The Historian

The Historian
Elizabeth Kostova
Little, Brown and Company
ISBN: 0316154547
Fiction, Paranormal
Reviewed by Joel A. Nichols

Elizabeth Kostova’s novel The Historian has many aspects. It’s a vampire story, terrorizing readers with brutal violence, ancient magic, and, of course, the threat of Dracula. It’s a family saga, following a smart and strong-willed teenage girl who has never known a mother and who is searching for her lost father. It’s an intellectual mystery a la The Da Vinci Code, following scholars who use archaic documents written in dead languages, librarian detective work, and undercover operations at universities tucked behind the Iron Curtain on their trek to uncover Dracula. It’s a love story between a strong-willed and brilliant (sound familiar?) young woman historian and an often bewildered scholar who doesn’t know whether to burden her with his dark secrets, trust her to help him, or fear her. It’s a travelogue, chugging around Europe like an undergraduate, from a dark library in Amsterdam to a creepy small town church in France, penetrating exotic Ottoman parlors in Istanbul and dark forests of Romania.
This novel is also an exercise in parallel first person narratives. Kostova manages three here, each from a different time period. The precocious teenage girl inhabits one. The lost father’s letters make up the second, and his lost mentor’s diary and notes the third Kostova’s facility in keeping hold of these three narratives is commendable. She keeps a controlled pace and switches between them to modulate suspense and relay just the right information at the right time, which enables her to communicate tons of information without losing the reader in didactic overload.
Kostova’s work is full of mystery and intrigue, terror and suspense. But at points this plotting is excessive, and the breath of the story is squeezed out by the conveniences of tight plotting and by contrived coincidences that, by the time the three narratives spiral together, much of what excited the reader, from fantastical tales of Romanian folklore to mysterious paternity and diplomatic intrigue, and pulled her along through the first several hundred pages: everything from dark and scary encounters with a killer librarian to a teenager’s first, dangerous kiss among the stacks leaves her rather empty as Kostova’s multiple tales collapse to make room for unsatisfying resolutions in the family saga.