The Historian - Elizabeth Kostova
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.