Book Review: The Historian

I was first attracted to Elizabeth Kostova's novel The Historian when I heard a story on NPR that mentioned that it had been purchased for just over two million dollars, a record for a first novel. I needed to know what made publishing companies feel it was worth that. I assumed that, like most of the works gaining media recognition, it would turn out to be over-hyped and under-written. Happily, it was not the next Da Vinci Code as many had promised, but rather an intricate weaving of story with history, of lives with life.

Our story is told to us by a nameless narrator, the sixteen year old daughter of an American diplomat living in Amsterdam. As she recounts the story, she pulls from not only her own experience but also from the letters of her father, her mother and her father's mentor Bartholomew Rossi. Using these letter and this perspective, the story unfolds in three separate timelines: Rossi's initial discovery (1930), the story of her mother and father (1950's), and her own quest to discover the truth (1972). She finds a strange book in her father's library; it is blank save for a woodcut in the center depicting a dragon holding a banner with a single word: Drakulya. Inside the book, she finds a letter dated 1930 that begins..."My dear and unfortunate successor."

The book then leads us on chase after chase to track down Dracula. As we travel from America to Turkey to Romania and Bulgaria, we learn not only of the significance of the Dracula legend in these places, but about the lives of our characters.

While on the surface, it is a novel about Dracula, in the end we are left with the story of a young girl examining the forces that shaped her life. The same obsession is passed on from generation to generation, an obsession that took away her loved ones before she ever had a chance to know them and threatened to take all that she had. Then with the discovery of a book and a letter, the obsession is hers as well.

The verdict: While Kostova's novel did not reveal the meaning of life or give greater depth to any particular topic, the writing was done quite well, especially for a first novel. Each character was given a distinct personality and a purpose behind his or her actions. The story was intricately detailed, but still easily understood. I enjoyed the book and feel that it was more than worth my time and was certainly better than most popular fiction...though I'm not sure about $2,000,000 though.

Until later...