{"id":5548,"date":"2006-11-05T12:19:15","date_gmt":"2006-11-05T17:19:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/?p=5548"},"modified":"2024-10-27T17:09:34","modified_gmt":"2024-10-27T21:09:34","slug":"the-historian","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/?p=5548","title":{"rendered":"<i>The Historian<\/i>, by Elizabeth Kostova"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><iframe style=\"width:120px;height:240px;\" marginwidth=\"0\" marginheight=\"0\" scrolling=\"no\" frameborder=\"0\" src=\"\/\/ws-na.amazon-adsystem.com\/widgets\/q?ServiceVersion=20070822&#038;OneJS=1&#038;Operation=GetAdHtml&#038;MarketPlace=US&#038;source=ac&#038;ref=tf_til&#038;ad_type=product_link&#038;tracking_id=thesheivari-20&#038;marketplace=amazon&#038;region=US&#038;placement=0316070637&#038;asins=0316070637&#038;linkId=MDCH5FPFTRJZ4Z3M&#038;show_border=true&#038;link_opens_in_new_window=true\"><br \/>\n<\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>\nI stayed up until 3 am to finish it.  I knew I would regret it today and I kinda do &#8230; I just woke up, and I hate waking up when, you know, it&#8217;s PM and not AM &#8211;  but I just could not put the book down.  I even fell asleep briefly at one point &#8211; with candles blazing all over my apartment &#8211; here, there, in the kitchen, the hallway, my room &#8230; Lovely.  I could have burned up in my sleep.  But I woke up maybe 20 minutes later &#8211; and slogged myself back to the book.  It was unthinkable that I would put the book down with only 50 pages to go.  So I kept going.  My back cramped, I hunched over it, sitting up in my bed &#8230; and finally finished it.  Naturally, when I went to sleep after that &#8211; I had a dream that I cut someone&#8217;s throat.  Lovely.  I KNEW that too as I kept reading.  It got very scary at the end and I thought, &#8220;I&#8217;m gonna regret this &#8230;&#8221;  But I finished it.<\/p>\n<p>It&#8217;s quite a book.  It&#8217;s terrifying, and actually &#8211; very sad.  It ends up being about loss.  Dealing with loss.  Letting people go.  If someone you loved was &#8211; you know &#8211; bit by a vampire &#8211; and you knew that they were now &#8220;undead&#8221; &#8230; how would you let them go?  How would you deal with this?  The postcards from Helen to her daughter were, for me, some of the saddest parts of the book.  Her feeling unclean, not clean enough to be near her daughter.  She would contaminate her child and so she left.  But what a sacrifice.<\/p>\n<p>And believe it or not, I did NOT see the ending coming.  The one in the Epilogue.  I had a feeling this wouldn&#8217;t be a &#8220;happily ever after&#8221; book &#8211; and I went back and looked at the prologue and saw that the very first sentence was something like, &#8220;After a shocking event, I have found myself wanting to tell this story &#8230;&#8221;  I had forgotten that.  So &#8230; in our narrator&#8217;s present-day life &#8211; and we know that she is now in her 50s &#8230; there has been a &#8220;shocking event&#8221;?  What could that be?<\/p>\n<p>When the librarian in Philadelphia came running out after her, saying, &#8220;You left these behind on the table &#8230;&#8221; I STILL didn&#8217;t see it coming.<\/p>\n<p>And once I read what she had left on the table &#8211; once it was revealed &#8230; I thought: Of course.  Of course.  This is how it MUST end.  There is no other way for this book to end.<\/p>\n<p>Sad.  I found the book to be very sad.  Not in a page-by-page way (not like <i>Atonement<\/i> is sad &#8211; where the entire book is suffused with absolute tragedy) &#8230; in a page-by-page way, the book is a thriller.  A horror story, a literary detective story, a romp through Eastern Europe chasing down leads &#8230; It has no introspection, almost no subtext.  But added up all together &#8230; when I closed the book &#8230; I felt sad.  Sad about loss.  Losing people.  Having to let people change.  Having to let people go.  Not just when they die &#8230; but when they have life events that change them, or alter them &#8230; Things do not stay the same.  We cannot get attached to things remaining unchanged.  We have to just keep &#8230; letting &#8230; go &#8230; It is one of the hardest things in the world.<\/p>\n<p>\n<iframe style=\"width:120px;height:240px;\" marginwidth=\"0\" marginheight=\"0\" scrolling=\"no\" frameborder=\"0\" src=\"\/\/ws-na.amazon-adsystem.com\/widgets\/q?ServiceVersion=20070822&#038;OneJS=1&#038;Operation=GetAdHtml&#038;MarketPlace=US&#038;source=ac&#038;ref=tf_til&#038;ad_type=product_link&#038;tracking_id=thesheivari-20&#038;marketplace=amazon&#038;region=US&#038;placement=0316070637&#038;asins=0316070637&#038;linkId=SLW6GO4YYTRJCCE4&#038;show_border=true&#038;link_opens_in_new_window=true\"><br \/>\n<\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I stayed up until 3 am to finish it. I knew I would regret it today and I kinda do &#8230; I just woke up, and I hate waking up when, you know, it&#8217;s PM and not AM &#8211; but &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/?p=5548\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[15],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5548"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5548"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5548\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":102962,"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5548\/revisions\/102962"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5548"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5548"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5548"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}