I would read Kostova’s other work.
The relationship between Rossi, Paul, Helen and the narrator for the most part this worked well for me, although some of the twists are too obvious. Less successful is the mirroring that goes on between Paul and Helen’s relationship and that of the narrator and Bailey (an underdeveloped British student who adds little to the story and doesn’t even merit a mention in the epilogue). Ultimately the big issue is Dracula who, once revealed, has a really low key motivation that simply wasn’t convincing and for that reason, the book ultimately didn’t work for me.
The Verdict:
Elizabeth Kostova’s debut novel is a slow burn gothic horror spanning three time periods that doesn’t quite pay off on its build up and premise. The plot’s complicated, taking the reader through the different investigations into Dracula and showing how each builds on and links in with the other characters’ earlier work and Kostova gives a good sense of the many cities and places her characters visit. I particularly enjoyed the scenes in Istanbul involving Professor Turgut and his wife because of the domestic feel they give to the story. However I found the narrative voices rather samey (I had particularly difficulty in believing the narrator was a teenage girl because even given her precociousness, her vocabulary is very sophisticated), I could have done with many of the food descriptions (which I didn’t think added anything) and the ending is very anti-climatic – especially the revelation as to what Dracula is up to. This is a shame because the creeping sense of menace in the first three quarters of the book is excellent and I really enjoyed the mystery of what was happening. Although this book didn’t quite come good for me, I would read Kostova’s other work.
