"The Historian"

The Historian by Elisabeth Kostova is a suspenseful historical journey to find the burial site of Vlad Ţepeş, more commonly known as Dracula. The narrator, who remains nameless throughout the first half of the book is a 16 year old girl living in Amsterdam, with her diplomat father, Paul. The story unfolds in letters spanning from the 1930-1950's written by Paul, and his college advisor about their search to discover the truth about Dracula. Beginning with how Paul was drawn into the hunt not by inclination, but by the appearance of a blank book bearing the name Dracula, of unknown provenance, in the library one day; the letters document his subsequent research into the dark mystery. The search takes Paul from Oxford to Turkey, Belgrada, Budapest, and Sofia with a mysterious and beautiful Romanian anthropologist.

The suspense is maintained throughout the book by the interweaving of the letters documenting the past search for Dracula and the present day narrator's attempts to rescue her father from Dracula's minions. A brief excerpt will show how Kostova heightens the reader's anxiety: "The man behind the newspaper was so still that I began to tremble in spite of myself. After a while I realized what was frightening me. I had been awake for many long minutes by now, but during all the time I had been watching and listening, he had not turned a single page of his newspaper" (p. 228). At this point the story jumps back to Paul's letters and the reader must keep reading about the past in order to learn what will happen in the present.

I recommend this book for the engaging quality of the writing. The merging of the European and Turkish accounts of Dracula fact and legends in a quasi-academic way makes for entertaining reading. The journeys through Central-Eastern Europe illuminate the history if those states, but of course in a somewhat fantastical way.