Bloodsucker Proxy

By Margaret Hicks in Arts & Entertainment on Mar 24, 2006 4:21PM

We’re not scared of big books. In fact, we love big books, the bigger the better. It’s like those restaurant contests where you win something if you eat that big, huge cheeseburger. We always know we can eat it and we see it as challenging more than daunting.

So we were stoked when we finally picked up our copy of the “The Historian” by Elizabeth Kostova. So it might be a little too big and burly for the El, we still secretly flashed everyone on the train so they could see us reading this big, beautiful book.

And we liked the inside almost as much as we loved the outside. “The Historian” is the newest Dracula story told from the narrative voice of a young girl. It examines the life of Dracula from his Vlad the Impaler days making the story richer by making the man more real. It is told mostly through letters and flashbacks, and sometimes, letters within letters which sometimes led us to be confused. But no matter, we rambled on. The depth Kostova goes to in this book is astounding and besides being a thriller, and a historical novel, the book is a pretty intense travelogue as well, taking the reader in and out of Bulgaria, Transylvania and all over Eastern Europe.

As we raced to the end of the book, we were anxious, wondering if the payoff would be equal to the time spent with the book. And we were pleasantly surprised, we felt full and happy when we were done, just like we had eaten the worlds biggest cheeseburger.

You can see Elizabeth Kostovo at Writers on Record at the Lookingglass Theatre in the Water Tower Water Works at 821 North Michigan Avenue, Sun. March 26, 11:45am-1:00 p.m. For reservations call (312) 832-6788, or listen to the live broadcast on 98.7 WFMT, starting at noon.