Review of “The Historian”by Elizabeth Kostova

I don’t think I’ve officially reviewed a book since I wrote book reports in high school, but Elizabeth Kostova’s The Historian was so wonderfully intriguing I’ve decided to write one.

Summary: A teenage girl discovers some old letters and an eerie blank medieval book hidden in her father’s library, which sends her on a quest to learn about her family’s mysterious past. Going back and forth in time and told through various narrators, The Historian takes us from London to Istanbul to Budapest, delving into vampire lore, revealing that Vlad the Impaler was not only the inspiration for Bram Stocker’s Dracula, but that he was in fact a real vampire and may still be the living dead.

Elizabeth Kostova’s debut novel, ten years in the making (Bram Stoker spent 8 years researching vampire folklore to write “Dracula”), is a romance, travel journal, supernatural thriller, mystery, and an anthropological primer of Bulgaria, Romania, and Cold War Europe all in one.

The Historian is not for everyone. There’s not much action in it, and it’s not character or plot driven. It was equal parts an homage and a retelling of Bram Stoker’s Dracula, and written in similar fashion – mostly through letters in a rather slow pace. What made this book so appealing to me was the ambiance. I loved the unique and careful blending of vampire lore, Vlad the Impaler’s horrible true legacy, locations of dusty monasteries and libraries, and painstakingly researched anthropological details. The descriptions of the customs, cuisine, and scenery of Eastern European cities and villages are so tangible one can taste the food and smell the air. The slowly developing story told through letters and manuscripts allow the reader to go through the scholarly quest the characters do. At times it felt tedious, but mostly it was a compelling, albeit long, read.

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Some background on the real life Vlad the Impaler

The real life Prince of Darkness was infinitely more cruel and evil than any incarnation of the fictional Count Dracula. Vlad the Impaler, a.k.a. Vlad III, Dracula, Drakulya, or Tepes, was known as “Vlad Dracula” during his lifetime, which could be translated to “The Son of the Devil.”

He was born in 1431 in Transylvania, the son of Vlad II or Dracul, a military governor who was a member of the secret fraternity, the Order of the Dragon. Vlad II defied the Order of the Dragon and sided with the Turks. To prove his loyalty, he surrendered two of his sons, Vlad being one of them, to Sultan Mehmad II, where Vlad was thrown in a dungeon and tortured, where presumably his anger festered and grew to form a beast. Upon being freed, Vlad vowed revenge and eventually became the ruler of Wallachia. Then the craziness ensued.

He committed every single imaginable and unimaginable atrocity to inflict the maximum amount of pain and suffering on his victims. He impaled 30,000 merchants on St. Bartholomew’s Day. He had no qualms about torturing and killing women and children – even babies. He held dinner parties next to the freshly impaled and was rumored to eat their flesh and drink their blood. One famous story says that when Turkish ambassadors did not remove their Phyrgian caps in his presence explaining it was their custom, Vlad was so enraged he ordered their hats to be nailed to their heads (“So you von’t remove your hats, eh? How vould you like it if you wore your hats FOREVER! Mwah Ha Ha Ha!”). Oh yeah, and he still thought he was going to heaven.

He spent his life defending Wallachia against the mighty Ottoman Empire. It is not known how he died; whether it was in battle, via assassination, or by the hand of one of his own men in error. He was decapitated so his head could be put on a stake as proof, and his body was reportedly buried in a monastery somewhere near Bucharest, although his tomb was never actually found in excavation (hence the myths about his immortality).

Bran Castle, better known as Castle Dracula from its mythical link to Vlad (the only indisputable fact is that he was imprisoned there for two months), has been put up for sale for the bargain price of about $79 million (or 40 million pounds) . It’s located in the peaceful peasant village of Bran in Romania…the perfect weekend getaway!