Kostova handles the logistics of multiple story lines well, though unfortunately her narrators all speak in the same hyper-descriptive, overwrought prose. They're all somewhat disembodied -- brains in jars, not quite fully realized. Whereas Lucy Westenra and Jonathan Harker struggled against Dracula's seductive sensuality, Kostova's characters are proportioned like "Peanuts" drawings: huge heads with nothing going on below the waist. Too often this forces her writing into clumsy abstraction: The prologue, for example, warns that "sometimes history itself reaches inexorably forward for us with its shadowy claw," an image that manages to be both hackneyed and imprecise. (Surely if a legend grows corporeal and dangerous, the claw turns from shadow into flesh.)
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Summer reading
The Historian A Novel Elizabeth Kostova Little, Brown: 642 pp., $25.95
This may seem a quibble, but it points to a larger problem with "The Historian": too little danger. Kostova's Dracula, while a nasty piece of work, doesn't really threaten anyone other than those who chase him. The book's few genuinely frightening touches -- a book that stinks of rotten flesh, a ghoulish bureaucrat in Washington, a kindly librarian mysteriously beaten to death -- come early, and (without giving the game away) Dracula's revelation of his own mission is likelier to raise shrugs than shivers. Where the book shines is in its last third, when the narrative moves to Bulgaria, for which Kostova obviously feels deep warmth and about which she knows a great deal. The memorable scenes there are the quiet ones -- a lunch party in an aging professor's orchard, a conversation with a Scottish-Gypsy farmer outside an ancient monastery -- during which Kostova gives fuller rein to her observational warmth. Even if this thriller fails to thrill, those moments linger and show Kostova to be a writer at home in the world: a rare and welcome thing. *
