The Historian. Well, that’s over with. Not exactly the reaction I expected to have to finishing this book – from the early reviews, I really expected to love it. But I did not love it. I did not hate it, exactly, although I don’t think it is a very good book. If I had to sum it up in one word, I would be torn between “amateurish” and “dull.”
I will start with what’s good. Kostova writes reasonably well. The prose is occasionally lovely, and I chose that word deliberately. Despite the dark subject manner, this is a very pretty book.
I also like what she does with the character of Dracula. He’s not well fleshed-out, but that seems appropriate. We don’t meet him until very late in the novel, but then we recognize in retrospect his presence in earlier chapters, and I like that. I really enjoyed Kostova’s version of the manner in which Dracula cheated death; I like her vision of how he has been spending the last 500 years. His current obsession is fascinating. This may be my favorite take on Dracula himself, as a character.
But that’s about it on the positive scale. In most ways this book is just fluff; Kostova tries for some deeper meaning and some clever structural play, but she doesn’t really accomplish what she is setting out to do here. Her structure is more maddening than clever: the time leaps, the multiple narrators, the improbable letters. The flaw that undermines every aspect of literary cleverness here is a simple and pervasive one: every character sounds exactly like every other character. Not one of them sounds like a 17-year-old girl in the 1970s, and I’m not even convinced that the principal narrator sounds like a middle-aged scholar/diplomat in the same time period. He certainly doesn’t sound like a middle-aged scholar/diplomat who is writing under enormous stress and in a very big hurry.
So the novel’s deep flaws prevent it from standing as any kind of serious literature, but unfortunately, it’s not really successful as a fun plot-driven novel, either. Because mostly, the plot is boring. People go to libraries, run into someone else who just happens to be researching the same subject, and wait a minute, just the other day I saw something in a book … here it is! Here is the tidbit of information that will lead you to the next library and the next plot contrivance.
As you can see, the historical research angle really irritated me, even though I expected to love it. We never see any of the characters doing any research; we just see a lot of annoying coincidences. After 600 pages I still have no reason to believe that either Paul or Helen are real scholars, except that the novel keeps informing me of their brilliance.
I was also very frustrated by the fact that even given the exotic locations and grim historical periods Kostova is visiting here, the novel rarely achieves a sense of time and place. You do get a sense of Istanbul and maybe of Bulgaria, but the cold war stuff never seems to gel into a real atmosphere. This was a novel that begged for some atmosphere, but it just seemed like a lot of description of scenery and buildings, without really making me see or feel history. Quite a letdown.
I really did expect to love this novel. I like vampire stories, horror, epistolary novels, novels that unfold slowly and don’t have much plot, novels set in Eastern Europe, novels that jump around confusingly in time, historical fiction, and literary experiments. But I did not like The Historian.