[email protected] reviewed The Historian by Elizabeth Kostova
Long. Just so, so long
2 stars
It would probably have been healthier if I'd given up on this 700-page monster at any of the many points at which I commented to others that it was like Dan Brown wrote a vampire novel. It just goes on and on. What's more, it's written in an odd first-person that has three (two? three? I forget now) narrators, which is resolved by making all but the teenage daughter's occasional appearances just the reading out of letters from older characters. Epistolary novels obviously have a fine heritage in the Gothic, most notably in Dracula, but at least those feel like real letters. These are letters that go on for twenty pages of excruciating detail. The only reason I can give for why I actually finished this is that I'm on a bit of a gothic/vampire 'thing' at the moment, but that's probably not actually a strong enough argument.