Stunning debut novel

In one of my favorite books, "The World According to Garp," there's a line where the main character - an author - thinks back over his work and reflects that his first novel "was still just a first novel." He means that whatever its better qualities, it was hamstrung as a whole by virtue of the mistakes of a first-time author. I've always thought that maxim was fairly accurate - first efforts do tend to lack the polish and skill of an author's later works.

That said, if the same holds true with Ms. Kostova, we are in for a colossal future. Simply put, this is a breathtaking book made all the more glorious by the fact that it is the author's first. I work at a bookstore and was able to read an advance copy of this months ago. To be honest, the advances we read are generally rubbish - foolish cast-offs from publishing houses apparently ashamed of a lack of such silly little things as plot, and so foisted on the hapless bookstore employees in the empty hope of a little word of mouth. Imagine my surprise to take this home on a whim and find out what I had in my hands was nothing less than extraordinary.

Other reviews have gone over the bare bones of the plot - dizzyingly interwoven storylines, historical bent, loads of letters, Vlad the Impaler/Drakulya, etc etc. So I'll skip that part. What other reviewers have failed to mention is the quality of the writing itself. In 656 pages, Ms. Kostova never lets the suspense or the tension waver. The book is chilling, unsettling, but never overly so - it never crosses the line into hoaky, or bizarre, or creepy (so lowbrow). This is the thinking person's Dracula, the considerate person's Dracula, the meticulous and educated person's Dracula.

What is truly exceptional is the sense of melancholy that the author manages to maintain from the first page to the last - this is perhaps what contributes so to the unsettling nature I spoke of. There is hope scattered throughout, but so much of the book is so hauntingly wistful that the emotions ride high the entire time. Love and loss and unrequited love are here in spades, but never exploited, never carried away, never overdone.

Is it hard to tell that I loved this book?

In a year sure to be dominated by Harry Potter, it is nice to know that at least one other author is determined to make a splash - and what an auspicious first-time splash this is! Do take a look - don't balk at the vampiric element, for this is the nosferatu of history, not Anne Rice. An overall tremendous novel from a sure to be bestselling author.

A suspenseful, literary novel

The marketing campaign is underway and Elizabeth Kostova's debut novel is already being hyped as the "Dracula Code" or some similar slogan. I disagree with that approach, not just because they are quite different in more ways than just storyline, but because "The Da Vinci Code" was a good thriller with elements of history mixed in, but it is not even in the same league with this book.

"The Historian" is an epic work of historical fiction that sweeps across Europe during the four decades between 1930 and the mid 1970s. It just also happens to involve the Dracula myth and a good dose of suspense. Now, some people may object to me calling this novel a work of historical fiction because it is mostly fiction and contains very few real characters. That is true, but Kostova does such an amazing job of making the Dracula myths come alive that you can't help feeling that the legends and the story are real. Her research is stunning in its attention to detail and the wide range of topics Kostova must've studied. A previous reviewer slightly criticizes Kostova for spending too many pages describing the pilgrimage routes of monks hundreds of years ago. While sections like that do slow down the pace of the novel somewhat, they don't distract from it. The last book that I read that combines elements of history, suspense, and great characters as well as "The Historian" was "The Devil in the White City".

Highly recommended!

This is an exciting novel!

This debut novel from Kostova contains elements from many of my favorite genre's - thriller, suspense, mystery, historical fiction, and vampire lore. It is no surprise then that this supremely intelligent story was a very entertaining read. Though I feel that the story concept and character development deserve five stars, I feel that there are a few important flaws in this book which put it into the four star category.

First the good: All of the characters in this tale are very believable, including Vlad Tepes himself. I really enjoyed the historical facts surrounding the Ottoman Empire and Eastern Europe that Kostova weaved into her tale. I also loved the way she used letters to reveal the more thrilling aspects of the story bit by bit. This kept me in that "I'll just read ten more pages" mode on many a late night.

Now for the problems: The first 300 pages of this book were very compelling and hard to put down. Somewhere between page 300 and 450 it began to feel like Kostova had an old graduate school dissertaion on the migration patterns of monks in the 15th century lying around so she decided to work it into the story. Wow did that slow the pace... I don't have a problem with the storyline taking the characters on a search for the history of these monks, its just that Kostova occasionally strayed across the line between entertaining fiction and dry academic research.

All of that said, my opinion as a librarian and avid reader of such stories is that this is an excellent book, well worth reading. I am sure that it will have wide appeal and is no doubt deserved of its huge marketing push. I have heard that there is already talk of a movie...