reviews
Reviews: book
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BOOK
The Historian Elizabeth Kostova Price: $25.95
★★★
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Now that everyone has read The Da Vinci Code, the Powers That Be have
designated Elizabeth Kostova's first novel, The Historian, as the next "it" book. Like The Da Vinci Code, The Historian glamorizes the academic life and has as its gimmick the exposure of a popular belief — in this case, the historical context of Vlad the Impaler, upon whose life Bram Stoker's Dracula is based.
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Our nameless heroine recalls her teenage years living with her diplomat father in 1972 Amsterdam. Upon investigat-
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ing his library, she discovers a series of letters beginning with, 'My dear and unfortunate successor...'. She learns
that her father's academic mentor, Bartholomew Rossi, who disappeared
novel.
soon after he confided to her father that Vlad the Impaler might in fact still be alive, wrote the letters.
The novel is broken into three criss-crossed timelines. The first is a narrative of the 1930s, when Professor Rossi first begins investigating the Dracula myth. The second is the 1950s, when the heroine's father begins to search for his vanished advisor. The third storyline is 1972, which serves as the grounding of the
The Historian aims at those with a love of history — appropriately. While
there are surely those who would cling to every description of Ottoman warfare - Vlad the Impaler was a Romanian warlord whose military victories against the Turks made him infamous — I imagine that after a while, the historical anecdotes would get repetitive for some. My main beef with the novel is its editing — it easily could have beeh slimmed, and seems bloated.
Far from being a horrific novel (this is nowhere near the realm of, say, Stephen King), The Historian is more interested in the real history of the Dracula myth than in any gore. That said, the most involving passages are those describing Vlad the Impaler's historical actions — when envoys refused to remove their religious turbans, he had the turbans nailed to their heads, for instance. For better or worse, the man makes a compelling subject.
-Kelsey Hayes
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