Happy Spooky Hallowe'en reading


I love Hallowe'en. It may be my favorite holiday of the year... I think it might be a combination of the fascination with getting scared and an unhealthy obsession with mortality. Being in Ireland for the day this year, I do not miss the costumes and candies that are hallmarks of how America observes the day. But I do miss my tradition with Sören, originating with an afternoon spent with Sugar Booger, of going to a graveyard in Austin and having a picnic on the gravesite of a family named "Hello."

In honor of the holiday, I started to read Elizabeth Kostova's The Historian while I was in Prague. I finished it Monday night, in a fevered rush to complete the book. It tells the story of a teenaged girl in Amsterdam whose father has a mysterious book that appears to be blank except for a woodcut image of a dragon with a curling tail. That book is the commencement of a perilous compulsive hunt for the truth behind the historical figure of Vlad the Impaler -- Dracula.

Kostova writes her story as a pastiche of multiple timelines and interlocking stories. There is the teenage heroine and her hunt for her missing father; the story of how her father met her mother, long presumed dead; her father's and mother's search for his academic adviser, Bartholomew Rossi, who also had a copy of this book; and Rossi's hunt for the truth behind Dracula. This literary style is reminiscent of books like A. S. Byatt's Possession, Charles Frazier's Cold Mountain, or even Michael Ondaatje's The English Patient. It's effective, in that it keeps my interest, but it seems strained to meet the format of the author's story. There are many times in The Historian where the teenage daughter's story (why don't we ever find out her name?) is sidelined for chapters while her father's letters continue to pull out the Cold War era thread of the vampire hunt.

I laughed at an interview published in the back of the volume I had, where some marketing flack tried to compare The Historian to Donna Tartt's Secret History. Um, why because the letters "h-i-s-t-o-r" appear in both titles??? This was a sad, obvious attempt to tie in a new novelist to a cult legend of a debut literary talent. Much closer to Secret History is the book Special Topics in Calamity Physics. Which I read a few weeks ago, and probably deserves its own blog entry/review...

But I did like that the novel had several touching love stories intertwined throughout, and did not have an overwhelming focus on the violent or macabre. It was a fun and entertaining read...

Posted: Wed - October 31, 2007 at 08:53 AM        

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