I first read Elizabeth Kostova’s The Historian when it came out in 2005.
Curiously, there is only one thing about the book or my reading experience that I remember: I was terrified! It took me 6 months to finish reading the dang book. I’d get so scared that I’d had to close the book every few pages, and put it away for a bit to settle the nerves (and be able to get back to sleeping with the lights out).
As I’m someone who gets spooked easily, you might ask why on earth would I read The Historian to begin with. Beats me. It’s not like I didn’t know what it was about.1 I must have been seduced by all the hype surrounding it when it came out.2 It’s the only explanation for why I rushed to Barnes & Noble to grab me a hardcover.
But here’s the other equally crazy thing: this book has been on my “to re-read” list for several years now. Talk about insanity, right? I don’t really get why it’s on that list either — this has to be some form of reader masochism.
The physical book had long been donated to my local library. (I couldn’t hold on to it; just seeing the book on the shelf reminded me of my terror.) But when I saw BookBub offer it at bargain discount recently, I grabbed a Kindle version immediately.
Before I started the re-read, I wondered if I was going to have the same experience as before. If I’d get spooked as much as I did the first time. How long would it take me to read the book this time?
• • •
I took precautions this time. I started the re-read while traveling; a plane-full of people should be enough to keep me from getting spooked.
Want to know what happened?
The Historian the second time around felt like an entirely new book! Is this even the same novel I read twenty years ago?
There’s so much here that I don’t remember from before. So much 15th century Eastern European history. Kostova must have done loads of research for this book.3 There’s the end of the Byzantine Empire, the Ottoman Empire (and its bloody legacy), the cultural tension between the Christian West and the Islamic East. I’d somehow forgotten that this was also a novel about empires collapsing, borders shifting, and centuries of conflict layered beneath every city the characters visited.
At times, the book read like a travelogue. The geography, the monasteries, those train rides from one beautiful, eternal city to another. Kostova slows down, lingers on scenes in these ancient cities. The streets, the cafes, the libraries... the romance and leisure of unhurried travel experiences so atmospherically described you’d want to experience these places yourself. (Okay, maybe not so much the scary places where something, you know, happens.)
“The Historian is suffused with the sensual and intellectual pleasures to be found in dusty old libraries, with their leather-bound books and fading maps.” — Susan Larson, The Times-Picayune
And then there’s the deeply loving father-child relationship, albeit tinged with unexplored trauma. The father’s love for books and research and travel, all passed on to his daughter. The part of me that will forever be my father’s daughter, felt these scenes deeply. In the pages where Kostova described the father at home with a book and his papers, I imagined my father reading in his small home office/library.
Were all these there the first time?
None of these registered with me from the first reading. The only thing I could remember was the fear.
Why is that?
• • •
Had I really forgotten six hundred pages of medieval history? Had Kostova somehow rewritten the novel over the last twenty years?
Or had my fear during my first reading simply crowded everything else out?
The history was there. The libraries, the train rides, the father-daughter relationship. They were all there. I simply wasn’t able to notice them.
These two experiences reading The Historian made me think about how fear works. My first instinct was to say fear hijacked my attention in the first reading and didn’t leave much room for anything else. It seemed to ask the same question over and over: Am I safe? Everything unrelated to that question became background noise.
But I wondered if there was another angle to this.
The French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty argued that we never experience the whole world at once. Our attention is always bringing some things into focus while letting others recede into the background.4
Perhaps fear didn’t hijack my attention so much as reorganized it. It became the foreground of my experience, while everything else faded into the background.
That would explain why, twenty years later, it felt as though I were reading an entirely different novel. Those other parts had not been missing the first time. They had simply never been the thing I was looking at.
I started thinking about what this reading experience says about my other experiences where fear (or some equally strong emotion) was involved. How my perspective of those times might be distorted too, my attention focused on the one thing and ignoring everything else because it had no space for anything else.
I wonder, if I were given the chance to do those experiences over, would I still only notice what I remember about those times? Or would an entirely different experience emerge?
It made me consider whether we experience much of the world this way. That we're always seeing less than what’s really there, because whatever currently holds our attention pushes everything else into the background. But when that narrowing loosens, our attention can relax and take in more. A widening of the lens so to speak.
• • •
Twenty years ago, I thought I’d read The Historian. Looking back, I’m not so sure. I may have spent six months reading fear instead.
✴️ I’d love to hear from you:
Does this track with your experience with fear or any other strong emotion? Have you ever returned to a book or a memory and discovered you'd only remembered the emotion?
Talk soon,
Lou Blaser
Lou Blaser exchanged PowerPoint decks for essays and has yet to regret the trade. She writes Shaping Life, where she follows her curiosity through books, conversations, films, and whatever else refuses to leave her alone.
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Blending history and folklore, The Historian is “the story of a young woman plunged into a labyrinth where the secrets of her family’s past connect to an inconceivable evil: the dark fifteenth-century reign of Vlad the Impaler and a time-defying pact that may have kept his awful work alive through the ages.” One reader said, “It’s a vampire novel that desperately does not want to be a vampire novel.” According to Kostova, “Dracula is a metaphor for the evil that is so hard to undo in history.”
The Historian is the debut novel of Elizabeth Kostova, and is the first ever debut novel to land at number one of the NYT bestseller list the week of its release. This remarkable feat was due almost entirely to the heavy promotion of its publisher (Little, Brown and Company) in the weeks leading to publication. According to The Age, "By the time it arrived in the bookstores, The Historian had already made the news several times.” As soon as it hit the bookstores, Kostova went on a 15-city book tour, including book signings and readings which then prompted further media and TV coverage. (source)
Kostova spent roughly 10 years writing this book. It is also partly auto-biographical. Kostova's father is an academic who told her vampire stories in her youth. While her father was on academic exchange, she lived in Slovenia for several months. This inspired her long-term interest in the Balkans and Eastern Europe, which she studied in college and traveled extensively through in the late 80s. And she ultimately married a Bulgarian. One might say, she’s been researching this book her entire life. (source)
This is admittedly a very much simplified and flatter version of his arguments in Phenomenology of Perception. But I think you can excuse it as a fair representation. 😊
"All that survives is the emotion" - Ezra Pound writing about ancient literature fragments.
Not a book I was familiar with, but I now have it sitting on my kindle. I may take your lead in reading it in well-lit busy places rather than alone at night!