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.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #111897 in Books
• Published on: 2008-06-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Mass Market Paperback
• 928 pages

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

From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. Considering the recent rush of door-stopping historical novels, first-timer Kostova is getting a big launch—fortunately, a lot here lives up to the hype. In 1972, a 16-year-old American living in Amsterdam finds a mysterious book in her diplomat father's library. The book is ancient, blank except for a sinister woodcut of a dragon and the word "Drakulya," but it's the letters tucked inside, dated 1930 and addressed to "My dear and unfortunate successor," that really pique her curiosity. Her widowed father, Paul, reluctantly provides pieces of a chilling story; it seems this ominous little book has a way of forcing itself on its owners, with terrifying results. Paul's former adviser at Oxford, Professor Rossi, became obsessed with researching Dracula and was convinced that he remained alive. When Rossi disappeared, Paul continued his quest with the help of another scholar, Helen, who had her own reasons for seeking the truth. As Paul relates these stories to his daughter, she secretly begins her own research. Kostova builds suspense by revealing the threads of her story as the narrator discovers them: what she's told, what she reads in old letters and, of course, what she discovers directly when the legendary threat of Dracula looms. Along with all the fascinating historical information, there's also a mounting casualty count, and the big showdown amps up the drama by pulling at the heartstrings at the same time it revels in the gruesome. Exotic locales, tantalizing history, a family legacy and a love of the bloodthirsty: it's hard to imagine that readers won't be bitten, too.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From School Library Journal
Adult/High School–A motherless 16-year-old girl stumbles upon a mysterious book and papers dating back to her father's student days at Oxford. She asks him to explain her find but he disappears before she can learn everything. Reading the salutation of the letters, My dear and unfortunate successor, the unnamed heroine uncovers an academic quest that begins with her father's mentor's first research into the history of Vlad Tepes (Dracula) and reaches a kind of conclusion many years later. Kostova's debut book unfolds across Europe, through three main narrators, and back and forth in time, as the story of two families' connections to and search for the true Vlad the Impaler is unveiled. The historian of the title could refer to any of the novel's central characters or even to Vlad Tepes himself. While teens may gain a feeling for Cold War Europe and some respect for the Internet-less scholars of 40 years ago, Historian is an eerie thriller, an atmospheric mystery, and an appealing romance. Teen fascination with vampires has been keen since Bram Stoker popularized the legend of Dracula, right up through Buffy. This complex, convoluted, and well-written novel will appeal to teens who love a story on a grand scale that is as engrossing as it is entertaining.–Jane Halsall, McHenry Public Library District, IL
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Customer Reviews

This is an exciting novel!
This debut novel from Kostova contains elements from many of my favorite genres - thriller, suspense, mystery, historical fiction, and vampire lore. It is no surprise then that this supremely intelligent story was a very entertaining read. Though I feel that the story concept and character development deserve five stars, I feel that there are a few important flaws in this book which put it into the four star category.

First the good: All of the characters in this tale are very believable, including Vlad Tepes himself. I really enjoyed the historical facts surrounding the Ottoman Empire and Eastern Europe that Kostova weaved into her tale. I also loved the way she used letters to reveal the more thrilling aspects of the story bit by bit. This kept me in that "I'll just read ten more pages" mode on many a late night.

Now for the problems: The first 300 pages of this book were very compelling and hard to put down. Somewhere between page 300 and 450 it began to feel like Kostova had an old graduate school dissertaion on the migration patterns of monks in the 15th century lying around so she decided to work it into the story. Wow did that slow the pace... I don't have a problem with the storyline taking the characters on a search for the history of these monks, its just that Kostova occasionally strayed across the line between entertaining fiction and dry academic research.

All of that said, my opinion as a librarian and avid reader of such stories is that this is an excellent book, well worth reading. I am sure that it will have wide appeal and is no doubt deserved of its huge marketing push. I have heard that there is already talk of a movie...

A suspenseful, literary novel
The marketing campaign is underway and Elizabeth Kostova's debut novel is already being hyped as the "Dracula Code" or some similar slogan. I disagree with that approach, not just because they are quite different in more ways than just storyline, but because "The Da Vinci Code" was a good thriller with elements of history mixed in, but it is not even in the same league with this book.

"The Historian" is an epic work of historical fiction that sweeps across Europe during the four decades between 1930 and the mid 1970s. It just also happens to involve the Dracula myth and a good dose of suspense. Now, some people may object to me calling this novel a work of historical fiction because it is mostly fiction and contains very few real characters. That is true, but Kostova does such an amazing job of making the Dracula myths come alive that you can't help feeling that the legends and the story are real. Her research is stunning in its attention to detail and the wide range of topics Kostova must've studied. A previous reviewer slightly criticizes Kostova for spending too many pages describing the pilgrimage routes of monks hundreds of years ago. While sections like that do slow down the pace of the novel somewhat, they don't distract from it. The last book that I read that combines elements of history, suspense, and great characters as well as "The Historian" was "The Devil in the White City".

Highly recommended!

The dissapointment of the year
There has been a lot of reviews and commentary about for this book, much of it complimentary. So I looked forward to reading ‘The Historian’ hoping it would be a well written, involving literary adventure. Considering the author was paid around US$2 million for it, you would hope so.

Well, what a disappointment!

I don’t know where to start with what is wrong with this book – do I mention that the writing is ‘clunky’? Do I go into how the book is based on letters supposedly written in a hurry that end up reading a melodramatic word-by-word recreations of events twenty years past? Do I mention how in the second half the book got so bogged down in boring extraneous information I ended up skipping and skimming through much of it like a pebble across a lake?

I think there are probably three main problems with this book. The first is the author has forgotten the main rule, equally applicable to films and books, when writing about ‘fantastic’ subjects – if you expect the reader to believe the unbelievable (in this case that vampires do exist) everything else about your story should be believable. And here we come to ‘the letters’ – most of this novel is presented as letters written by a father to his daughter. Nothing wrong with that. However, these letters are meant to be written in a hurry as the father is concerned he will not have the time to tell his daughter all he wants her to know. Yet, what is meant to be a letter is full of flourishes such as “She inhaled without flourish, smoking dexterously…The Friday plane to Budapest from Istanbul was far from full, and when we had settled in among the black-suited Turkish businessmen, the gray-jacketed Magyar bureaucrats talking in clumps, the old women in blue coats and head shawls – were they going to cleaning jobs in Budapest, or had their daughters married Hungarian diplomats? – I had only a short flight in which to regret the train tip we might have taken...” etc. etc. etc. After a few pages of this, the reader is left wondering why the author bothered with the letter conceit and just didn’t tell it as a narrative. There was no way I could believe these were letters rather than a novel.

The second problem is the density of this book – while I can understand an author unwilling to leave out any of the information gathered over ten years of research, where is the editor in all this? By the last quarter of the book it gets so tied down in blather about details that are not all that interesting you wonder why you are bothering at all.

Lastly, there is the plain and simple fact this is not a well written book. As I stated above, much of the writing is clunky. Many of the descriptions of the locations are workman-like rather than evocative – I have been to places mentioned in this book, including Istanbul, and rather than recreate the city I loved I thought it was really boring. And the plot itself relies on too many clichés – unbelievable co-incidences, extraordinary good luck, even amnesia for one of the main characters for goodness sake. By the time you eventually get to the ending and the reason for the dastardly Dracula’s actions are revealed, you are too bored to even laugh at the ridiculous reason.

After all this, a review in a nutshell – the writing is clunky; the plot is meandering and ridiculous. The book is too long, and could have been much better with half the words. In short, don’t bother – life is too short to slog through this book! Get your hands on some Anne Rice or even Bram Stoker if you want to read a good book involving vampires.