We’ve been implementing several new features here at Tingle Alley. One of these is “A Reader’s Diary,” notes on what I’m reading. Not really reviews, just reactions and thoughts of a reader making her way through her teetering TBR stack. The entries may be long, or as simple as “[Such-and-such] rocked.” We make no freaking promises.
The Historian went tits-up after page 120 or so. As you may recall, I was taken with the beginning, with the lure of vampires, musty books and exotic locales. Plot gist: Young girl living abroad comes across stash of letters pointing to her scholarly father’s connection to something spooky and blood-sucking. Even better, young girl has the sort of cool, dispassionate voice that equates with great intelligence and a Grade A ability to brood, that is, the passion is there but submerged. (Think of the narrator of Rebecca.)
The father explains himself, and as he does so we gradually become entwined in three or so stories of tracking Dracula across the decades and across Europe. Letters and recollections are used to alternate between the stories: “Daughter, as we sit at this seaside café, let me tell you of the time I bearded the Count at Chez Maxim’s,” etc. Elizabeth Kostova is an elegant writer with a sharp eye — some of her sentences and descriptions are sumptuous — and she has a winning conceit in this scholarly tracking of Dracula.
It’s the last book I expected to become monotonous, but monotonous it becomes. Here’s an example of why: At one point, we’ve got two characters in a desperate search for the tomb of Dracula, racing against time to find a revered friend who they fear has been snatched by the vampire. Just a note: If I am ever snatched by Dracula, please do not send these two scholars to look for me. Sure, they’ll board a plane, look in the occasional book, and interview the occasional librarian while they’re searching for me. But what they mostly will seem interested in doing is sight-seeing and sampling foreign cuisine. Seriously. I started counting and these two NEVER missed a meal. In Budapest, in Istanbul, in the Hungarian countryside. NEVER. They’re always breaking golden bread, or eating a charred kebab with tender meat inside, or dipping into a warm fragrant stew made by a simple peasant woman. It’s as if the book should have been named The Tourist.
As a lot of the novel’s action was being conveyed through letters, at some point I started to imagine the plot as told through the journal of the poor sod locked up in Dracula’s tomb: Day 3 Light-headed from loss of blood. Still, spent two hours clawing against stone of ancient monastery walls in vain search for some form of escape. I fear I am losing my sanity. I also fear that the MOTHERFUCKERS WHO ARE SUPPOSED TO BE LOOKING FOR ME ARE SMACKING THEIR FINGERS OVER SOME BAKLAVA RIGHT NOW INSTEAD OF HITTING THE GODDAMNED BOOKS.
Tingle Alley’s First Rule of Page Turners: It is a poor sort of adventure when the protagonists manage three squares a day.
There is also a barren stretch, maybe 150 pages or so, where the worst evil we come in contact with is a Bulgarian bureaucrat with a short temper and a condescending attitude toward scholars, which considering the arsenal of potential evil minions that could have been dispersed to harry our protags’ progress, is not scary at all.
I hate to sound so impatient, and I’m making what is, in fact, a very competent book sound worse than it is. I think my impatience comes from frustration — The Historian was nearly a great book and it was so disappointing to feel its greatness begin leaking out the sides in those middle chapters. I feel aggrieved with the book somehow.
More than the leisurely pacing, the largest fault of the book lies in a laziness of characterization. A disappointment as we begin so promisingly with that wonderful young girl character whose voice is so shrewd and observant. She is the sort of narrator one implicitly trusts to notice good things. But then the narration goes soft, perhaps because the baton of the story is passed to one too many speakers: The writing is still lovely, but the reader can’t help but notice that this is a world where every monk is kind and smiling (even if baffled), every landlady has had a hundred grandchildren and is willing to babysit, every elderly scholar is benign and wise, while every villain is cold-faced and short-tempered. Frankly, I’ve seen more variance in human nature working at the front desk of my library.
This is why the book grows so monotonous — no one, after the beginning, has been drawn in such a way as to surprise us. So that when, in one of the later chapters, Dracula first appears in (the Undead) flesh, even the thrilling touch that he is wearing a cape of white fur (so odd, so perfect) couldn’t revive my interest for more than a half-second.
THINKING ABOUT
Reading The Historian made me think fondly of the side characters in other novels: The brusque, athletic, roughly kind sister-in-law in Rebecca, the crewmen on The Covenant in Kidnapped! (this while I was belligerently stewing over how good adventures mean skipped meals), just about any walk-on in Dickens, that sort of thing.
These characters rivet, in part, because they are allowed to exist out of humor and sympathy with the narrator. And that seems in some way to be not just a sign of good writing, but also a moral stance. We become moral beings as we learn that our wishes are not the world’s wishes — that people (with their own jostling, attendant wishes) exist independently of us. Cardboard characters are characters that haven’t broken free of the solipsism of the narrator. They’re not independent. At best, they’re mirrors reflecting the narrator back to herself — cold-faced when things are bad, wise and benign when things are good — at worst, they’re wallpaper.
ALSO READ
It was with relief I slogged to the finish of The Historian on Saturday morning, and picked up Tayari Jones’ The Untelling that afternoon. This post is already too long but it feels appropriate to go on as one of the great strengths of The Untelling is the vividness of the characters — they were so real, so immediate, that I dreamt about them that night. As if I knew them.
The plot gist: As a kid, Aria Jackson’s in the backseat when her family is in a horrible car accident, killing her father and baby sister. Now she is a young woman, still living in Atlanta, and as the story gets going, she discovers she is pregnant by her boyfriend Dwayne.
I loved this book, which is surprising only because — as the panting after vampires above indicates — I’ve been in the mood lately for fairy tales and mysteries and supernatural happenings. And The Untelling is deeply realistic — we follow Aria as she visits the doctor with her mother and older sister (the other survivors of the car crash), watches a movie with Dwayne, talks wedding dresses with her roommate Rochelle. But it is not a narrow book — the novel takes in a wide swathe of Atlanta, especially its black middle-class and poorer neighborhoods. And the characters and their conflicts are so deftly drawn, that I found myself deeply moved as I went along, and I couldn’t do much else till I finished the book Sunday morning.
This review from The Washington Post gets the charms of the book right. Reviewer Carrie Brown writes: “Jones has made Aria a careful witness to her own life and the lives of those around her; her observations, sometimes wry, sometimes poignant, always honest, inflate the novel with hope, sending it soaring over its wasteland of woes.”
Next up is A Dream in Polar Fog by Yuri Rytkheu. It should be nice to read about ice and snow while it’s so muggy out.
