I'm about 100pp in so far, and it's great. It's a very academic mystery/thriller, and it's well-written, even sometimes very quotable. Here's some of what's going on so far, but I will not tell you exact mechanics, so it will still be interesting if you try to read it.
At this point in the book, a 16-yr-old girl who is the daughter of an American diplomat in Europe - they live in Amsterdam - has found a weird little book and a packet of letters half-hidden in her father's library. She asks him about it, and he reluctantly tells her the story, but only when they travel (the reasons for this become apparent, I think).
When he was in grad school studying history, a small antique book featuring only a woodcut of a ferocious dragon, labelled DRAKULYA, kept appearing in his study carrel. He eventually went to ask his thesis advisor about it. The advisor (Rossi) told him (Paul) that a similar thing had happened to him when he was younger, that he had decided to research it, and that it had led to some weird happenings in Istanbul, after which he'd decided to drop the topic. Rossi then handed him an envelope of info (clearly the papers Paul's daughter has found later on), and disappeared under mysterious, possibly violent circumstances.
In reading the papers, Paul found out that Rossi was NOT telling him the whole story of what had happened, and that it's a lot creepier and more involved than the weird happenings in Istanbul. Rossi had begun to deeply research the life, death, and burial of Vlad Tepes, and it seemed that such research drew "someone"'s attention, that speaking of Vlad could summon this person, that he would attack people around the researcher as a warning, etc. But for various reasons Paul decided to pursue this research, and that pursuit forms the main body of the story.
Meanwhile, his daughter begins to do some research of her own, with similar results: someone helps her, and something happens to him. And she begins to notice that, while Paul tells her parts of the story every time they take a trip from their home in Amsterdam (often to Slovenia, but sometimes to France or Italy), someone is probably watching them.
I don't think the idea is vampirism per se, in terms of the Anne Rice of it all, the romanticism that infused her books and also Coppola's Dracula movie, but more "What would happen if Vlad Tepes, someone like Stalin or Hitler, found a way to live forever?" - which seems to be exactly what is going on. So far I love how astute Kostova is about this kind of topical obsession... how research topics can gnaw at you. What each of the characters seem to go through in this respect - especially Paul's daughter, who starts lying to him so that she can do university library research after school - seemed so familiar and perfectly stated to me. I wouldn't be surprised if Kostova was drawing on her own feelings about researching Tepes, since she's clearly found just about everything there is to find.
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At this point in the book, a 16-yr-old girl who is the daughter of an American diplomat in Europe - they live in Amsterdam - has found a weird little book and a packet of letters half-hidden in her father's library. She asks him about it, and he reluctantly tells her the story, but only when they travel (the reasons for this become apparent, I think).
When he was in grad school studying history, a small antique book featuring only a woodcut of a ferocious dragon, labelled DRAKULYA, kept appearing in his study carrel. He eventually went to ask his thesis advisor about it. The advisor (Rossi) told him (Paul) that a similar thing had happened to him when he was younger, that he had decided to research it, and that it had led to some weird happenings in Istanbul, after which he'd decided to drop the topic. Rossi then handed him an envelope of info (clearly the papers Paul's daughter has found later on), and disappeared under mysterious, possibly violent circumstances.
In reading the papers, Paul found out that Rossi was NOT telling him the whole story of what had happened, and that it's a lot creepier and more involved than the weird happenings in Istanbul. Rossi had begun to deeply research the life, death, and burial of Vlad Tepes, and it seemed that such research drew "someone"'s attention, that speaking of Vlad could summon this person, that he would attack people around the researcher as a warning, etc. But for various reasons Paul decided to pursue this research, and that pursuit forms the main body of the story.
Meanwhile, his daughter begins to do some research of her own, with similar results: someone helps her, and something happens to him. And she begins to notice that, while Paul tells her parts of the story every time they take a trip from their home in Amsterdam (often to Slovenia, but sometimes to France or Italy), someone is probably watching them.
I don't think the idea is vampirism per se, in terms of the Anne Rice of it all, the romanticism that infused her books and also Coppola's Dracula movie, but more "What would happen if Vlad Tepes, someone like Stalin or Hitler, found a way to live forever?" - which seems to be exactly what is going on. So far I love how astute Kostova is about this kind of topical obsession... how research topics can gnaw at you. What each of the characters seem to go through in this respect - especially Paul's daughter, who starts lying to him so that she can do university library research after school - seemed so familiar and perfectly stated to me. I wouldn't be surprised if Kostova was drawing on her own feelings about researching Tepes, since she's clearly found just about everything there is to find.