the historian

By Elizabeth Kostova

“To you my perceptive reader, I bequeath my history”

The story opens in Amsterdam in 1972, when a teenage girl discovers a medieval book and a cache of yellowed letters in her diplomat father's library. The pages of the book are empty except for a woodcut of a dragon. The letters are addressed to: "My dear and unfortunate successor."
When the girl confronts her father, he reluctantly confesses an unsettling story: his involvement, twenty years earlier, in a search for his graduate school mentor, who disappeared from his office only moments after confiding to Paul his certainty that Dracula--Vlad the Impaler, an inventively cruel ruler of Wallachia in the mid-15th century--was still alive.
The story turns out to concern our narrator directly because Paul's collaborator in the search was a fellow student named Helen Rossi (the unacknowledged daughter of his mentor) and our narrator's long-dead mother, about whom she knows almost nothing. And then her father, leaving just a note, disappears also.
As well as numerous settings, both in and out of the East Bloc, Kostova has three basic story lines to keep straight—one from 1930, when Professor Bartolomew Rossi begins his dangerous research into Dracula, one from 1950, when Professor Rossi's student Paul takes up the scent, and the main narrative from 1972.
The criss-crossing story lines mirror the political advances, retreats, triumphs, and losses that shaped Dracula's beleaguered homeland--sometimes with the Byzantines on top, sometimes the Ottomans, sometimes the rag-tag local tribes, or the Orthodox church, and sometimes a fresh conqueror like the Soviet Union.
(from amazon.com)

Dracula stories are not my cup of tea. Gue ngga pernah baca Bram Stocker or Ann Rice novels. Paling gue cuman bisa related ama film Interview with Vampire, itu juga karena ada Brad Pitt :)
Gue beli buku ini juga rada ketipu sih, gue pikir jenis jenis kaya Da Vinci Code gitu. Tapi pas gue baca sih ternyata not bad juga, mungkin karena di buku ini gue bisa “kenalan” ama sosok Drakula ini, yang ternyata di luar anggapan gue selama ini adalah tokoh nyata dan punya history yg sangat panjang
Bagian awal buku ini menarik, tengah tengahnya kaya baca text book sejarah, menjelang ending naik lagi tapi endingnya mengecewakan. Bukan kenapa napa, buku ini tebelnya 704 halaman, jadi agak kecewa dong setelah berjuang habis habisan buat tamat, ternyata gitu ajah nih Count Dracula kekuatannya ???
Tapi gue suka buku ini pakai format surat menyurat buat nyeritain perjalanan tokohnya, jadi ngga terlalu ngebosenin.
Cuman buku ini asyik banget kalau dijadiin film..hmmmm, mungkin mini seri ajah tepatnya biar lebih puas. Karena tokoh di buku ini berkelana dari Inggris, Paris, Amsterdam, Istambul, Hungaria, Rumania..melewati gereja gereja tua, kubur kubur bawah tanah, situs situs kuno..... Mungkin kaya persilangan Indiana Jones and Interview with Vampire kaliiii...