The Historian: A book about... vampires??

Titles are odd things. When my colleague told me about a book called " The Historian", I (unsurprisingly) assumed it was about a historian. You know, old man with snow-white beard, piercing dark eyes and a stylised vocabulary. So when my colleague proceeded to crush these assumptions with the information that the book was about Dracula, I was slightly intrigued. A week later, she dumped the near 600 page tome onto my desk and I proceeded to sink my teeth into it. HAHA, lame joke right there. Oh yez, I couldn't resist. Sorry.

So I'm living in Canada right now and I understand that there's this craze about vampires. Personally speaking, I was never that much into vampires anyway. In the countries that I grew up, there were a myriad of other superstitions and ghostly creatures, and while I knew what vampires were, I was never fascinated by them. Maybe it's because I lump all blood suckers together, and after being covered with mosquito bites in every imaginable place, and after witnessing leeches do their thing, I couldn't bring myself to find any appeal in the idea of a blood-sucking human (?) being.

With the advent of Twilight however, I am forced to gnash my own teeth at the thought that I am confronted by vampires in every bookshop I go. Yes, I've read Twilight. Okay, okay, so I read one chapter. A little bemused by the fuss, I thought I'd give Twilight a try, reasoning that if so many people liked it, it had to be good, right? Riiiiiiight.

I mean, there are other things to write about in the world you know. I've pretty much stopped going into bookshops nowadays. Everything is so generic and vampire-based, and I can't wait until this madness is over and people get hooked onto nut-cracking newts or whatever other spine-chilling mythical creature there is out there in this crazy world.

Anyway. Where was I? Ah, The Historian.

The book is structured in such a way that there are actually two ( or at times, three) stories occurring with each alternating chapter. The narrator is a young girl whose name we are never told ( like the Girl in Daphne Du Maurier's Rebecca), a lonely, inquisitive little thing, who when exploring her absent father's library chances upon a strange old book with nothing on its pages except an eerie woodcut of a dragon and the word " Drakulya."
Little Miss then proceeds to read a couple of letters which are mysteriously addressed to " my dear and unfortunate successor."
Most intrigued, she confronts her father with her finding, and instead of getting angry as most normal parents would upon hearing that their perspicacious offspring have been reading their private correspondence, he instead begins to tell her a story. It all started when he was a university student doing research in the library ( the library again!). Suddenly he found the book with the dragon woodcut at his elbow. Thinking someone had left it behind, he returned it to the librarian. The very next day, the book  is back at his customary cubicle. Intrigued, he shows the book to his advisor, Professor Bartolomeo Rossi, who tells him that years ago, he received the exact book... and he suspects it all ties in to Dracula.

Who is Dracula? In The Historian, the premise is that the vampire Dracula is an actual being, based on the 15th century prince of Wallachia, Vlad Tepes. Such a personage did exist, and I love how Kostova takes this fact and works it in with with whole vampire myth. The girl's father, Paul, then begins telling his story, and the story of her mother. I know this sounds terribly simple, but it's not; half the story is narrated by Paul, some of it is narrated by Paul through letter format, some is narrated by Rossi through letters to Paul (!), and there is even some narration by the girl's mother.

While this is no blood 'n' guts horror novel (thank God for that), I did come perilously close to screaming a couple of times because it gets rather creepy, especially if you are reading at night. I was smart and did the bulk of it during the sunny daytime ;)

This is what I'd dub an " intellectual" novel, and apparently Kostova herself was going for a serious, almost Victorian tone. As a lover of history, I enjoyed the mysteries and clues revealed in maps and old books and parchments galore. I also enjoyed Kostova's marvelous descriptions of exotic countries like Romania, Turkey and Bulgaria. It's obvious that she's been to those places before, but each of her words felt like the artful strokes of a brush on a beautiful painting. I felt like getting out a map and planning out a trip to Eastern Europe ASAP.

The only downside was that I didn't bond with any of the characters at all. I felt that they were all rather far away from me ( with the slight exception of Paul) and some of the girl's reactions seemed a little too cool and distant considering the tense situations she was in. Another irritant is that the book is so long, the end feels rather rushed, as if Kostova had only just woken up to the fact that she needed to write " The End" somewhere. A rushed ending is definitely not a satisfactory ending folks.

However, I really enjoyed this book. While my heart might not have been too caught up in it; my brain was certainly engaged, and for this I thank Kostova for realizing that there are readers who do want to exercise their brains. And apart from one ambiguous scene which I'm still puzzling over, and people sometimes taking the Lord's name  ( grr) in tense situations, this was a pretty good ride. Which is nice for me. I have made a vow not to read books with sex scenes or negative messages, and that's pretty much shut the door on modern fiction for me. So it's nice to have books like these where I can read without getting too disgusted.

So that's it for this review! What should I read next?