The Historian

From the Amazon.com Review:


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.





While I was in one of my "expeditions" at a nearby bookstore, I chanced upon this book by Elizabeth Kostova. It was not love at first sight, I tell you. For at the moment I am very much fixated with romance novels. The plot, as well as the thickness of the book are enough reasons for me to walk away. It sounded heavy, and dark-the last thing I needed when I wanted a break from work. But the book managed to worm its way into my consciousness. I started to do some research, until I gave in and bought myself a copy.

Unlike most books, I was not able to finish this in one sitting. It's complexity would require you to slowly absorb the details that Kostova has presented. I say complex because three stories are interwoven: the narrator's, the father, and the father's mentor. The storytelling is rich in details, at times I felt as though I've tagged along their journeys. Every now and then I get a bit scared at her description of the undead-Dracula's minions-unleashed and living among us.



Although most (if not all) characters are intellectuals, Ms. Kostova managed to present them as multifaceted creatures. I would marvel at their ability to piece together clues and cheer for them whenever they've managed to overcome obstacles. Grieve as they have to make diifficult decisions.



But their "holy grail", the very much alive (or undead) Dracula has become some sort of disappointment to me. In this book, a different side of Draculya was highlighted. What was present was not Vlad the Impaler, but Vlad the Scholar. The book was obviously intended to be dark, but I could not help it but get tickled pink when the reason for Dr. Rossi 's(the father's mentor) abduction was revealed- Dracula simply wants someone who could catalog his collection of rare books.


I blame Bram Stoker.


But still, a good roller coaster ride.