The Historian: the review

Underwhelming.

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Okay, I guess that was a little terse. It’s kind of meant to be a joke, given that The Historian by Elizabeth Kostova is 656 pages long. It’s also had one of the greatest publicity blitzes in recent memory—I’d been hearing about this book for weeks before it was published, with articles using such phrases as “one of the rare books that’s worthy of the hype.” I was so excited when it was available at the library. Darin needed something to read; I let him read it first.

He was underwhelmed. If you read EW, he completely agreed with its review, except he said, “I’d give it a B- instead of a B.”

The Historian is the story of several generations of scholars who have been obsessed by who Vlad the Impaler was and what really happened to him. The first problem I had with this book is this: in the first couple hundred pages, there are three narrators:

1. A woman in 2008, looking back to when she was 16, in 1972.
2. Her father, discussing events that happened in the early 1950s.
3. The father’s academic mentor, an Englishman, discussing what happened in the 1930s.

Guess what? They all sound exactly the same. Same stentorian phrases, same high-flown descriptions. I had to pay particular attention to the opening phrase of any given chapter so I could be sure as to who in the hell was speaking, or, in many cases, writing—there are lots and lots of letters that apparently everyone leaves around describing what had happened at some period in the past.

And I get the point, Kostova wants to describe a different, more removed world, but the only detail I remember her including that links what happens in her book to the real world is a passing reflection that after the events that happened here, the Soviets invaded Hungary. Oh, and a discussion of what would happen if someone like Stalin were immortal, the damage he could do. (Were the extent and severity of Stalin’s crimes as well known in the 1950s? I ask because I actually don’t know the answer to that.)

Another problem is the writing about past events. Everyone describes everything exactly chronologically. The problem with this is, in several cases, the writer knows how it’s going to turn out but somehow forgets to put that in the beginning of the letter they’ve left for posterity. Imagine if someone who lived in NYC wrote down the events of their day on September 11, not just as history but as a warning to future readers. Think they might put some of the salient points up front?

Not in this book. No, in this book people will just leave off in the middle of their stories, needing to pause for whatever reason.

Janet Maslin, in her review, mentions the endless travelogues. Yup, gotta agree with her there. Worse than that, however, is that these descriptions go on for so damn long I forget what the characters are doing there. There’s one section that’s an ancient letter describing the pilgrimage of some monks from Wallachia to Constantinople and from there to Bulgaria, and as I started reading it I suddenly realized I had no idea what the point was.

The Historian isn’t terrible; it’s just ponderous. And if there’s one thing a frickin’ vampire novel shouldn’t be, it’s ponderous. So I’m with Darin: I give it a B-. And I want the name of Kostova’s publicist for my own future reference.