The search for housing goes on... I wish I could just live in the Savoy. It's right next to school....
I just finished "The Historian" by Elizabeth Kostova. It was pushed pretty hard by the publisher and the NY Times as the next "Da Vinci Code" (which I haven't read). An Eastern European "Da Vinci Code" dealing with Dracula.
Well, it was pretty terrible. Both in style and substance. It was boring, poorly paced, and contrived. Not to mention huge plot holes. All the action in the 642 page book takes place after page 600. The characters go all over Europe to make astounding discoveries that could be found in the encyclopedia ("Dracula was a real ruler of Wallachia who impaled people!)
But I can forgive an aesthetically bad book (as Belinsky said), but not a morally bad one.
The author, who tries to withold all information about herself save that she went to Yale, has a Bulgarian name (and I assume is from Bulgaria the way she writes about it).
The themes she explores in her book are sexuality and hatred. In kind of a reversal of Bram Stoker's book, here, Eastern European men are emasculated and the book focuses on the sexual liberation of Eastern European women by Western men. The only sympathetic Eastern European men are old and impotent (maybe literally). Her three female protagonists all find love and liberation in Englishmen. Way to sell us out Elizabeth. Its bad enough we're superstitious and irrational and thus incapable of defeating evil, but now our women need pasty dudes? I'll stick with our sexual predator rep.
***SPOILER***
Ok, this is almost comically bad. The whole point of the book is that Dracula (who is only in about 20 pages of it) is trying to find someone to catalogue his library that in which he has gathered "lost" works over the last 500 years. In a Darth Vader "I am your father" moment, the protagonist says ,"I'll never join you" (in cataloguing your books).
********
The book which is overflowing bookshelves on both sides of the Atlantic is being sold for half price here now... still overpriced.
I just finished "The Historian" by Elizabeth Kostova. It was pushed pretty hard by the publisher and the NY Times as the next "Da Vinci Code" (which I haven't read). An Eastern European "Da Vinci Code" dealing with Dracula.
Well, it was pretty terrible. Both in style and substance. It was boring, poorly paced, and contrived. Not to mention huge plot holes. All the action in the 642 page book takes place after page 600. The characters go all over Europe to make astounding discoveries that could be found in the encyclopedia ("Dracula was a real ruler of Wallachia who impaled people!)
But I can forgive an aesthetically bad book (as Belinsky said), but not a morally bad one.
The author, who tries to withold all information about herself save that she went to Yale, has a Bulgarian name (and I assume is from Bulgaria the way she writes about it).
The themes she explores in her book are sexuality and hatred. In kind of a reversal of Bram Stoker's book, here, Eastern European men are emasculated and the book focuses on the sexual liberation of Eastern European women by Western men. The only sympathetic Eastern European men are old and impotent (maybe literally). Her three female protagonists all find love and liberation in Englishmen. Way to sell us out Elizabeth. Its bad enough we're superstitious and irrational and thus incapable of defeating evil, but now our women need pasty dudes? I'll stick with our sexual predator rep.
***SPOILER***
Ok, this is almost comically bad. The whole point of the book is that Dracula (who is only in about 20 pages of it) is trying to find someone to catalogue his library that in which he has gathered "lost" works over the last 500 years. In a Darth Vader "I am your father" moment, the protagonist says ,"I'll never join you" (in cataloguing your books).
********
The book which is overflowing bookshelves on both sides of the Atlantic is being sold for half price here now... still overpriced.
posted by akrites @ 4:27 AM
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