aaand it continues!

[verbminx]

Not sure how much I can say about this here publicly. But let's go.

I've mentioned lately that Tom and I are both having runs of almost comically bad luck. Bad timing, disappointment, misfortune, you name it. But none of it has been earthshattering, nobody has died or anything: it doesn't negatively impact the status quo or quality of life for either of us, it's only been disappointments related to our ambitions. I got sick and couldn't work, he didn't get a job he was up for, we have to postpone moving, etc. So... we're just shaking our heads and waiting for it to pass.

The latest thing came today. Tom was set to do a graphic novel for Oni, which was to be written by Andy Greenwald, who wrote a book on the emo scene called Nothing Feels Good and who has a novel coming out called Miss Misery. The proposal and the first 15 pages of script for The Satellite Heart have been kicking around the house for a while, and T. was waiting for more script so that he could get to work. Alas, Andy kind of overcommitted himself or something and is not going to be able to get the script done any time in the near future, so the project is shelved, probably permanently.

On the upside, Oni has another project they want to offer Tom; we'll see what happens with that.

I spent most of today with a terrible headache. We will blame PMS. Tylenol and tea helped. My mom bought me a copy of The Historian by Elizabeth Kostova, which came out last week. It's a first novel and Kostova got a huge advance, so it's already kind of infamous, but I read an excerpt I liked and a couple of great reviews. In tone the excerpt reminds me more of The Secret History and The Alienist than The DaVinci Code (crap! total crap!) - so I'm cautiously excited. They say this is "the book that will make Dracula scary again." Oh, and it's 40% off at Borders.

Comments

[aranel.livejournal.com]

If it's like The Secret History, I'm in! On the other hand, I'm very not into vampires. Let me know what you think of it when you get a chance.

I hope things start to go better for you.

[verbminx.livejournal.com]

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.

[aranel.livejournal.com]

Hm. The whole research obsession thing sounds just like A.S. Byatt's Persuasion, which is amazing (just read it last week for the first time). I might have to try this, even though I'm not generally into horror.

[verbminx.livejournal.com]

Possession? Well, maybe a little like that, but not as lighthearted or romantic... the tone of the writing is really different and much more similar to the other books I mentioned. Anyway Possession was mostly Byatt's experiment with writing in a ton of different voices, so the point of it was not so much the story but the ventriloquism (a major reason why I didn't like the film version). The Historian only has a handful of voices, and they all know each other in some way and are all academic, so there isn't much reason for any of them to be extremely dissimilar.

At the point I've reached in the book, there is now an actual vampire of sorts, but he's a creepy little stalker who isn't in any way motivated by his "thirst."