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Taphophilia (dot) Com...
A repository of morbid curiosities:
Thanatology and Taphophile Issues, Cemetery,
Funeral Industry and Death Related News.
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On a scholarly hunt for bad old Vlads tomb |
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Written by DeadGirl
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Tuesday, 12 July 2005 |
The Historian
By Elizabeth Kostova
Little, Brown. 647 pp. $25.95
Reviewed by Susan Balée
In The Historian, Elizabeth Kostova's first novel, history lives, and so does Dracula - Vlad the Impaler to you - who's been pursued down the centuries by a motley assortment of monks, archivists, historians, and precocious graduate students.
In the best 19th-century tradition of Bram Stoker (whose Dracula serves as the seminal text here), the story is told mostly through letters and memoirs. Documentation is everything to these protagonists and many "Aha!" moments occur when one vampire seeker shows another an important manuscript.
After all, texts endure and flesh does not (except for undead flesh). As one of the narrators writes to his "dear and unfortunate successor": There is survival and survival, the historian learns to his grief. The very worst impulses of humankind can survive generations, centuries, even millennia. And the best of our individual efforts can die with us at the end of a single lifetime.
Therefore, in The Historian, scholars who might be at each other's throats in a typical academic setting are trying to spare each other's throats in this one. Knowledge is power, and all the eggheaded heroes of this novel share knowledge and ideas in their quest for the evil prince.
Happily for the reader, our narrators must travel to many exotic locales in search of bad old Vlad's tomb. The descriptions of the Slovenian Alps, the South of France, and Istanbul, Turkey, are magnificent. Kostova has provided readers with a marvelous travelogue of all the important sites of the Byzantine and Ottoman Empires. Everything you ever wanted to know about the history, politics, religion, architecture and art of these places is woven skillfully into the story.
The main narrator comes to Philadelphia to visit what locals will recognize as the Rosenbach Museum & Library. Insofar as this fine little "Museum of the Book" houses Bram Stoker's original notebooks on Dracula, it's a natural place to set a scene of this novel. After all, Stoker did the major research on vampires before he wrote his classic. He's the guy who got the goods on garlic, crosses, stakes through the heart, etc. And Kostova, like Hollywood, does not deviate from the folklore. Culture resides in a country's language, literature, folk beliefs, and food, and the author serves heaping helpings of all of them: Yogurt with cucumber and skewered, grilled meats, coffee and pastries rolled in honey and almonds flavor the scenes set in Turkey; layered potatoes and salami, stews of every sort, warm goat's milk, a strong liqueur made of apricots called "palinka," and pancakes filled with veal add gusto to the scenes set in Eastern Europe.
One character informs us: "Coffee has a tragic history in Budapest." It seems that in 1541, the invader Suleyman II invited a local general to a sumptuous meal in his tent. After the Hungarian general had finished eating and was enjoying the first cup of coffee he'd ever tasted, Suleyman told him that the Turkish troops had captured Buda Castle while they were dining. The character adds, "You can imagine how bitter that coffee tasted."
The only character who doesn't seem hungry enough is Vlad himself. The real man's cruelty is legendary - reputedly, he impaled about 14,000 of his own citizens, in addition to every Turkish enemy he could capture. He liked to torture people; he loved to watch them die. Yet when readers finally meet him in the novel, he seems almost courtly, an out-of-style old scholar who spends too much time alone with books. He even tells one of the academics he's captured, "I became an historian in order to preserve my own history forever." In short, he's nothing like the raging hemoholics in Anne Rice's novels. Far from being an addict desperate to get a fix, he exercises restraint: The wounds he leaves on most of his victims' throats are rather dainty - more like hickeys than ripped jugulars - and a mere trickle of dried blood stains his own little mustache.
Fortunately, Vlad's somewhat anemic portrayal doesn't diminish the overall force of the novel. That's because in The Historian, the journey matters more than the ultimate destination. So, sit back and enjoy the lush writing (infinitely superior to the hackneyed prose of The Da Vinci Code), the intellectual suspense, the clever plot and the likable protagonists. Elizabeth Kostova is a first-rate writer and she's earned her laurels with this debut.
http://www.philly.com/mld/inquirer/news/magazine/daily/12109697.htm |
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Taphophilia?
taphophilia (taf′ō-fil′ē-ă)
ORIGIN:
From the Greek words taphos, meaning "tomb" or "sepulcher" and philia, meaning "attraction or affinity to something, in particular the love or obsession with something"
DEFINITION: 1. An excessive interest in graves and cemeteries. 2. A love or fondness for funerals, graves, and cemeteries. 3. In psychiatry, a morbid attraction to graves and cemeteries
Quote Repository
“Its funny the way most people love the dead. Once you are dead, you are made for life.” Jimi Hendrix, Rolling Stone, D
Shirtless and Sculpted
The Men of Mortuaries 2008 Calendar is now available! All sale proceeds benefit KAMMCARES, a breast cancer foundation.
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