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Type of bind: Audio CD
Dewey Decimal Number: 813.6
EAN num: 9781600242786
Format: Abridged, Audiobook
ISBN number: 1600242782
Label: Hachette Audio
Manufacturer: Hachette Audio
Quantity: 10
Printing Date: June 03, 2008
Publishing house: Hachette Audio
Sale Popularity Level: 589146
Studio: Hachette Audio
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Editor's Notes and Comments:
Product Description:
If your pulse flutters at the thought of castle ruins and descents into crypts by moonlight, you will savor every creepy page of Elizabeth Kostova's long but beautifully structured thriller The Historian.The story opens in Amsterdam in 1972, when a teenage girl discovers a medieval book and a cache of yellowed letters in her diplomat father's library. The pages of the book are empty except for a woodcut of a dragon. The letters are addressed to: 'My dear and unfortunate successor.' When the girl confronts her father, he reluctantly confesses an unsettling story: his involvement, twenty years earlier, in a search for his graduate school mentor, who disappeared from his office only moments after confiding to Paul his certainty that Dracula--Vlad the Impaler, an inventively cruel ruler of Wallachia in the mid-15th century--was still alive. The story turns out to concern our narrator directly because Paul's collaborator in the search was a fellow student named Helen Rossi (the unacknowledged daughter of his mentor) and our narrator's long-dead mother, about whom she knows almost nothing. And then her father, leaving just a note, disappears also.As well as numerous settings, both in and out of the East Bloc, Kostova has three basic story lines to keep straight--one from 1930, when Professor Bartolomew Rossi begins his dangerous research into Dracula, one from 1950, when Professor Rossi's student Paul takes up the scent, and the main narrative from 1972. The criss-crossing story lines mirror the political advances, retreats, triumphs, and losses that shaped Dracula's beleaguered homeland--sometimes with the Byzantines on top, sometimes the Ottomans, sometimes the rag-tag local tribes, or the Orthodox church, and sometimes a fresh conqueror like the Soviet Union.Although the book is appropriately suspenseful and a delight to read--even the minor characters are distinctive and vividly seen--its most powerful moments are those that describe real horrors. Our narrator recalls that after reading descriptions of Vlad burning young boys or impaling 'a large family,' she tried to forget the words: 'For all his attention to my historical education, my father had neglected to tell me this: history's terrible moments were real. I understand now, decades later, that he could never have told me. Only history itself can convince you of such a truth.' The reader, although given a satisfying ending, gets a strong enough dose of European history to temper the usual comforts of the closing words. --Regina Marler
Amazon.com Review:
If your pulse flutters at the thought of castle ruins and descents into crypts by moonlight, you will savor every creepy page of Elizabeth Kostova's long but beautifully structured thriller The Historian. The story opens in Amsterdam in 1972, when a teenage girl discovers a medieval book and a cache of yellowed letters in her diplomat father's library. The pages of the book are empty except for a woodcut of a dragon. The letters are addressed to: 'My dear and unfortunate successor.' When the girl confronts her father, he reluctantly confesses an unsettling story: his involvement, twenty years earlier, in a search for his graduate school mentor, who disappeared from his office only moments after confiding to Paul his certainty that Dracula--Vlad the Impaler, an inventively cruel ruler of Wallachia in the mid-15th century--was still alive. The story turns out to concern our narrator directly because Paul's collaborator in the search was a fellow student named Helen Rossi (the unacknowledged daughter of his mentor) and our narrator's long-dead mother, about whom she knows almost nothing. And then her father, leaving just a note, disappears also.
As well as numerous settings, both in and out of the East Bloc, Kostova has three basic story lines to keep straight--one from 1930, when Professor Bartolomew Rossi begins his dangerous research into Dracula, one from 1950, when Professor Rossi's student Paul takes up the scent, and the main narrative from 1972. The criss-crossing story lines mirror the political advances, retreats, triumphs, and losses that shaped Dracula's beleaguered homeland--sometimes with the Byzantines on top, sometimes the Ottomans, sometimes the rag-tag local tribes, or the Orthodox church, and sometimes a fresh conqueror like the Soviet Union.
Although the book is appropriately suspenseful and a delight to read--even the minor characters are distinctive and vividly seen--its most powerful moments are those that describe real horrors. Our narrator recalls that after reading descriptions of Vlad burning young boys or impaling 'a large family,' she tried to forget the words: 'For all his attention to my historical education, my father had neglected to tell me this: history's terrible moments were real. I understand now, decades later, that he could never have told me. Only history itself can convince you of such a truth.' The reader, although given a satisfying ending, gets a strong enough dose of European history to temper the usual comforts of the closing words. --Regina Marler
User popularity level:
Rated by buyers 
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The Historian is a slog through plot with characters very similar. However, the description is worth the trip for those who read quickly and will devour (ah...) other books as well--all in the same week's worth of reading time.
Rated by buyers 
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It is hard to believe this is a very first novel, so successfully has Elizabeth Kostova captured the atmosphere of the original novel. It is written in a twin narrative by father and daughter, always a voyage of discovery backwards through time via research, documents and letters, left by those who went before...
It is a beautifully conveived idea. It is written with a great eye for detail and a wonderful ear for the academic voice and retrained mores of the time. Despite the length of this book (at over 700 pages of close type paperback) Kostova's style is actually highly economical. What she delivers is predominantly a historical mystery mixed with travelogue and laced with an undercurrent of elusive gothic horror. Occasionally the horror breaks through but Kostova never surrenders to it totally, much to her credit, as this would shatter the style of her writing and the credibility of the characters. She produces more shudders from eerily unsettling us than she could deliver via gratuitious shocks.
Kostova populates her novels with evenly introduced characters. You won't need your family tree wall planner to keep up with who is who. It's not Jane Austen - even if the tone owes something to her discipline. The slow unwinding allows them to develop, yet I found myself greedy for more developments and tearing through this book very quickly at around 80 pages a day. It really does grip you, and given how detailed it is and and how carefully it is written, that's a terrific compliment. Of course, she inherits a wonderful legacy from Bram Stoker's spell-binding character, and the Dracula novel and films is openly referred to which makes it even more intruiging.
This is an archivists' drama - the librarian meets the undead. It casts a shadow over your nightgown (um...) and if you're thinking to yourself, 'Dracula - horror - blood - gore - etc' you'll be very disappointed. The people who will get most out of this are probably the ones who know least about the films and it definitely repays the literary reader. (Mind you, being a pedant I did spot three split infinitives...).
It is nice to gorge so thoroughly on a book that fully justifies the hype on the dust jacket and inside cover. If I have one minor criticism it is the slightly tapering end and I think Kostova could have made more of the ending somehow - I suppose I am secretly on the side of anybody who keeps a good book collection even if he is a vampire. A very nearly superb work. Four and a half stars.
Rated by buyers -
I've just reread "The Historian," and was amazed for a second time by the deft ease with which Ms. Kostova weaves back and forth between multiple narrators and time periods, and by her ability to evoke a tremendously vivid sense of place with a few well-chosen words. It is a book to savor slowly, rather than a page-turner, and it transcends the "horror" genre to an extent that few others in recent decades have matched.
Rated by buyers -
Out of every word in the English language to possibly describe this book (thrilling, suspenseful, terrifying, ingenious) the one that seems to always pop into my mind when thinking about it is, well, disappointment. The idea behind Kostova's writing is truly brilliant with a wonderful plot and theme. In an age where science fiction and fantasy writing reigns supreme, you would expect a book like this to shatter the minds of the public. Regrettably, it did not "shatter my mind", it melted it... into a woozy puddle of boredom. Kostova's ability to generate intrigue lags greatly between each "blip" in excitement. As a literature student, I cannot help but despair at the unfulfilled promise of ecstasy that this book possessed.
However, as a history student, I was greatly thrilled at Kostova's vivid descriptions of the protagonist's different visits to far-off and unusual corridors of the earth, as well as the multitudes of historical tidbits.
My overall assessment is that it is a very decent book, for a very tailored audience. If you merely have passing interest in the occult, I warn you to endeavor this book at your own risk. However, if you are the type of person to fully immerse yourself into every detail of book so that you forget you are not actually in it, you will be thrilled with Kostova's ability to paint every picture in the most elaborate detail.
Rated by buyers -
This is unlike Ann Rice novels or the classic Dracula story. I thought Kostova did a good job building up the mystery and overall plot.
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