The Historian

by Elizabeth Kostova

I tend to avoid most contemporary writers. I have several reasons: publishing houses, whether they admit it or not, are ultimately about profit and this has created an institutionalized push for predictability, copycat prose, and bland reading. But every now and then a writer with a spark of individuality tends to slip through. Elizabeth Kostova has that spark. And if she's lucky, the publishing houses won't put it out anytime soon.

Praise aside, Kostova writes a slow, methodical prose that is quite the opposite of someone like Dan Brown. This can be exasperating at times, particularly given the highly tense situations she creates for her charaters in The Historian. She is precise. Most settings are described in the perfect amount of detail to create a masterful image in the mind of the reader. This can be a challenge for all but the most Dickensian of readers. But it is a tremendous advantage when it comes to creating characters. She gives the goldilocks amount of information - just right - when it comes to giving her characters life. She doesn't tell too much or too little, which is hard yet necessary in a work built on drama and characterization as opposed to action.

The Historian is a tremendous book. It's writing must have been tremendous given its length and attention to detail, and reading all 650+ pages is a bit tremendous too. However, the book admirably takes on the challenge of three separate narratives presented simultaneously. There's a student, his mentor, and the student's daughter later in life. Oh, and a book-obsessed Dracula too. It sounds weird, maybe a bit confusing even, but Kostova pulls it off with so much grace and finesse that this book becomes a page-turning thriller despite the fact that it was written to be a melodrama/travelogue/ode-to-a-parent.

So without saying anything more about this book, except that it has Dracula, which is really quite cool when you think about it because nobody of note has taken the infamous Dracula and given him any depth or significance since good old Bram Stoker (though many have tried), I encourage you to go find a copy and read it right away.

This is one of those books that lets you know if you're a good reader or not. I'm sure that sounds pretentious. Nonetheless it's true. If you make it through The Historian, then it's safe to say that you are a good reader even if you started as a poor, uninterested reader. So ask yourself this: How many books can turn you into a good reader if you're not one already? This is one of them.