the historian: dan brown’s the da vinci code meets bram stoker’s dracula

© Little, Brown and Company 2005

The Historian was published by Little, Brown and Company in 2005. I read the 2008 mass-market paperback edition.

Elizabeth Kostova’s debut novel is a labyrinthine tale of scholarly discovery spanning much of Eastern Europe. It follows the misadventures of a sixteen-year-old American girl living with her father in Amsterdam in the 1970s, who uncovers a secret family history of obsession and loss: years before, her father became embroiled in a search for Vlad Tepes, better known as Dracula. The novel recounts a series of nesting narratives. The framing narrative is that of the protagonist herself, as she slowly uncovers, through stories told to her by her father and a series of letters he leaves behind after he disappears, the events of twenty years prior, when her father first set of to discover the truth behind his mentor’s disappearance and its link to a collection of mysterious, ancient, and otherwise blank volumes featuring a woodcut of a dragon bearing the name “Drakulya”. The father’s narrative features a number of stories told to him by other scholars from around Europe and the Near East, all of whom have come across their own copies of this mysterious book, and all of whom contribute, in different ways, to his search for Dracula’s tomb, where he believes the undead Dracula still resides and has taken his mentor, Bartholomew Rossi.

The complexity of the narratives, and the constant shift of narrative voice, between letters, stories told, translations, and recorded texts are at once confusing, impressive, and a clear homage to the epistolary form of Bram Stoker’s classic novel, Dracula. Kostova does a good job of slowly revealing the secrets of her narrative without unnecessarily obscuring details through convoluted circumstances or shadowy characters. Having the plot slowly revealed through letters and the discovery of historical documents lets the novel build up suspense without having to shift outside of the two main points-of-view (those of the protagonist in the present and of her father, Paul, in the past).

Like The Da Vinci Code before it, The Historian builds up a mystery with roots in the distant past, and offers the reader a sense of accomplishment in unraveling this ancient conspiracy as the novel goes on. The Historian, however, does an even better job of this than Dan Brown’s novel, by doing as much to reveal the real history of Eastern Europe in the time of the historical Vlad Tepes, as well as the fascinating world of Cold War Europe in which the book is actually set. Astute readers will certainly guess ahead of the novel’s protagonists, realizing pieces of the puzzle before the characters do, but on the whole the pacing of these reveals is well-done, and the book is truly hard to put down, because you can’t help but want to know what is coming next.

Unfortunately, the book is somewhat mired by the supernatural elements that pervade its pages. When I first started reading the book, I was hoping to discover that its subject was not in reality a vampire, but rather perhaps some kind of cult of personality devoted to Vlad the Impaler mixed up with Iron Curtain conspiracies. Although the supernatural is only glimpsed sparingly throughout the text, its occasional intrusions into an otherwise realistic (though convoluted) story can be jarring. In addition, the tone of the novel is somewhat anachronistic, or rather archaic: it is written in a voice more reminiscent of Stoker’s 1897 novel than the 1950s and 1970s in which the novel takes place. On the whole, however, I highly recommend The Historian to readers of every stripe, especially fans of historical fiction, commercial thrillers, and vampire novels.

less than a week in, and already i’m breaking my own rules

I’m only supposed to be reading and writing about Canadian literature on this blog; after all, the damn thing is called canlit confessions, but I’m only a week in and already breaking the cardinal rule. I’ve decided to put Canadian literature aside for a little while and read a book by an American author and put out by an American publishing house. Why, you might ask? Well, simply put, I’m doing it for love.

Not love of the book, dear reader; after all, I’ve only just started the damn thing. No, rather, it is love for my girlfriend, who is currently living about a five hour drive away from me. She picked up the book first, started reading it, and decided that I would also enjoy it. In an effort to have something to bind us together across the vast physical distance between us, I have decided to read it simultaneously with her, in a kind of miniature book club.

The novel is The Historian by Elizabeth Kostova, published in 2005 by Little, Brown and Company. A friend of a friend once described it as “The Da Vinci Code, but for smart people.” While I’m not certain that such a description is possible (after all, Dan Brown’s book is decidedly not for smart people) I trust my girlfriend’s judgment of my tastes, and I expect to enjoy the book. So far, it seems to be a series of nested narratives: the main narrative is from the first-person point-of-view of a woman in her mid-fifties, looking back on some kind of terrible discovery she has made on the subject of Vlad Tempes, better known as Dracula. Embedded in the main narrative are a series of tales told to her by her father of his own experiences researching the Impaler, and these stories themselves contain first-person accounts of his mentor’s original attempts to discover some kind of terrible secret about the Wallachian tyrant (yeah, it turns out he wasn’t even from Transylvania). These nesting narratives actually flow pretty well into each other, and there is sufficient difference between them to make the speaker pretty easy to identify as you are reading, which is, of course, a plus.

I was pretty into the whole vampire mythology about ten or fifteen years ago, and I’m looking forward to reading a fresh take on the concept of the vampire that doesn’t adhere to the terrible stereotypes that are prevalent today (I’m not going to dignify these narratives by naming names, but I’m sure you, oh gentle reader, know exactly what I’m talking about). Only time will tell, however, if The Historian will live up to the smattering of hype it has received in my personal life.

On a side note, I bought my copy at a Chain outlet nearby. I’m not proud to have shopped there, but I had limited time to find a copy, and wanted to make sure that it would be in-stock, so I decided not to chance it on an independent. The cashier also happened to rave about the novel when I handed it over to be scanned. I hope she was right.

review: the golden mean by annabel lyon

© Random House of Canada

Until recently, The Golden Mean by Annabel Lyon has dominated my bedside table and the top of my toilet tank. The book is a first-person novel, written from the perspective of the classical Greek philosopher Aristotle, a man whose work I haven’t looked at since undergrad, but with whom I definitely identified more than that overly-idealist pederast Plato. The novel switches smoothly between a present-tense main narrative, that starts with Aristotle, his wife, nephew, and household on the road to the court of Philip of Macedon in Pella, and ends with Aristotle bidding his final farewells to a young Alexander the Great, who is about to set off to conquer the known world. Interspersed in this main narrative are past-tense flashbacks to Aristotle’s childhood and adolescence.

I really enjoyed the novel. Lyon, however, conceives of Aristotle as being bipolar, and therefore either reinforces the myth that all highly-intelligent people throughout history have suffered some form of mental illness. These interspersions of Aristotle’s mood-swings seem forced and contrived to me, and really took away from the strength of the narrative. Otherwise, I really liked Aristotle’s cool, objective observations of the tragedies that surround him, including the death of his wife, the suffering of Alexander’s autistic older brother, and the political turmoil of the Macedonian conquest of Greece.

Lyon also very effectively presents a classical point-of-view by inserting little pieces of classical scientific thought (like the concept that the cosmos are a series of nesting crystal spheres moving around the earth, or that the heart is a sensory organ) throughout the narrative and presenting them as fact rather than marking them out as unusual; the only time Aristotle has one of these beliefs compromised is during his first sexual encounter with his second wife, who achieves orgasm despite Aristotle’s belief that, according to his medical knowledge, the female orgasm is impossible.

Overall, the narrative is well balanced between main narrative and flashbacks, the characters are well-rounded without having the voice be lost to multiple perspectives, and the events of the novel are not overly-tragic or flowery and idealized. On the whole, I would definitely recommend The Golden Mean as an enjoyable and surprisingly quick and easy read to anyone interested in literary fiction. You don’t have to be interested in historical fiction, or specifically in classical Greece, to enjoy the novel.

only book titles and people deserve capital letters

Welcome, weary reader, to canlit confessions, a travelog of my sojourn into the weird, wonderful, and sometimes wearying world of Canadian literature.

My own tastes for literature have always been eclectic, at least in regards to the countries of origin of the authors I read. I started my MA degree expecting to specialize in American literature, and ended up writing on postcolonial Britlit. A little more than a month ago, however, I started a new chapter in my life by enrolling in the Humber Creative Book Publishing program, with an eye to working in the Canadian trade publishing industry. This has lead me down the garden path to investing heavily in Canadian literature, far more heavily than I have ever before. In response to this new chapter of my life, I’ve decided to dedicate my reading time to Canadian literature exclusively for the foreseeable future.