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.
Great post! It’s funny, I was just talking to Sarah Weinman about how we both really liked THE HISTORIAN but that it’s a book that you have to read FAST or it drags. I agree with you that THE UNTELLING is the better novel of the two–it’s great, isn’t it? (p.s. Did you read VALIANT already? If not, you must!)
Comment by Jenny D — 6/28/2005 @ 12:01 am
I think my great mistake with The Historian is that I started reading Pictures from an Institution during the day, while up in my office, and it made me so cross with The Historian’s shortcomings when I’d pick it up at night.
So following your and Sarah’s theory, I read at the wrong speed.
Isn’t The Untelling great? Such good stuff.
I haven’t read Valiant yet but did read and like Tithe. And I think I’ve also seen Gwenda and a couple others sending up ecstatic signals over it. Did you prefer it to Tithe?
Comment by CAAF — 6/28/2005 @ 12:13 am
I also adored Valiant. It’s a much better novel than Tithe (and I thought Tithe was wonderful). Especially technically. It’s like Holly really knows how to write a novel now. Tithe was her journeyman book and now she’s a master. I’m aching to read it again. They other thing I love about it–which is probably odd given that it’s about human/faery relations–was it’s realism. It’s so much closer to my experience of being a teenager than many other YA books out there.
Comment by Justine Larbalestier — 6/28/2005 @ 3:27 am
Carrie, I’m so relieved that you backtracked from your previous praise of The Historian, although I still think I disliked it a great deal more than you did (about the speed thing – I read the first 2/3 of the novel in 3 days, so I don’t think that was a factor for me). I just found it so bland. Kostova does write beautifully, but with no heart, and the characters all sound the same. It’s a horror story that doesn’t frighten, a mystery that doesn’t excite, a romance that doesn’t affect.
I can’t believe I’m writing this, but if forced to choose between rereading The Historian and The Da Vinci Code, I’d choose the latter. For all its many flaws, it isn’t boring.
Comment by Abigail — 6/28/2005 @ 4:42 am
Justine, I completely know what you mean about realism – and that tracks somewhat with my disappoint with the Historian: I’ve gotten very spoiled by some fantastic fabulist stories that feel realer than realism. It’s as if by scrambling reality they get closer to the quick of things. So it was disappointing to go to a book that felt as if all its characters had been gotten out of other books … Anyway, I will look for Valiant toot sweet.
and Abigail, god help me but I know what you mean too: I think the Da Vinci Code, even with all its craptastic prose, was far better at getting a driving sense of urgency, race-against-time going. My own thought on The Historian is that she was uneasy writing the adventure parts (made up mainly of the tracking of DeRossi to Dracula’s tomb) and should have just whacked those sections out, and given us instead a 200-or-so-page coming-of-age story of a girl whose scholarly father had had a run-in with Dracula and about the girl’s own attraction to the myth, etc. Those parts were strongest — she’s better on the atmospheric. And it would have been a wonderful and exciting and spooky novel.
Have either of you read Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell? I abandoned it halfway through and keep meaning to circle back and complete (my husband tells me it gets better in the back). But it was one for which I also had high hopes, and then felt let down because even while the prose was gorgeous — Clarke writes some of the most beautiful magical scenes I’ve read – I couldn’t, after a certain point, make myself continue to care. The characters had a similar unreal feel.
Comment by CAAF — 6/28/2005 @ 8:45 am
I do think it helped that I read the bulk of THE HISTORIAN on a train between Ottawa and Toronto, in that I had loads of uninterrupted time. But the reason I knew the book worked for me is that when I wasn’t reading, I got incredibly cranky. I wanted to know what happened, and yeah there were boring parts (that 100 page section in the middle-end? Should have been cut) but I was actually glad that Kostova *didn’t* go for the obvious raising-stakes page turner approach. She took her time and that’s rare nowadays. It was more of an old-fashioned novel in that respect (American Tragedy meets Dracula?)
But I am getting so ridiculously excited to read Tayari Jones it is not even funny. So thanks for stoking that flame further, Carrie!
Comment by Sarah — 6/28/2005 @ 9:43 am
I think the yearly tagline for the big blockbuster fantasy novel should now be: “If you read only one book this summer, make sure it’s a really long one.”
Comment by gwenda — 6/28/2005 @ 9:47 am
oh Sarah, so glad to stoke the flames of someone’s eagerness to read The Untelling … let me know what you think when you get to it. I think it deserves many, many more readers.
I do agree with the virtues of the taking-the-time ness of The Historian, but I thought if she was going to take that approach they should have removed the whole “we’re looking for our friend in the tomb” element, which wouldn’t have been hard to do. If they were just trying to work a scholarly puzzle I wouldn’t have gotten so fierce with their meal-taking and wandering the streets of the city they were in.
And I would argue that what those really long, old-fashioned novels offer is an attention to the niceties of character and social relations that was missing here. Kostova’s a fine, intelligent writer: I know she’s capable of noticing these things, so I just hope in her next novel she does.
Gwenda, they may have to start using a bike pump in the warehouses to inflate all the “fantasy books of summer” to their proper size.
Comment by CAAF — 6/28/2005 @ 10:00 am
Mmmm…kebab.
Welcome back, CAAF. You’ve officially relieved me from going to hear Kostova read tonight–I’m grateful. The Regulator sent out two emails exhorting people to come–I guess that’s the $500,000 in marketing scratch in action…
Comment by Jimmy Beck — 6/28/2005 @ 10:06 am
I loved JONATHAN STRANGE, it’s actually much more my kind of book than THE HISTORIAN (better prose style) though there are obvious similarities. VALIANT is amazing, I completely second Justine’s comments–loved TITHE, but VALIANT is just superb. And JUST like being a teenager! The NJ transit train scene and the running around NY and behaving badly part of it practically made me have flashbacks to myself at age 17 or 18, it’s a great, great book… Yes, neither Clarke nor Kostova is primarily interested in character…
Comment by Jenny D — 6/28/2005 @ 10:22 am
Agree with you about Jonathan Strange, even if I did wander off halfway through. It’s got great wit, which was lacking in The His. (and that’s the last thing I’m saying about The His. as I feel I am whacking on it mercilessly, when it really wasn’t so bad. I am trying to diagnose my disappointment.
Jimmy, I bet the Regulator will be PACKED. Far better to sit in a quiet restaurant eating a kebab.
Comment by CAAF — 6/28/2005 @ 10:57 am
I liked Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, although I think the hoopla that surrounded it was excessive (not as egregious as in the case of The Historian, but still unwarranted) and that it would have benefitted from some editing. The thing that kept me going was Clarke’s beautiful prose and her wonderful pastiche of the Regency novel. It truly felt credible to me that I was reading a book written several centuries ago, plus the footnotes and various digressions peppered throughout the book are just my thing. Not a perfect book by a long shot, but I enjoyed it.
I actually ended up thinking about S&N while I was reading The Historian because it occurs to me that they might be part of a trend of gentrifying genre stories and marketing them to people who wouldn’t be caught dead with Neil Gaiman or China Miéville. The Time Traveller’s Wife might also belong in this group, and there’s a review in this week’s NYT of a book called The Traveller that also sounds right. With the exception of the Clarke (and even in her case, if it weren’t for the prose, you would have been better off reading Hope Mirrlees’ Lud-in-the-Mist and getting the same story for a third of the page count), these books don’t seem to do genre very well, but they’re respectable enough to get reviews in the major papers. In fact, I remember when the S&N publicity machine was warming up with that absurd ‘Harry Potter for adults’ tagline, I made some annoyed noises at Patrick Nielsen-Hayden’s website and was told that the marketing strategy was specifically geared to getting people who wouldn’t normally read fantasy to pick this book up because it wasn’t their idea of what fantasy was.
Comment by Abigail — 6/28/2005 @ 3:57 pm
Heh heh … “tits up” … that’s gonna be the new TEV tagline. And JS&MN made me want to beat my head until my ears bled.
Comment by TEV — 6/28/2005 @ 4:30 pm
Oh and yes, yes, yes: you must read Valiant. It’s SO great.
Comment by gwenda — 6/28/2005 @ 9:39 pm
Any book that garners a two million dollar advance and a ton of hype is bound to be a disappointment. I’m tired of this one before opening page one.
Comment by Patry — 6/29/2005 @ 10:39 pm