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"The Historian," by Elizabeth Kostova. Little,
Brown, 2005, 642 pages.
Anemic Bloodlust by Jo Ann Skousen
"The Historian," Elizabeth Kostova's fictional search for
the historic Dracula, is being touted by reviewers as the book of the year, the
new "Da Vinci Code." Like Bram Stoker's original "Dracula," "The Historian" is
told through letters, journals, and postcards, as several historians travel
through four decades and three continents in an attempt to unravel the secret of
the "undead" and discover Dracula's final resting place. Each scholar is guided
by an ancient book containing the print of a sinister dragon — books that
have mysteriously appeared on their university desks. In some ways the novel is a
metaphor for the cutthroat world of academia, where a scholar's worst nightmare
is the discovery that someone else is already researching one's topic, one's
thesis stretches dragonlike across the blank pages of a dissertation, and a
friendly librarian may actually be working for one's opponent.
| | Jo Ann
Skousen is a critic living in New York. |
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Little, Brown purchased the manuscript after a bidding frenzy raised its price
to over $2 million — not bad for a first novel, even for a Yale graduate.
The publisher hopes that this sophisticated novel will duplicate the wildly
successful run of Dan Brown's "Da Vinci Code" (still on the bestseller list after
two years). Both books rely heavily on historic research, both take the reader on
a wild ride throughout Europe, and both focus on the occult. But while Dan
Brown's novel is genuinely impossible to put down, Kostova's book bogs down in
too much detail and too much literary flair. "The Historian" begins with a bang,
but the reader must slog through more than 400 pages of medieval history, cloying
imagery, and minuscule detail before finally getting back to the story line. And
the story, after all, is the reason we read novels. The book begins chillingly
enough, with the foreboding words, "My dear and unfortunate successor." It has
moments of deliciously unresolved eeriness, brief moments of unrequited horror;
for example, the narrator writes, "I saw in a coffin of glass the skeleton of one
small woman. . . . When I bent over the case to look down at her, she smiled at
me suddenly out of eye-sockets deep as twin pits." But moments like this are too
few and too scattered to sustain any satisfying suspense, and they seldom turn
out to have anything to do with the actual story. Kostova seems proud of
her academic credentials; her biographical notes list only that she "graduated
from Yale and holds an MFA (Master of Fine Arts) from the University of
Michigan." And in many respects, her book reads like an MFA novel-in-progress,
with its heavy-handed use of simile, metaphor, and personification. Kostova
overwhelms the reader with her literary prowess, populating her novel with
sentient boats and castles and rivers to the point of distraction: "Boats rock
and swell in the Lagoon as if launching themselves, crewless, on adventure" . . .
"The whole city puffs up like a sail, a boat dancing unmoored, ready to float
off" . . . "The castle was made of brown stones like discolored bone, joined
neatly together after some long state of dilapidation" . . . "The castle seemed
to be clinging to the edge of the precipice with only its toes dug in for
support." A little imagery goes a long way, and 642 pages of it can become more
oppressive than Dracula's coffin. |
| "The Historian" begins
with a bang, but the reader must slog through more than 400 pages before finally
getting back to the story line. |
|
Just as distracting is Kostova's attempt to satisfy the multiculturalist
expectations of modern academia while presenting the traditional elements of the
Dracula legend expected by the reader. One can almost imagine her horrified MFA
colleagues exclaiming, "You can't present Christian icons as a protection against
evil!" Consequently, a woman bitten by a vampire cries out, "Bring me a towel and
the basin — I will wash my neck and bind it . . . Later we will go into the
church and clean this wound with the holy water," but then muses to herself, "How
strange, I have always felt all this church ritual is nonsense, and I still do."
The historian warns his daughter: "I ask you from the bottom of my heart to wear
the crucifix at all times, and to carry some of the garlic in each of your
pockets," but then adds in the next sentence, "You know I have never been one to
press either religion or superstition on you, and I remain a firm unbeliever in
either." Huh? To offset her references to the icons of good and evil
lifted from the original Dracula legend, Kostova links vampirism with
Christianity, making Christianity both the remedy and the poison in her telling
of the tale. One heroine asks cynically, "Is [vampirism] any stranger than hoping
for bodily resurrection?" (Well yes, actually, since vampirism is a continuation
of life on earth, while resurrection is a promise of a happier life in heaven
after one dies.) The narrator, observing a painting of the raising of Lazarus
from the dead, comments, "The Christ who stood impatiently at the tomb's
entrance, holding up his hand, had a countenance of pure evil, greedy and
burning." And, if Christ must be made a villain, Dracula must also be made a
hero. She describes the cruel nature of the 15th century baron, Vlad Tepes, on
whom the Dracula legend is based, as a man who "liked to feast outdoors among the
corpses of his impaled subjects," but then reports that he heroically protected
his people — what was left of them, after he had tortured and impaled
hundreds of them himself — from the invading Ottoman Turks. Dracula laments,
"I should have been allowed to rest there [in Transylvania] forever. Imagine,
after fighting so hard for my throne, for our freedom, I could not even lay my
bones there." Poor misguided terrorist, he has no place to lay his head.
| Kostova overwhelms the
reader with her literary prowess, populating her novel with sentient boats and
castles and rivers to the point of distraction. |
|
Kostova can't settle on painting the Ottomans as bad guys either. She
describes their butchery as they invaded Europe, and decries the way they built
their mosques in the rubble of the churches they destroyed along their way. Yet
she decides that an Islamic crescent is just as useful as a crucifix in warding
off vampires — perhaps even more so, since its use isn't accompanied by the
disclaimer, "not that I actually believe in Islam." Such unwillingness to set up
consistent, believable rules within her fictional world makes the suspension of
disbelief, so essential to fantasy, nearly impossible for the reader.
Stoker's Dracula was erotic and sadistic, charming and horrifying, all at once;
his nightly feasts on the blood of beautiful young virgins made sure every page
was filled with dread. Kostova's Dracula, on the other hand, seems to have run
out of steam, able to wait years between nocturnal relations with his female
victims and preferring, it seems, to settle down with a good book. (Is it mere
coincidence that he sleeps in his coffin with his hand firmly grasping a dagger
over his pelvis?) At one point in Kostova's novel, the historian searches a
library in vain for a copy of Bram Stoker's "Dracula"; no one has told him, I
guess, that he could buy a copy at any Barnes & Noble. Fortunately for you, dear
reader, the secret is out: Stoker's "Dracula" is the best-written horror story of
all time, and it's available in a variety of editions at your nearest bookstore.
That's the one I recommend this summer if you want to be thoroughly spooked. But
if you have a long flight ahead of you, and you enjoy picturesque travelogues
mingled with vague horror, "The Historian" will fill the time nicely.
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