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Historian Description
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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.
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