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The Historian | 
 enlarge | Author: Elizabeth Kostova
Publisher: Time Warner AudioBooks
Category: Book
List Price: £15.65
Buy New: £7.98
You Save: £7.67 (49%)
New (13) Used (12) from £5.00
Rating:  280 reviews
Sales Rank: 173471
Format: Abridged, Audiobook
Media: Audio CD
Edition: Abridged edition
Number Of Items: 8
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.7
Dimensions (in): 5.9 x 5.3 x 1.6
ISBN: 1594830371
Dewey Decimal Number: 813.6
EAN: 9781594830372
ASIN: 1594830371
Publication Date: July 7, 2005
Availability: Usually dispatched within 1-2 business days
Condition: Good condition, dispatched within two working days in UK, from independent bookshop in London.
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| Editorial Reviews:
Amazon.co.uk Review
Some stories can be told again in endlessly different ways. Elizabeth Kostova's The Historian combines a search for the historical Dracula with a profound sense that Stoker got some things right--that the late Mediaeval tyrant kills among us yet, undead and dangerous. From Stoker, she also takes a sense that the supernatural seems more real when embedded in documentary evidence. Three generations search for Dracula's resting place, and their stories are nested within each other, so that we know that at least two quests ended badly. Kostova rations her thrills very carefully so that we jump out of our chair at quite slight surprises, especially when we have come to expect buckets of blood and loud bangs. She also has a profound and well-communicated sense of place and period, so that the book is equally at home in 1930s Rumania, Cold War Budapest and 1970s Oxford. Kostova is particularly good on the sights and sounds of remote country places and the taste of real peasant food--this sensuous realism does not always go with her other skill, the creation of imagined documents and folksongs that feel as real and true as what might be actual. This is a quietly good book rather than a spectacular debut, with some uncomfortable twists in its tail; her heroine-narrators are, and perhaps remain, in the most serious of jeopardies. ---Roz Kaveney
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| Customer Reviews: Read 275 more reviews...
 An oddball book that's hard to categorise! January 6, 2009
Book Worm DJ (UK)
I'm half mystified by this book and what to write about it. I picked it up on a whim, without having heard any hype about it, so perhaps was less bitter than some other reviewers who expected more from it.
The book is meticulously written, for want of a better phrase. It gives a real feeling of historical realism - it is believable in many ways - but it does this at the expense of good narrative drive and character development.
I've given it three stars for imagination and sheer dedication - the author must have truly slogged on it!!! But although I read to the end, I was glad to get it finished, not left wanting more. It was a strangely cold book - it really did give the feeling of an especially dry historical account at times. I was left not caring about the characters, and whether they lived or died.
 If only... December 17, 2008
J. L. Eyre
Starts fantastically, being written in a style that is wonderfully reminiscent of Bram Stoker's original. It's highly engaging and dances on the edge of pastiche - then before you know it we're in airport lounge territory, lots of international locations, stock characters, amazing co-incedences, lumpy writing and a dull ending. The fabulous start only makes this all the more disappointing - and I imagine all the lovely people who she credits with helping her with the writing of the book must also feel short-changed, unless of course they're on a percentage. Worth reading for the start alone, but as soon as you reach Istanbul close up, read Bram Stoker and imagine what might have been.
Too long by half - SPOILERS December 15, 2008
Gambers86 (South Wales)
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
It took me two attempts to finish this book...which has only happened to me once before with the Lord of the Rings, and I was 10 at the time.
I first picked it up shortly after returning from travelling around Romania and Eastern Europe after someone I met out there mentioned that he was reading it and found it quite fun reading about the places he had actually been to only days ago. I was in university so I wasn't exactly short of free time but even then I only managed to get halfway before losing interest and shelving it for a couple of years. I picked it up again about a month ago after I made a vow to not buy any new books until I'd read the ones I already owned and this time I finally managed to finish it...and I was more than a little disappointed.
I agree with the majority of the critical reviews on here in the sense that if you read the first 200 pages, then the last 100 and just found a synopsis for the drawn out middle section then you'd enjoy this book a whole lot more. It starts promisingly and moves at a relatively quick pace with some genuinely creepy moments, however as soon as Paul and Helen start travelling together it just loses all of its pace and pazzazz and reads as nothing more than an incredibly detailed travel diary of two rather cliched academic types. The librarian who follows them around seems to me like it was a late addition in an attempt to add some action and drama to the stilted and overly descriptive plot of two people basically travelling around and discovering things about Dracula V E R Y S L O W L Y. I'm no Hercule Poirot but I worked out the bit with the head about a chapter before it was revealed and we're supposed to believe that everyone in this story is an accomplished academic! And everything they do discover, no matter how trivial is treated as if it's an earth shattering revelation that promises to change history and the world FOREVER!!! (See anything by Dan Brown to see what I mean).
The ending, when it finally comes, is simply awful. It strikes me as offensive that Kostova spends 700 pages describing a not-so-jolly-jaunt around Communist Europe (which is accomlished with unrealistic ease by an American during the Cold War...another gripe of mine) and then devotes about 5 pages to the ending. The final confrontation lasts about a paragraph and relies on a ridiculous appearance by a completely random character in an attempt to inject some drama into it. It is hackneyed, rushed and reads like it was written for a soap. And as for the reunion of Helen and Paul...don't get me started! We're supposed to believe that she can survive for 15 years by withdrawing money from their shared account and he wouldn't be able to trace her!
The style of writing is another aspect that irritates me as the majority of the book is made up of letters, either from Paul to his daughter or from Rossi to Paul or Hedges or Helen to her daughter and so on...However the language throughout is Hardy-esque in its descriptive nature and each letter stretches out over many pages describing in ridiculous detail something as inane as a journey up a mountain. Moreover the author of each letter seems to have a photographic memory for events, facial expressions and conversations that is ridiculously unbelievable. If Kostova wanted to use the concept of telling a story through letters she could have made them more letter-like and less essay-like in my opinion...
Overall then reading this book is a bit like jogging in the rain...you start and think 'Oh, this isn't that bad actually'. Then after a short while you realise you may have made a mistake and it becomes a tiresome and rather thankless slog. Then as you approach the end you start to gather speed and rush towards home and the satisfaction that you will soon be finished...only to find that when you reach home you don't feel anything but relief and exhaustion...and then you vow to go for a shorter jog next time.
 fantastic book October 21, 2008
Miss G Abbotts
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
I found this book to be intriguing and I pretty much read it as quickly as I could.
I liked the way it was told with a mixture of letter writing and present day. I also thought the concept was good.
While some places were a bit 'iffy' overall I think the book works marvellously. You have to pay attention, but you get the satisfaction of finding out new information and a good yarn into the bargain.
Atmospheric and respectful October 2, 2008
Mark Slattery (London, UK)
2 out of 3 found this review helpful
It is hard to believe this is a 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 rapidly 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.
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