So far, a good book

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FullerH

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I picked up the new novel, just out, The Historian by Elizabeth Kostova over the weekend and am enjoying it quite a lot. It is a complex novel with three plot lines, one set in the 1930s, one in the 1950s, and one in the 1970s, but all about three generations of historical scholars who set out to research the historical Dracula. Vlad III, the Impaler, Prince of Walachia and Terror of the Turks. The researches seem to lead to unfortunate ends, not only for the researchers but for those around them and it becomes clear that there is somone very old and very powerful who does not want people looking into this history. That someone is, of course, the vampire, Dracula. This is not the forst literary effort to conflate the Medieval warlord with the vampire, Fred Saberhagen has written a whole series of novels based on that conseit. But Kostova has the system down quite well and her writing, at least through the first seventeen chapters, is "spot-on", scary and suspenseful, with loads of local color and political color, what with people flitting in and out of the Warwaw Pact countries.
 
ABC did a thing on vampires Friday night and mentioned this book, gave it high marks. As a "dracula" fan I'll check it out!

I always find it funny though, the overwhelming similiarities between the fictional character and Vlad The Impaler, but Bram Stoker never admitted basing the one on the other.
 
TLC, if you haven't read any of Fred Saberhagen's "Old Friend of the Family" series, you really should. The first one is The Dracula Tape and the second one is Holmes-Dracula File, a delightful Sherlockian pastiche. You then begin to fill in the background with Dominion, Thorn, A Matter of Taste, A Question of Time, Old Friend of the Family, which explains that these people to whom he is "Uncle Matthew" are the descendents of Mina Harker (and Jonathan), Vlad's greatest love whom he sired into a vampire as she lay dieing. Others are {i]Seance for a Vampire[/i] and A Sharpness at the Neck. BTW, Saberhagen also cowrote the novel form of Bram Stoker's Dracula, the Francis Ford Coppola film from 1992. BTW, this is not the order in which they were published, but it is the best order chronicologically.
 
I read The Draculs Tape YEARS go, but I will print his list and check out the rest of them!

Funny side note, my cousin Patrick married a girl from Bucharest, Romania and she gets her knickers in a knot everytime someone asks her "have you been to Dracula's castle"?

HAHA
 
I'm half Hungarian, so this is a subject near and dear to my heart. Plus, I like sucking blood out of people's necks and I can turn into a bat. One ha ha ha, two, ha ha ha, three ha ha ha...

Anyway, I am also reading The Historian and am about halfway through. I like it, although it's a little slow. Not an action-packed vampire hunter adventure book by any stretch, but I like it. Very well-written and things seem to be building to a head.
 
The Last Confederate said:
I read The Draculs Tape YEARS go, but I will print his list and check out the rest of them!

Funny side note, my cousin Patrick married a girl from Bucharest, Romania and she gets her knickers in a knot everytime someone asks her "have you been to Dracula's castle"?

HAHA
Click to expand...

Yeah, I know what you mean. I am romanian (living in France) and get asked about Dracula too often. Bloody Bram Stoker ;)
 
Flava, I have read that Vlad Tepes is something of a national hero in Romania. Is that true?
 
I wouldnt say he's viewed as a big national hero. Our big national heros are:
- Mircea Cel Batran (Mircea the Old), uncle of Vlad Tepes; he made life difficult for the turks and defeated Baiazid once despite the small army (quite an achievement)
- Stefan Cel Mare (Stefan The Big), the most famous ruler of Moldova; he fought the turks for a looong period and defeated them most of the time
- Mihai Viteazul (Mihai The Brave), the most famous ruler of Tara Romaneasca (Valahia) who kicked the turks and unified Romania for the first time (didn't last long that time though)

Can you see the pattern here? :D
The turks were THE ENEMY. They invaded, got kicked out, invaded again, got kicked out ... for centuries. We were the buffer between them and the rest of Europe for quite a long time.
Vlad Tepes fought the turks, impaled towsends of them (really towsends, he didn't like to feed captive enemy), alive, through any body part. He also impaled murderers, thieves, his creditors ;), cheating wives, people he didn't like, people in general. He was the most cruel ruler from our history (at least by the books).Despite all this we like him. He stood up against the turks and in his twisted way tried to get rid of what he considered scum. There is a legend saying in Targoviste there was a gold cup near the fountain so travelers can drink. It was not stolen until Vlad Tepes was killed.
 
I had read that the Turks came in at one point and saw the thousands of impaled Turkish prisoners and decided to leave. So it appears that Vlad's impaling was not all cruely for its own sake but psychological warfare. But, no question, he apparently was one mean SOB. I just wonder if he was really any meaner than many of his contemporaries. The written records that we have of him are from German merchants whom Vlad disliked for their treatment of his people and with whom he carried on a long-standing feud, so how accurate are they? Yes, there are Ottoman records, but are they any better? He was also apparently caught in the conflict between the Roman Church and the Eastern Orthodox Church, so that neither was overly fond of him.
 
Finished the book this weekend and it is quite good. It gathers momentum rather like a heavy train, once it gets moving, it just won't stop.
 
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