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Book Reviewed by:What does the legend of Vlad the Impaler have to do with the modern world? Is it possible that the Dracula of myth truly existed—and that he has lived on, century after century, pursuing his own unknowable ends? Elizabeth Kostova's debut novel is an adventure of monumental proportions, a relentless tale that blends fact and fantasy, history and the present, with an assurance that is almost unbearably suspenseful—and utterly unforgettable.
"To you, perceptive reader, I bequeath my history...."
Late one night, exploring her father's library, a young woman finds an
ancient book and a cache of yellowing letters. The letters are all addressed
to "My dear and unfortunate successor," and they plunge her into a
world she never dreamed of—a labyrinth where the secrets of her father's
past and her mother's mysterious fate connect to an inconceivable evil
hidden in the depths of history.
The letters provide links to one of the darkest powers that humanity has
ever known—and to a centuries-long quest to find the source of that darkness
and wipe it out. It is a quest for the truth about Vlad the Impaler, the
medieval ruler whose barbarous reign formed the basis of the legend of
Dracula. Generations of historians have risked their reputations, their
sanity, and even their lives to learn the truth about Vlad the Impaler and
Dracula. Now one young woman must decide whether to take up this quest
herself—to follow her father in a hunt that nearly brought him to ruin years
ago, when he was a vibrant young scholar and her mother was still alive.
What does the legend of Vlad the Impaler have to do with the modern
world? Is it possible that the Dracula of myth truly existed—and that he has
lived on, century after century, pursuing his own unknowable ends? The
answers to these questions cross time and borders, as first the father and
then the daughter search for clues, from dusty Ivy League libraries to
Istanbul, Budapest, and the depths of Eastern Europe. In city after city, in
monasteries and archives, in letters and in secret conversations, the
horrible truth emerges about Vlad the Impaler's dark reign—and about a
time-defying pact that may have kept his awful work alive down through the
ages.
Parsing obscure signs and hidden texts, reading codes worked into the
fabric of medieval monastic traditions—and evading the unknown adversaries
who will go to any lengths to conceal and protect Vlad's ancient powers—one
woman comes ever closer to the secret of her own past and a confrontation
with the very definition of evil. Elizabeth Kostova's debut novel is an
adventure of monumental proportions, a relentless tale that blends fact and
fantasy, history and the present, with an assurance that is almost
unbearably suspenseful—and utterly unforgettable.
Chapter 1
In 1972 I was sixteen—young, my father said, to be traveling with him on his diplomatic missions. He preferred to know that I was sitting attentively in class at the International School of Amsterdam; in those days his foundation was based in Amsterdam, and it had been my home for so long that I had nearly forgotten our early life in the United States. It seems peculiar to me now that I should have been so obedient well into my teens, while the rest of my generation was experimenting with drugs and protesting the imperialist war in Vietnam, but I had been raised in a world so sheltered that it makes my adult life in academia look positively adventurous. To begin with, I was motherless, and the care that my father took of me had been deepened by a double sense of responsibility, so that he protected me more completely than he might ...
Certainly there are many moments of tension and an overwhelming sense of impending dread, but Kostova doesn't stoop to the methodology used by so many modern thriller writers - short chapters, each ending with a breathless cliff-hanger forcing the pulse-rate up and, more often than not, the credibility down. Instead we get a challenging, substantial novel that many serious readers will love...continued
Full Review
(376 words)
(Reviewed by BookBrowse Review Team).
Elizabeth Kostova (née Johnson) was born
in New London, Connecticut in 1964, and now lives in Ann Arbor, Michigan.
She graduated from Yale and holds an MFA from the University of Michigan where
she won the Hopwood Award for the Novel-in-Progress. The Historian
took her ten years to write, and
was inspired by the vampire
stories told to her by her
father, a professor of urban
planning, during the year they
spent in Ljubljana, capital of
Slovenia (where her father
taught at the university) when
she was seven, and as they
traveled through Europe.
She says, "I wondered whether this...
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