Erasmus has spent several pleasant evenings in the company of Elizabeth Kostova’s first novel, The Historian. Erasmus doesn't care to give away any of the book's twists and turns, but it gives away little to say that it broadly concerns historians, Vlad III Ţepeş of Wallachia and his alter ego courtesy of Bram Stoker, Count Dracula the vampire.
As an enthusiast of Balkan history, vampire myths, and Stoker’s novel, Erasmus could not resist picking up the book, and was not displeased. Ms. Kostova’s research was very good. Her writing is quite good, and the story’s twists and turns are quite satisfying. Erasmus found it a thoroughly entertaining, literate, page-turner. (And moreover, her characters visit Budapest and Istanbul, two of Erasmus's favorite cities.) He looks forward to Ms. Kostova’s future works.
By way of criticism, Erasmus will note that in an obvious homage to Stoker, Ms. Kostova has written The Historian as an epistolary novel. While this is clever, the form was already rather antiquated when Stoker took it up in 1897. Dracula's dynamism overcomes the form’s inherent artificiality (and indeed was a bit of a techno-thriller as well for the day, featuring all sorts of high-tech Victoriana like typewriters, telegraphs, dictation cylinders, et cetera). The Historian is generally successful, but one’s suspension of disbelief is slightly tested by the premise’s requirements of huge caches of letters and diaries which make up the book's 642 pages.
Moreover, the first historian and narratrix we meet begins the story when she was 17 or so in Amsterdam in the early 1970s. This frame narrative then proceeds to disappear for huge sections of the book as we learn about the book’s real protagonists, her father and the mother she never knew. Her parents’ story and her own reconnect at the climax, though the frame narrative adds little dramatic heft to the scene which is, alas, slightly disappointing and less dramatic than one would have wished.
Erasmus’s main complaint about the book is the same as he had about another very enjoyable literary entertainment, Matt Bondurant’s Third Translation: dreadful editing. Ms. Kostova should complain loudly to her publishers. Erasmus was poked in the eye by errors in the book’s Romanian, Hungarian, and Turkish, and at least twice the text strongly suggests the main language of the Ottoman Empire was Arabic rather than Ottoman Turkish. Moreover, various characters receive books labeled DRAKULYA, which is an obviously semi-Anglicized version of the Romanian Drăculea (perhaps English by way of Russian or Bulgarian?). Why this bizarre orthography appears rather than the Romanian, or a German or Slavic "Drakulja" is never explained. Along the same lines, Ms. Kostova's editors introduced (or let stand) the Bulgarian Tsarigrad when the Slavonic Tsargrad was more appropriate in some instances.
But Erasmus quibbles. Obviously.
Vampire novels of late have been dominated by either gothic-lite romances or talky political squabbles, both the legacies of Anne Rice, whose Interview With the Vampire and its undistinguished sequels completely revitalized the form. Erasmus also suspects the very popular vampire-politics role-playing game Vampire: The Masquerade compounded these tendencies among writers familiar with it. The Historian is a fine addition to the vampire genre, and a welcome return to the tradition of Stoker. Her villain, and Erasmus won't reveal who he is, is far more akin to Count Dracula than Lestat and kith.
Her accomplishments are all the more impressive as The Historian is Ms. Kostova's first novel. In consequence, Erasmus must say, Ave.
P.S. Erasmus's review is not at all affected by Ms. Kostova's apparent knowledge of his occult work, Sicarii fortunæ. (See page 217 of the Little, Brown edition.)
