The Historian

 

 

A Note to the Reader

The story that follows is one I never intended to commit to paper. Recently, however, a shock of sorts has prompted me to look back over the most troubling episodes of my life and of the lives of the several people I loved best. This is the story of how as a girl of sixteen I went in search of my father and his past, and of how he went in search of his beloved mentor and his mentor's own history, and of how we all found ourselves on one of the darkest pathways into history. It is the story of who survived that search and who did not, and why. As a historian, I have learned that, in fact, not eveyone who reaches back into history can survive it. And it is not only reaching back that endangers us; sometimes history itself reaches inexorably forward for us with its shadowy claw.

The Historian

Elizabeth Kostova

She had me from paragraph #1! Inexorably... Love the word.

inexorably

adverb relentlessly, inevitably, irresistibly, remorselessly, implacably, unrelentingly Spending on health is growing inexorably. Collins Thesaurus of the English Language – Complete and Unabridged 2nd Edition. 2002 © HarperCollins Publishers 1995, 2002

While reading and loving The Swan Thieves, I saw Elizabeth Kostova's earlier book--The Historian--had received international attention, so I checked out the reviews. And then, shied away because I don't enjoy fantasy and keep away from occult.

"Breathtakingly suspenseful and beautifully written, The Historian is the story of a young woman plunged into a labyrinth where the secrets of her family's past connect to an inconceivable evil: the dark fifteenth-century reign of Vlad the Impaler and a time-defying pact that may have kept his awful work alive through the ages. The search for the truth becomes an adventure of monumental proportions, taking us from monasteries and dusty libraries to the capitals of Eastern Europe - in a feat of storytelling so rich, so hypnotic, so exciting that it has enthralled readers around the world."

"Never was a ghost story so casually erudite, nor a historical travelogue such gripping entertainment."

---New York Magazine

Skipping this book would have been such a great loss. I learned so much middle-eastern European / North African / Mediterranean history, and am fascinated to read and research more. We've traveled some in Hungary, France, The Carpathians... And, one tends to latch onto and be mesmerized by the somewhat familiar.

I figured out that Svaty Jur, Slovakia--near our son's family's home until recently-- is named for the very same St. George (Svety Georgi) who plays a pivotal role in the searches involved. It's the old Six Degrees (or less) of Separation.

The Distant Hours

It started with a letter. A letter that had been lost a long time, waiting out half a century in a forgotten postal bag in the dim attic of a nondescript house in Bermondsey. I think about it sometimes, that mailbag: of the hundreds of love letters, grocery bills, birthday cards, notes from children to parents, that lay together, swelling and sighing as their thwarted messages whispered in the dark. Waiting, waiting, for someone to realize they were there. For it is said, you know, that a letter will always seek a reader, that sooner or later, like it or not, words have a way of finding the light, of making their secrets known.

The Distant Hours

Kate Morton

Pg. 7

 

Read this one between the two Elizabeth Kostova novels--The Swan Thieves and The Historian. Love Kate Morton. A wonderfully detailed writer. There are at least three, if not more, interwoven stories here. Dated chapter headings keep the chronology clear.

 

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The Swan Thieves

 

I got the call about Robert Oliver in April 1999, less than a week after he'd pulled a knife in the nineteenth-century collection at the National Gallery. It was a Tuesday, one of those terrible mornings that sometimes come to the Washington area when spring has already been flowery and even hot--ruinous hail and heavy skies, with rumbles of thunder in the suddenly cold air. It was also, by coincidence, exactly a week after the massacre at Columbine High School in Littleton, CO; I was thinking obsessively about that event, as I imagined every psychiatrist in the country must have been...

The Swan Thieves

Elizabeth Kostova

 

This is the opening paragraph, although I wish I'd marked more of the outstanding excerpts in this truly beautifully-written novel. Alas (Rarely get a chance to use that wonderfully expressive word.), I was reading a borrowed copy of Elizabeth Kostova's 2010 book. And, had not yet determined to never return the book to its rightful owner. (With permission...)

Anyhow, for me this is one of those books that you never want to end. I cherished the pages and stretched it out--a rarity for this book-a-day gal.

Now, I've begun Kostova's 2005 best seller--The Historian.

 

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The Operative

"Blogging?You're so twenty-ten," she said as she browsed down her queue of (Twitter) updates. "He's tweeting from the convention center for his student newspaper. It's called ambient journalism."
"I see. And how's that different from reporting?"
"Anyone can do it," she said.
"So the difference is it's for amateurs."
"That's harsh."
"Not at all," Kealey said. "Where's the editor, the veteran eyes?"
"It's the public, Ryan. The process has been democratized."
"Cheapened--no offense to Colin."
"You're wrong," she said confidently. "The good journalists get repeated hits. The bad ones are relegated to Facebook. The worst ones are left to comment on what's relegated to Facebook"

The Operative
by Andrew Britton
p. 33


A definite insight into the best view of social media vs. journalism, or what passes for journalism. Just wish Twitter was actually that democratic and newsworthy. Just saying.

A Gate at the Stairs

 

[protagonist Tassie describing some of the idiosyncrasies of her hometown in Wisconsin]

Prepositions mystified. Almost everyone said "on" accident instead of "by." They said "I'm bored of that" or "Wanna come with?" They pronounced "milk" to rhyme with "elk" and "milieu" as "miloo," as in skip to my loo--when they said it at all. And they used tenses like "I'd been gonna." As in, "I'd been gonna to do that but then I never got around toot." It was the hypothetical conditional past, time and intention carved so obliquely and fine that I could only almost comprehend it, until, like Einstein's theory of relativity, which also sometimes flashed comet like in my view, it whooshed away again, beyond my grasp. "I'd been gonna to do that" seemed to live in some isolated corner of the grammatical time-space continuum where the language spoken was a kind of Navajo or old, old French. It was part of a language with tenses so countrified and bizarrely conceived, I'm sure there was one that meant, "Hell yes, if I had a time machine!" People here would narrate an ordinary event entirely in the past perfect "I'd been driving to the store, and I'd gotten out, and she'd come up to me and I had said..." It never reached any other tense. All was backstory. All was preamble. The past severed prologue and was never uttered to be anything but. Who else on earth spoke like this?
pg. 67
A Gate at the Stairs
Lorrie Moore


I've actually read this one before, but it's well-written and well-conceived and it'd been long enough (oh so many other reads ago) that I enjoyed the unwinding of the plot and the character development even as I anticipated them.

This lady can write. And, with all that I read, I've come to understand that a lot of the novels written, promoted, reviewed, and revered are not well written. I love words and writers who use them so very well.