"The Historian" by Elizabeth Kostova -- Eek! Vampires!

[Ed Augusts]

"THE HISTORIAN”
by
Elizabeth Kostova,
or:
The Ultimate Bibliophile: Vlad the Impaler
aka
Vlad the Impaler & Other Buggers!


This is an utterly charming and disarming book, considering it is a
tale about a hideous vampire, yet it begins in the private, quiet
world of a sixteen year old girl; a girl who seems perfectly normal,
other than the fact that she has never known her mother, a mother
whom, she was told, died when she herself was a baby. This girl lives
in the moderately well-to-do world of a scholarly, diplomat father.
Life is fairly quiet and serene. But at sixteen she finds the peculiar
notes, up on the top bookshelf of her father's study, the notes he
took, eighteen years earlier; notes which speak of many secrets, and
which include a blank medieval book with the sinister image of a
dragon in the middle, and mention of what might be abou the romance
her father had with her missing mother. Finding out the answers to
these and other mysteries become an irresistible attraction for our
young friend, as well as for us, the readers of this wonderful, 'three-
layer cake' of a book, which is a rich treat, a dazzling celebration,
of European history, conquest, and culture.

She only reads a paragraph, but knows she needs to find out more. All
of a sudden she realizes her father has a past that she's been
excluded from knowing about. What to do? She's never asked for
anything before, but now she gets the strength to ask to go along with
her father on his next diplomatic mission. He, indeed complies, with
a hint of sadness, but knows she must be ultimately told the truth,
and takes her along on a series of ventures to towns and cities from
the Julian Alps on the border between Slovenia and northern Italy, and
down the Dalmatian coast, to Venice itself, as well as to a town and
monastery near the French border with Andorra and Spain. They can't
really see and feel anything if they fly, so the book is a primer for
slower forms of transportation.

There is something ravishing about the author's descriptions of all
these various European landscapes. We are made to see and feel what
Constantinople, the last bastion of the Roman Empire must have been
like, from its street vendors to its bejeweled illuminated books. Buda
and Pest, across the river from each other, come to life. The Cold
War era and its effect on Eastern Europe is a subtext, together with
the lives, families, and mission of the secret descendants of
Janissaries who protected the realm of the Sultan from ghoul and foe,
and who still work for him. All along the way, we feel the sensations
of wind, cloud and wave, and the shadows as they slowly glide in front
of the sun. We sense the palpable darkness and stillness of the late
afternoon woods in Wallachia and Transylvania, the view of gorges,
forests and peaks from Vlad the Impaler's mountain-top castle, as well
as the pitch black depths of the reliquaries in the subterranean
vaults of ancient monasteries.

Who is the actual 'historian' here, in the title? The sixteen year
old girl becomes a historian in the course of the book. Her mother
and father are, or were, certainly historians. So was her father's
professor at Oxford who mined every quarry for data and legends about
Dracula. And even Vlad Tepes, i.e., Dracula, has a vast collection of
books that he has collected – either bought or stolen -- since the
late 15th Century. His minions have gone out and bought and stolen
rarities for centuries. Thus, he has one bejeweled, ancient volume in
his collection, of which, as one of his victims reports, “no one has
ever seen such a book”, a rarity that might have been made for an
emperor more than a thousand years ago. Books of the cabala. Lively,
illustrated, quite topical tomes and tracts about all the ways people
have been tortured to death through the ages. Journals and diaries
filled with startling facts by notables such as Napoleon Bonaparte.
Dracula even has a bookcase of biographies written from the 16th to
the 20th century about himself! The part of Kostova's book in which
glimpses can be seen of his vast, subterranean library, is itself well-
worth the price of admission. The question arises and we have to
judge for ourselves: If we were kidnapped by Dracula to such a vast,
wonderful library, and he offered us an immortal existence in which to
serve him and serving the library, “enough knowledge for ten thousand
lifetimes” as he puts it, would be refuse to work for him, knowing
that refusal means a horrible death? THAT is the choice given by
Dracula to one of the characters in this seductive great library, as
shown in this book.

The novel glosses over, but does not plunge too deeply into the crimes
of Vlad the Impaler, who came back after death, as Dracula. The few
comments on his historical bloodthirstiness are scholarly, from four-
hundred year old pamphlets in a Philadelphia library, for example. So,
no one can claim they are exploitative, although the information they
tell us, such as the fact that Vlad would, say, impale infants on
their mother's breasts with sharpened wooden stakes, tends to be an
image that stays in a person's mind and gives cause for concern, since
it turns out Vlad is still alive today and one of the characters we've
gotten to like in this novel might actually meet him just down the
road! We don't want to see anyone in this book impaled. A few of
them do get bitten rather deeply on the neck, however!

But the modern crimes of this Dracula do not rise to the vast evils of
his ancient crimes, nor can they, honestly, rise to the heights of
even more ancient reprisals and genocides by Vlad's predecessors in
crime. The medieval Vlad did not come up with anything really brand-
new, he may have modeled his infernal punishments on the everyday
methods of punishment and torture that were inflicted in ancient Rome,
not only in the seven hills of the Eternal City, but in places like
Judea, where Herod could kill all the male infants in Bethlehem and
nobody, (evidently!), other than the suffering parents, raised an
eyebrow about it. Cruelty was expected. Cruelty as a manifestation of
lust and power was common. Soldiers did what was demanded of them by
their commanding officers. Neither age nor sex was respected. Virgins
could not be executed under the law, so the soldiers were cleverly
told to take their virginity and THEN execute them. The Appian Way was
lined on both sides with the dead and dying on crucifixes. Jesus
himself, a largely well-meaning mystic and reformer, who shouldn't
have had an enemy in the world, met that same fate. The Coliseum was
filled with the dead and dying, and thousands of savage citizens,
urging their fellow humans on to destruction. Cruelty and torture was
also commonly meted-out by the barbaric hordes from the Asian Steppe
that swept like a crashing wave against the sea-wall of Eastern
Europe, who, according to medieval woodcuts, used pregnant Baltic and
Slavic mothers in target practice for their arrows. Of course, nobody
could out-do the Roman emperors for cruelty. A recent film shows a
patrician who got on the wrong side of one of these bloody emperors.
Like living gods they could point a finger and cause the unlucky
person to be taken away to die, writhing in horizontal agony as a
stake is pushed up inside him, as his horrified family, who, adding
horror upon horror, are about to meet the same fate, in one orifice or
the other, are forced to look on at the father's agony. The stake
eventually comes right up their throat and either out their mouth or
through the top of their head. It was not a very dignified way to
die. Death was common and life was cheap. But this was ancient Rome,
and Transylvania and neighboring Wallachia in the late 15th Century
under Vlad the Impaler, are just shadows of that ancient, pre-
Christian, world of cruelty. Maybe what makes Vlad so horrible is that
he continued pre-Christian tortures even though he supported the
Christian church in his homeland against the encroaching Turk. He was
a hero of his country, a hero of the Church. All the more bizarre that
he meted out so much death to his own countrymen. If it makes you
feel better, none of the modern characters we get to know along the
way in this book not the 16 year old, nor her father or any of their
circle, actually get impaled. That is not what Dracula does, after
all. All HE has been doing, since his first death in the late 15th
century, is bite people on the neck and draw blood. He is only a
ghost of his former, more sadistic self. This Dracula is not
particularly sadistic. Maybe old age has got him by his throat. But,
If you want to see a medieval sadist, have a look elsewhere at Gilles
de Rais or the dangerous Lady Bathory, or above all, some of the
lesser-known and not very respectable, well, we might as well call
them 'wicked', writings of the Marquis de Sade, such as Juliette and
the 100 Days of Sodom. I think author Kostova COULD have mentioned
these or other sadistic creatures from the past, but that might well
have stripped her book of most of its innocent purity and mired it in
the world of sadistic tortures and destructive, decadent philosophies
instead of the more 'clean-cut', if you will, 'incisive', (pun
intended), world of vampirism.

She hardly mentions Nazi Germany, either. A browse of Nazi history
would bring to light more damage to humanity than could have been
meted-out by a thousand vampires! But who can blame the author for
focussing on what she needed to focus on to make her novel work? She
has not made this book one endless cycle of bloodletting, she has been
very restrained, in fact, and that is another reason why Kostova's
book is such a pleasure to read! Nobody ALWAYS wants "blood and gore"

We are forced to lose some of our respect for the Christian church
during the course of this book, since the Church sheltered Dracula
from his enemies. This part of the book seems to be absolutely
historical: He was a warrior for the Church, the Christian faith...
and so the Church turned a blind eye to Vlad's evils. On the other
hand, the Turks, who are Muslim and who hearken back to the days of
the Sultan, and who sacked Constantinople and terminated the Eastern
Roman Empire, come out very nearly as the “good guys” here, since they
are hunters of the godless, enemies of the vampire!

Much like a hungry vampire, the author bites off more than she can
chew by trying to juggle a coven of modern-day Janissaries in Istanbul
alongside empty-headed filthy communist bureaucrats from Budapest to
Bucharest, and involving Oxford dons in the subterranean affairs of
lordly vampires. It quickly falls prey to the risks of any book in
which a story becomes a story-within-a-story within a story, in which
italics an indents and different type-styles guide us as to what
character is injecting what element of plot and suspense. It is a
novel in which three generations of humans, and their friends, come up
against an infernal and nearly eternal, creature.

When we are 15 or 20 pages from the end of “The Historian” we doubt if
the story can possibly be finished in the few pages which remain – and
yet, it CAN. And it IS. The climax is so sudden we almost feel
cheated by it, but it does tie together all the loose threads, with an
addendum or two with some additional materials. But the climax does
relieve us of much of the pent-up anxieties about the fate of all our
cast of characters. '

What the climax does NOT reveal is anything at all about the secret
book in which Vlad learns the secret of immortality. There is not a
hint about how this gift of eternal life was gained, perhaps through
ritual or sacrifice or --perhaps?-- drinking someone's blood from
the neck!

This book cannot be put down easily, no more so than I could do a
'quickie' review of it, it is like a Caramel Macchiatta (sp?) at
Starbuck's, you can't just put it down, and you can't gulp it down,
either. You have to savor it sloooowly! So, the hours past midnight
might melt away while one continues reading it. Oh my God, do you
think there might be some kind of SPELL from the Carpathians on this
book? If so, the protective amulet which is sure to save you, is to
finish reading this book from cover to cover. Then, all will again be
well! Best, ----Ed

www.edaugusts.com
www.twitter.com/edaugusts/


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