The Historian
by Elizabeth Kostova
Summary
An unnamed narrator finds a mysterious old book, its pages blank except for a woodcut of a dragon, hidden in her father's library, and asks him about it, prompting Paul to tell her the story of his own graduate years in the 1950s, when his mentor Professor Rossi vanished after showing him an identical book and explaining his decades long private research into whether Dracula, meaning the historical Vlad Tepes rather than Stoker's character, might still be alive. Paul and a fellow student named Helen, who turns out to be Rossi's own secret daughter and a descendant of Vlad himself, follow Rossi's research through library archives in Istanbul, Budapest and Bulgaria, aided by a Turkish scholar named Turgut Bora, and gradually piece together that Dracula has survived for centuries as an undead force curating a vast private library and recruiting scholars into his service, Rossi apparently among them. They eventually find Rossi transformed at a monastery in Bulgaria and are forced to destroy him with a blade through the heart. Paul and Helen marry and have a daughter, the narrator, but Helen, bitten during their search and afraid of what she might become, disappears from her daughter's life; a later encounter with Dracula himself, in a French monastery, ends with Helen apparently killing him with a silver bullet. A 2008 epilogue finds the narrator, now grown, discovering another identical dragon marked book at a conference and realizing the story may not be finished after all.
Kostova writes the horror out of research itself, letting library catalogues, monastery records and old correspondence generate suspense the way a more conventional vampire novel would use fangs and shadows. It reads slowly across three interwoven timelines that some readers find hard to keep separate, and its patience is either the book's great achievement or, for readers wanting a faster vampire story, its main flaw.
Historical Context & Significance
The Historian won the Quill Award for debut author of the year in 2005 and the Book Sense Book of the Year for adult fiction in 2006, honors from booksellers and readers rather than a major juried literary prize, and it has never won a National Book Critics Circle Award or comparable critical honor. Little, Brown paid Kostova a two million dollar advance and spent roughly half a million dollars promoting the book, an unusual bet for a first time novelist that the sales more than justified.
The novel became the first debut to reach number one on the New York Times hardcover fiction list in its first week on sale, selling more copies on publication day than The Da Vinci Code had, and roughly nine hundred thousand copies by that August alone. Reviews were more divided than the sales figures suggest: Newsweek's Malcolm Jones called it strikingly fresh, while Janet Maslin in the New York Times found its plotting ponderous. Kostova wrote the novel over ten years, tracking the book's timelines on a chart.