This is Elizabeth Kartova’s first novel. She is a graduate of Yale University with a Masters in Fine Arts from Michigan University (she considers Ann Arbor her home). She has found a way to retell the famous Dracula story from a new perspective. Having worked on it for many years, she finally produced the novel for northern hemisphere summer reading-just long and heavy enough to be a companion throughout a vacation-that extends the adventures into Bulgaria and France.
Vampires have been a subject that has captivated writers for centuries and more recently film directors. The person who gave a new thrust to the legend of the 15th Century Vlad the Impaler (1431-1476)- he was a pious old murderer”-and the undead (nosferatu) Count Dracula from Transylvania, was Bram Stoker with his Gothic novel published in 1897.
Kartova in “The Historian” utilises the methods employed by Stoker, presenting events mainly in the form of various written records: journals, letters, ancient books, diaries and even post cards from beyond. Instead of Jonathan Hawker, we now have Professor Bartholomew Rossi and his daughter Helen (known to her mother as Elena) and an unnamed granddaughter. All of them are prolific writers and most of them historians, but the most significant is the historian who has lived for 500 years and has devoted his life to amassing a secret and rare library of medieval works.
Twenty-four years later, Helen, in 1954, wins a scholarship to study cultural anthropology at Oxford University in England, and seeks out Professor Rossi. She is too late as he has suddenly vanished, passing his mantle on to one of his graduate students, Paul, who has also received a copy of the mysterious old volume with its largely blank pages. Following a series of misadventures, the two of them set off in search for Professor Rossi, her father and his mentor.
Eventually, in remote areas of Bulgaria, following a visit to Anton Stoichev and his amazing private library outside of Sofia, they go with their state-provided guide north to the monasteries of Rila and Bachkuro in search of the missing monastery Sveti Georgi. They believe Vlad’s remains were possibly moved from Istanbul and Lake Snagov to Sveti Georgi. Following a cultural trail of old songs and ancient letters from 1477, written by a monk, Friar Kiril, they begin to solve the complicated puzzle. There they find Professor Rossi, but it is too late to really help him. They also discover more than they set out to find, and along the way, Helen gets bitten on her neck a second time (still one short of the fatal, transforming, third bite).
Helen and Paul get married in Boston, he wins a position teaching history and they move to New York City to live in Brooklyn Heights. Helen is depressed, but it is more than post-partum problems. On a holiday in France, she vanishes on a cliff at the high monastery of Saint-Matthieu des Pyrenees Oriental. Another disappearance leads to another mystery.
Paul has raised his daughter alone, living and working in Amsterdam. As a medieval historian, he travels extensively. In 1972 at Oxford, on a special trip to see old friends and staff who knew him and Professor Rossi in the 1950s, Paul suddenly disappears. His daughter, accompanied by another graduate student from Oxford, Stephen Barley, sets out in pursuit, eventually taking a train to Perpignon in the Pyrenees. The various paths that people have followed, the living and the undead, the missing and the loved, converge again at Saint-Matthieu. The novel builds slowly and startlingly to its unusual climax.
Kartova has written a brilliant and engrossing thriller. She obviously loves libraries and in her long tale has re-created many of them, at Oxford, in Istanbul, and particularly at different places in Bulgaria. She describes them so adroitly that you can practically feel and smell the old books and sense their revelations. Libraries are also places where secrets are stored and the undead are hidden. Kartova also loves medieval churches, with their hidden passageways and submerged and hidden crypts-these too she brings to life. Discoveries are made in the most unusual and unexpected places. Helen neatly balances Paul with her expertise in cultural anthropology and knowledge of Eastern Europe.
On the same day this debut novel was launched by Little Brown, following great hullabaloo in the United States, an audio book of ten CDs with an approved abridged version of “The Historian” was released. It is unusual in that instead of one reader doing all the voices, six people perform the multitudes and the chapters are separated by Gothic music. Unfortunately no table of contents or list of characters (who reads what person) is provided. If you don’t want to read this novel in English, translations are planned for 28 languages. If you don’t really like to read, then listen to the audio book.
Or if you would prefer to see it, soon a movie version of “The Historian” will fill the big screen. Sony has bought the rights to make the movie.
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