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audio. oh my goodness it's good!!!

** I really thought this was a great book ~ as an audio book. I think in paper form, there were many aspects that would have frustrated me ~ I think I would have had a tough time separating each person/voice that was not an issue with the audio format.

I also thought the end was a bit of a let down. It was such a build up, I figured it would be huge. But, I did enjoy it. I really loved all the characters (even the odd librarian and shop people). It was a great adventure! ( )

9/10
I am not usually a reader of vampire or horror stories, but this book has a different feel to it—almost an historical fiction mystery. The author’s style is detailed but very readable. I found the alternating narrative timelines a bit difficult to follow, but they made sense from a story-telling perspective, peeling back the layers of family history. ( )

Originally written as an article on Ironichles:

For ages now I've been trying to figure out why novels like Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norell and The Historian work so well. Although the events and characters in those books are interesting, it can't really be said that 'and then ...' events play out. Most readers would even describe The Historian as having a disappointing ending. Why then are so many people excited about these books? My only conclusion is that the specific language used is incredibly enticing. Granted, the amount of environmental detail and the renderings of places and events are superbly rendered, but those are not what keeps everyone reading. There must be something else that keeps readers glued to their books.

Narratively rich books aren't a new thing, we've seen them come by for ages. Novels like Winter's Tale or anything by Neal Stephenson revolve mainly around detailed depictions of wonderful surroundings and colorful people. I could list many more stories where essentially nothing happens but where we're driving to keep on going. So why single out Jonathan Strange and The Historian? It seems that those books were specifically designed to engage and immerse readers rather than to drive then forward towards a conclusion. How does it work? What alchemical methods of writing are at work here? Here's a short excerpt from Jonathan Strange:

An elderly gentleman with faint blue eyes and faintly-coloured clothes (called either Hart or Hunt - Mr Segundus could never quite catch the name) faintly said that it did not matter in the least whether any body expected it or not. A gentleman could not do magic.. Magic was what street sorcerers pretended to do in order to rob children of their pennies. Magic (in the practical sense) was much fallen off. It had low connexions. It was the bosom companion of unshaven faces, gypsies, house-breakers; the frequenter of dingy rooms with dirty yellow curtains. Oh no! A gentleman could not do magic. A gentleman might study the history of magic (nothing could be nobler) but he could not do any. The elderly gentleman looked with faint, fatherly eyes at Mr Segundus and said that he hoped Mr Segundus had not been trying to cast spells.

I find it difficult to really put my finger on precisely why this works so well but I do see a couple of patterns. First of all the text is written to be narrated, meaning to be read out loud. Normally when we read a novel the voice telling the story is neutral. Instead, you, the reader, voices the narration and you add your own inflections and colour. In Jonathan Strange the author has almost explicitly added certain inflections and tone and done so in very clever way to entice us to read the text as if someone other than ourselves narrates or voices the story. Some might be uncomfortable by this and read the text as if they are being treated like a small child, and I can empathize with that, there is a certain 'being spoken to' sensation as you work through the text.

But there is more going on. This fictional novel takes place around the beginning of the 19th century. We can tell that by the use of words such as 'connexions'. Other smaller bits of text here and there gives us hints that we're not quite talking the here and now but notice how we're not reading pure Victorian prose either. Historical references and customs such as language use has been glossed over and polished while at the same time not losing that sense of reading dated fiction. We could combine the the text is historically treated with the first observation that the language has been chosen to sound narrated. In both cases the choice of words and the sentence construction is deliberately smooth and mellifluous.

As a final observation I would like to point out that the narrative contains a rather rapid wavering back and forth between various emotions. Not that other stories are that balanced, we wouldn't read them if they didn't take us on an emotional voyage. But in this small piece of text we're thrown back and forward quite a lot in short succession. We see something similar in the Historian, which at least in the beginning replaces the deliberate narrator's voice with an unfortunate chicklit tone. Luckily that sensation disappears after a few chapters. Take a look at the excerpt below:

At this point, my sense of guilt?and something else, too?made me put the letter hastily back in its envelope, but I thought about it all that day and all the next. When my father returned from his latest trip, I looked for an opportunity to ask him about the letters and the strange book. I waited for him to be free, for us to be alone, but he was very busy in those days, and something about what I had found made me hesitate to approach him. Finally I asked him to take me on his next trip. It was the first time I had kept a secret from him and the first time I had ever insisted on anything.

If we look at the very first sentence we could split it into: Guilt-Uncertainty-Fear-Pensiveness, and in that order. The effect this has is that we look to the author to give us guidance as to how we should actually think and feel about the text. The Historian is a historical novel and that was a clever choice because it allows the author to fall back on hard facts when this constant wavering gets too much and we can slip back into emotional overtones when the amount of historical detail becomes too much. I've noticed that in The Historian those two states are kept fairly separate, something Dan Brown doesn't do as sophisticated in his novels. In The Historian we also see the same language mechanisms outlined for Jonathan Strange and both novels feel eerily similar and only differ in the context and subject of the story.

There must be much more going on in the two chosen stories than the points I mentioned here but they are not as easy to nail down and describe. In fact they raise more questions than provide answers. For example in Jonathan Strange entire episodes from known history are rewritten to suit the narrative without anyone complaining that it didn't happen that way. How was that lack of expectation setup? It can't be the fact that you know it's a novel about magic, since many films and novels have reams of people who go into detailed rants about what's wrong with it.

To finish off I would like to add a small final observation and, which might be completely insignificant. It is that both novels were written by women. It could be that I haven't done a better examination and that I should add Neal Stephenson and Mark Helprin to balance things out but it does make me curious because there are a lot more distinctions between the male version of these types of narratives and the female versions of the same. ( )

So. This was an interesting book. I've read people comparing it to Da Vinci Code, and it is indeed kind of like that - if Dan Brown was a decent writer and at least strove to be historically accurate. This involves two pairs of people running around Europe, digging up clues to lead them to the next clue. This book, though, seems to be written by someone who had an advanced degree. It very much reads like acadamia - people giving papers at conferences and getting excited about obscure manuscripts. "Do you realize what this means? Those 15th century monks travelled THROUGH Wallachia, rather than going AROUND it on their journey to Bulgaria!!!" As a historian myself, I actually enjoyed all that, although many readers might not. The pace of this book is very slow - like doing research for your dissertation. If you like more action, then you might find this pace frustrating. I can see why many people give this book one star. What's less clear to me is why many people give it five stars. It's not bad at all. I found it entertaining --sort of academic horror lite. But the narrative choice of having three embedded narratives that are virtually indistinguishable could be very frustrating. And the romances were along the lines of "You're heterosexual, and so am I! Let's get together and feel all right!" Actually, the book seemed rather old-fashioned, as if it were written in the 50s or 70s rather than in the 21st century. There are an awful lot of coincidences, as well as McGuffins that I didn't really understand. Why in the world does The Book have no printing at all in it, only a woodcut? Why did one person in every generation of Dracula's descendants get a dragon tattoo?

It so happens that I recently read both Rebecca West's "Black Lamb and Grey Falcon," and Robert Kaplan's "Balkan Ghosts." This book literally covers the same territory, so a lot of the places and at least some of the history was already familiar to me. I probably enjoyed this book most as a sort of literary travelogue. They piece together Dracula's mystery very slowly, which I didn't mind, even though I occasionally lost the plot. The book definitely could have used more vampires, but what was in there gave nice thrills and chills. ( )

I love this book; I've read it twice. I will probably read it a third time. I have heard comments that it is too long and could have used some editing, but it's perfect for my tastes. I wish there was a sequel. ( )

It took me about a hundred pages to get into ‘The Historian’, which seems fitting as it is a book that systematically and incrementally builds a mystery much as an academic work builds a thesis. The narrative includes letters, excerpts from documents, stories told by one character to another, and stories told within stories. I enjoyed this multi-layered style, which required a hundred or so pages to initially establish who the main characters are and what they’re doing. I also greatly appreciated that so much of the plot took place in and/or centred around libraries. Since my attitude to libraries is unmitigated adoration, the variety and frequency of library visits in the book was delightful.

As well as the settings and atmosphere, I liked the characters a lot. Most of them are researchers, academic or otherwise, strongly motivated by intellectual curiosity. This made a lovely change from narratives of treasure hunting for material gain. It also meant that, for a supernatural mystery thriller, there was little violence. Tension and menace were instead deployed sparingly and well. This intellectual curiosity also links to two other elements I liked. One is the way that characters help one another, rather than being defensive of their own work. This really emphasised that research and intellectual enquiry are collaborative processes, and that talking through ideas improves them. It was lovely to have co-operation emphasised over competitiveness. The second element was continuity, the manner in which research builds upon what has gone before, the way that generation succeeds generation, and each person is merely a link in an intellectual chain. The multi-layered narrative contributed to this powerful sense of time, of short human lives within history's sweep. And, of course, it made for a striking contrast with the supernatural element, namely Dracula.

Since the blurb is quite chary of mentioning him, I didn’t initially realise that this is a novel about academic research into Dracula. It manages very well not to fall into mere melodrama (not that I don’t enjoy reading ‘mere melodrama’). Although the presence of Dracula hangs over the whole book, as a character he is used sparingly and carefully. Overall, I really enjoyed this dense, fascinating novel that explores the edges of Europe and conjures up the 15th century as effectively as the 1960s. It will resonate in particular with humanities and social science students, I think. Thank you Rae for recommending it to me!

To conclude, although I admire Rossi for his moral stand, in his place I would have jumped at the chance to become Dracula's librarian. MY DREAM JOB. ( )

A long and complicated tale, told through multiple viewpoints, of Drakula's pursuit of certain humans and their search for his tomb. I did not find the ending very satisfactory--reminded of P. J. O'Rourke's description of something as a "long run for a short slide." After enduring pages of pursuit through archives, libraries and remote monasteries I feel that the reader deserved some reward in the way of an exciting, climatic ending. Was the ambiguous ending intended to set us up for a sequel?

La historiadora
Elizabeth Kostova
Publicado: 2005 | 676 páginas
Novela Intriga

«Su nombre despierta terror en el corazón de los hombres. A lo largo de siglos, se le ha considerado un mito. Ahora, alguien se atreve a buscarlo a través de los rincones más oscuros de Europa y Asia y buceando en lo más remotos pasajes de la Historia».
Durante años, Paul fue incapaz de contarle a su hija la verdad sobre la obsesión que ha guiado su vida. Ahora, entre sus papeles, ella descubre una historia que comenzó con la extraña desaparición del mentor de Paul, el profesor Rossi. Tras las huellas de su querido maestro, Paul recorrió antiguas bibliotecas de Estambul, monasterios en ruinas en Rumanía, remotas aldeas en Bulgaria… Cuanto más se acercaba a Rossi, más se aproximaba también a un misterio que había aterrorizado incluso a los poderosos sultanes otomanos, y que aún hace temblar a los campesinos de Europa del Este. Un misterio que ha dejado un rastro sangriento en manuscritos, viejos libros y canciones susurradas al oído. Para Paul y su hija llegar al final de la búsqueda puede significar un destino mucho peor que la muerte. Porque a cada paso que dan, se convencen más de que él les está esperando. Y en sus corazones, retumba una pregunta angustiosa… ¿Es posible que la tumba de Vlad el Empalador esconda algo más que el cuerpo de un asesino legendario?

Uuuuuugh…..this was likely the single most drawn out book I’ve ever read.
The most scary-exciting thing to me in this book happens on a train with the main character’s daughter.
Helen is truly the saving element of this book.
The most interesting exchange is when a scholar speaks to a profound character in the 70s chapters regarding his carefully chosen extensive prized library.
This was definitely not for me, and next time I’m picking the buddy read….. ( )

(2005)Very good tale of a family's quest to find Dracula in Europe. She is a very good writer, but the book is long - 640pages.

I LOVED this book! Now one of my favorite books of all time. Chilling! ( )

This is an attempt to produce a novel about the real Dracula, Vlad Tepes, in the structure of Bram Stoker's novel which means a lot of it is told through letters and postcards. Unlike Stoker's novel however which was up to the minute in terms of technology - accounts produced on typewriter, early recording machine or in shorthand - this is set in various time periods starting around 1930 with the researches into the whereabouts of Dracula's tomb by a historian Professor Rossi and goes up to an undisclosed period sometime after the 1970s when the story opens. The seventeen year old daughter of Rossi's student finds a strange book and some letters in her father's study and he gradually discloses to her the truth behind her mother's disappearance, which he does over a series of visits to historical sites around Europe.

The book started off intriguingly but for me the early promise was not realised. It is a long novel which is not only disjointed with the frequent switching back and forward between time periods and narratives, but all the voices in those narratives are indistinguishable. There were some good minor characters but a lot of things - one character's amnesia for example - are obvious plot contrivances. The climax is muddled - I couldn't work out why a certain minor character suddenly turns up to distract Dracula - and the postscript is just odd. So I would only award this 2 stars. ( )

This was a hard one to rate. The first time I tried reading it, I was too scared to finish it. This time I got all the way through unscathed, and I really liked it a lot, but it was LONG. I usually love a long book, but by the end of this one I was sort of begging for it to end. Again, not because I didn't like it, but because I was tired and ready for something new. Strangely enough, the ending seemed pretty rushed to me. It's more of a 3 1/2 really. ( )

Late one night, exploring her father’s library, a young woman finds an ancient book and a cache of yellowing letters addressed ominously to ‘My dear and unfortunate successor’. Her discovery plunges her into a world she never dreamed of – a labyrinth where the secrets of her father’s past and her mother’s mysterious fate connect to an evil hidden in the depths of history

Well I enjoyed this. Bit of a love story, lots of history (if that's not real historical stuff it's very well made up!), not TOO heavy on the vampire stuff, though of course Dracula does make an appearance several times.

Whilst the daughter is prevalent at the start of the book, she does get "lost" in the middle, and makes a smallish appearance at the end of the book, which was a bit of a disappointment, as she was the one who initiated the story at the beginning ( )

I'm not sure if I liked this book or not. It certainly was well done and the details are beautiful. I'm just not sure I really cared by the middle of the book what happened. I think it will make a much better movie than a book and perhaps it was done with that in mind. To be fair though I acknowledge that I truly dislike mysteries in almost every form. ( )

Heavy, much historical information. Ruins the story a bit. ( )

This is a novel that draws on the myth of the vampire, Dracula. In it, he still exists in the modern world and is seeking to expand his influence and terror. However, some are trying to find him in order to finally destroy him with a silver dagger or silver bullet to the heart. This imaginative story, which is full of a mounting sense of fear and family secrets, follows their researches through ancient archives in Oxford, Amsterdam, Paris, Istanbul and other locations as they try to uncover where he might be buried or hidden. They are the historians of the title, but as they near their quest, they discover that Dracula too is an historian and has been amassing an enormous library of manuscripts and books over the past five centuries in order to protect his power. In a compelling climax. the researches take their toll on Dracula’s hunters as he fights back with a sense of mounting dread and threatens to infect them with his poison and through his bite, ensnare them, like him as members of the undead.

(Gigantic spoilers included!)

I felt ultimately torn about this book - after a slow but atmospheric beginning, I was awake late into the night finishing this wonderfully creepy and erudite story. The Historian in the title could describe numerous of the characters in the novel, or indeed its largely hidden villain. The multi-layered plot follows the lives of three people - Paul the diplomat, his daughter (who is never named), and Paul's former teacher, Professor Rossi. Each of them is hunting a missing parent/mentor who accidentally discovers, upon receipt of a mysterious book, that Dracula is not only still alive(ish), but is still fascinated with evil and cruelty, and still taking an active interest in those pursuing him. The wonderful conceit is that the wicked Count has a fantastic personal library dedicated to evil, and is looking for someone to willingly volunteer to become immortal and curate it for him.

In the end I gave it four stars because even though it is quite slow - in the first half, pages are spent describing exotic locations around France and central Europe with the regularity of a travelogue, all beautifully written but not necessarily advancing the story - it creates a rather wonderful and lush atmosphere that bears fruit later. This pattern of faults and virtues continues throughout - the conception of Dracula, when we meet him, is wonderfully realised and chilling, but he is dispatched too readily, and the happy(isn) ending is enabled by the sacrifice of a throwaway character - I thought at least one of the remaining main characters needed to make the terrible choice be sacrificed to the library, and this is where everything tends, and the drama would be in choosing which. Plotwise it's also highly coincidental, but since this is true of Stoker's Dracula too it seems churlish to carp. The evidence that the disparate heroes gather and which fuels their trail is complex, some bits repeated to the point of obviousness, others hidden (names and places and connections would come up as though they had been explained earlier), and yet on the other hand the forward momentum in the last third is irresistable and unstoppable, leading to unbearable tension.

So all in all, not an instantly rewarding read but I was very glad I did it, though my disappointment at the tidy disposal of the invidious Impaler at the end (especially as he was so beautifully realised) somewhat hampered my enjoyment.
( )

Holy Cow everyone RAVES about this book and it COULD have, SHOULD have been amazing but I found it ponderous and dull and so ploddingly dull that I gave up before I was half through. Plus, the lead character kinda sucked. ( )

The tale was good, but she REALLY needed a better editor, the book was much too wordy ( )

I'm really torn about this one. Overall I really enjoyed it. The story was fascinating, and Kostova kept a lot of balls in the air in order to ultimately deliver it. Her descriptions of setting are outstanding, as is her ability to build some tension in a scene.

However, these two things ultimately collide. Whenever there was mounting tension in the story, descriptions of place and food and people released the tension, which ultimately led to strange pacing that just didn't feel appropriate to the story.

Additionally, she isn't particularly good at writing distinct voices, which is especially problematic in that the story is told primarily through three people: the narrator, her father, and the father's mentor. Had I not listened to the audiobook for a lot of it, I would have had difficulty distinguishing the three from each other.

I'll read more from Kostova as this was her debut. I can only hope she figures out a way to bring her gifts for suspense and setting together in a way that serves the story. ( )

I loved Kostova's second novel, The Swan Thieves--something about the voice sucked me in immediately, and I just adored it. Because of that, I was excited to finally sit down and settle in for The Historian...but unfortunately, I ended up having nearly the opposite experience. Kostova's prose is lovely, but the truth is that I'm not sure I've ever read a book with less tension, and I mostly finished it because of my love for Kostova's other novel. The characters, story, and concept were all engaging in and of themselves, but it really was the slow build, the lack of tension, and the structure that killed the book for me. The reader pretty much knew what would happen, and what the book would cover, right from the beginning, and although there were some mysteries to be solved, they were more of the normal-life-drama sort than the horror/suspense sort. The Swan Thieves was a long, non-horror book, but the suspense and the voice carried it along so that it didn't feel nearly as long as it was. Here, however, the focus on an epistolary style, various voices that the reader didn't quite have time or reason to get attached to--despite the length!--and a devotion to giving the reader every detail even when it came to an academic conference of all things...well, the truth is that I rarely sat down with the book without becoming bored within a few chapters, and there were points in the second half where I finally just had to give in and skim, because I'd come so far and loved Kostova's other novel so much that I did want to say I'd finished it...but I also had no attachment to the book or story. And particularly since the characters seemed to 'just happen to run into' people they needed to know in order for the plot to progress, and coincidences mounted upon coincidences...well, I was just thoroughly unimpressed. The book was well-written for what it was, just in terms of sentence/paragraph-level prose vs. structure and style, but I fear that's about all I can say, which amounts to damning praise.

In the end, I have to say that the structure Kostova used for the novel just kind of ruined it for me, and the style she adopted too often left me feeling like I was reading a run-of-the-mill diary or travelogue vs. what I'd hoped would be a powerful story. I've often loved epistolary fiction, but in this case, I feel like Kostova did her concept an incredible disservice by choosing to go about telling the story in the fashion she did. I'm only glad this wasn't my first read from her, or I'd likely never even have considered picking up another.

I'm afraid I cannot recommend this book. I know some folks who adore it, but even after a lengthy book discussion, I still can't quite figure out the attraction beyond its attention to history and geographical/European cities' details...but all in all, I just keep coming back to the fact that I never really felt any narrative tension, attachment to character, or surprise at what came to pass. ( )

I must admit I was disappointed with the story. Perhaps because I've been overexposed to Vampires, thanks Buffy et al. Dracula actually made an appearance on Buffy. And the audiobook I was listening to had these corny accents for some of the characters, I was making fun of it. But the plot is good and the theme of historians and historical research is pretty consistent through the whole book. To misquote Dr Johnson worth reading Perhaps but not going to read. Whatever that means. ( )

Don't bother, read Dracula instead. Much shorter, better written, definitely spookier. ( )