Edgy Mama

There are 195 reader reviews of Elizabeth Kostova’s novel The Historian on Amazon—at the moment, which is incredible for a book published just over a month ago (June 14). Instead of adding my small voice to the multitudinous fray there, I’ll review the book here, for those of you who value my literary opinion (have I told you lately that I love you?).

I finished The Historian last night, and my first response to it was, typically, about me. The strength of the story lies in Kostova’s extensive research and revision of vampire lore, particularly that involving the big Daddy of blood sucking—Dracula. I attempted to do something similar, but clearly much less successful, with werewolf legends in my novel, Storm Mountain. So, for the record, SM was not, in any way, influenced by or derivative of The Historian. I completed the manuscript in 1998! Enough said.

The Historian is being touted as the next DVC, and is currently number two on the NYT’s best-seller list, but I don’t think it will be as widely sold or read as Brown’s thriller. Why not? Primarily because it is 642 pages long, and I don’t imagine that Joe-who-reads-one-novel-per-year will tackle this baby. Also, the first few hundred and the last hundred pages of the book are engaging, but I found myself bogged down in the middle. While a great deal of the Eastern Europe history that Kostova covers is fascinating, she overdoes it, and, in places, the book feels like a well-written dissertation. I’m an obsessive and rarely distracted reader, but at one point, I found myself staring into space, the book open on my lap, engaged in a fantasy starring Viggo Mortensen as Dracula and myself as the doomed Lucy. Oops, wrong vampire story.

A couple other minor caveats: a great deal of the novel is told through letters (another device I use, much less extensively, in SM, damn it). As a writer, I find it extremely challenging to give each character a unique, distinct voice. Kostova seems to have the same problem with the letter format. I found myself struggling to differentiate the voices, particularly those of the characters Rossi and Paul. Even so, the characters are extremely realistic and human—no cardboard cutouts here. The only character whom is somewhat unbelievable is the narrator, who, although she admits to it, seems overly innocent for a teenager living in Amsterdam in the 1970s. Among other things, she never questions her father about her deceased mother, to the extent of not seeming to know how the woman died.

Despite these limitations, the novel is well worth reading. The descriptions of the settings are evocative and often creepy; the mystery and its prolonged unveiling enjoyable; and the moments of tension, although too few and far between, are wonderfully frightening. I am awed by Kostova’s accomplishment—and I like her dark side.