Tag Archives: genre: historical fiction

The Historian

fiction, history, horror, supernatural, suspense / thriller August 12, 2019 Leave a comment

The Historian by Elizabeth Kostova may have been my favorite book of 2018 for its detail, complexity, and the blending of the history and folklore of Vlad Tepes (Vlad the Impaler) and his fictional counterpart, Count Dracula.

It kicked off a series of Dracula books for me in 2018. Dracula is a fascinating legend to begin with, and as I said previously, I did a lot of “scary” in 2018. The Historian isn’t a typical “horror” story but there are a lot of elements of it, and it’s definitely a suspenseful book. I’d put it mostly under historical fiction, but it’s a lot more complicated than that.

The Historian is a story within a story. It’s actually a story within a story within a story, but it begins to get confusing if you think about it too hard, and it really wasn’t a confusing book. Don’t get me wrong – it was long and quite dense. I did the audiobook version and it was 24 hours? 26? It was long. But it wasn’t confusing.

The unnamed narrator, in Amsterdam in the 1970s, finds a vellum book with a woodcut of a dragon associated with Dracula, and she asks her father, Paul, about it. He explains that he found it in his study carrel during his time as a graduate student in the 1950s. He took it to his mentor/advisor, Professor Bartholomew Rossi, and discovered Rossi had also found one when he was a graduate student in the 1930s. Rossi researches Vlad Tepes, the Dracula myth, and these mysterious books. Rossi travels as far as Istanbul, but unexplained circumstances and characters send him back to his graduate work at the university and Rossi, in the 1950s, informs Paul that he believes that Dracula is, somehow, still alive. After meeting with Paul, Rossi disappears.

There are smears of blood on Rossi’s desk and on the ceiling, but other than that, everything is in place. The police suspect run of the mill foul play, but Paul is certain that something involved in research into the Dracula legend is to blame for his disappearance.

The majority of the book follows the 1950s story, with cuts in and out to the 1930s and 1970s storylines, with all three of the main characters – the narrator, Paul, and Rossi – researching the Dracula myth in Europe and eventually converging later in the book.

As I said, the blending of history and folklore in this story made it one of my favorites of 2018. There’s tons of cool info about Vlad Tepes, the Dracula legend, and Europe in general. I loved the story surrounding the narrator, Paul, and Rossi as well as the ambiguous ending.

The Historian was one of those books that made me sad it was over, like it should have kept going, like there was even more story that could have been told. It was so good that I jumped on Kostova’s The Swan Thieves, which ended up being one of the books I returned early and didn’t finish last year. I don’t know if Kostova is a one hit wonder, but if she is, I very much enjoyed and highly recommend this one hit. If you enjoy history and folklore like I do, I think you’ll like The Historian as well.

Smoke

fiction January 11, 2019 1 Comment

I read Smoke on my honeymoon and it’s the first book I read by Dan Vyleta that I found unsatisfying, but not for the reasons you would think.

The premise is really, really good.

In an alternate Victorian England those who are wicked are marked by the smoke that pours out of their bodies. The aristocracy are clean, proof of their virtue and right to rule, while the lower classes are drenched in sin and soot.

Thomas Argyle is the only son of a wayward aristocrat. Charlie Cooper is his best friend. When Thomas finds himself under the boot heel of a sadistic headboy in the treacherous halls of their elite boarding school, he and Charlie begin to question the rules of their society. Then the boys meet Livia, the daughter of a wealthy and powerful family. She leads them to a secret laboratory where they learn that smoke may not be as it seems, and together they set out to uncover the truth about their world.

I enjoyed the book. Like Vyleta’s other books that I’ve read – The Quiet Twin and The Crooked Maid – it was atmospheric, detail oriented, with interesting twists (not as interesting as the other two, but still good) and somehow slow but well paced.

I could predict some of the twists, which is why I didn’t think it was as good as the first two books, but the end was good enough for me to overlook this.

That said, I found the explanation for the smoke dissatisfying. I just…didn’t like it.

However. I really liked the characters – Thomas, Charlie, and Livia – are all a lot of fun. Livia was irritating for awhile, but her mother more than makes up for this. Once Livia lightens up and asserts herself, she’s great.

The villain of the story – an older boy from a very wealthy family – is quite the villain. More animal than human once he gives in to his worst instincts, he’s real and frightening, and of course, and not so subtly showing the “virtue” of the ruling class as a lot of nonsense.

The story setting was also a lot of fun. With echos of Dickens’s own 19th century London woven through the text, Smoke isn’t my favorite of Vyleta’s books, but it was one of my favorite novels of 2018.

A Tale of Two Cities

fiction May 21, 2018 Comments: 2

I’ve read Charles Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities before. In high school, sophomore year.

This would be an excellent example of a teacher you have destroying a book you read.

A Tale of Two Cities is not a book that you look to for statements about the objectification of women. It’s not a book where you talk about how the hero of the story is secretly selfish because he hopes, one day, to be remembered.

A Tale of Two Cities is a book where you talk about the redemption of human beings, and love, and symbolism, and fabulous prose. It’s a book where heroes are heroes and villains are deliciously evil.

It’s a book where, if you’re reading it in high school with an English teacher who sells herself as an intellectual but pedals pseudo-intellectual bullshit, you ignore everything your English teacher has to say and just enjoy the story.

There is something to the criticism that the characters here are a bit flat; Lucie is loving and supporting and never changes and it’s borderline cringeworthy in spots. The Marquis is evil and unabashedly enjoys it. The most developed character is easily Sydney Carton.

I love Sydney Carton. I didn’t know it in the 10th grade, but I knew this time through, that he was suffering from depression and self-medicating with alcohol, and he let his law partner get the credit for his true legal brilliance because, basically, he just didn’t care. He was selfless, and smart, and I adored him.

There was only one, gaping plot hole in this book that I either didn’t hear because I missed it while I was simultaneously doing something else, like driving (entirely possible), or because there was just one, gaping plot hole that was never explained:

How did Carton know to show up in Paris? After reading the plot summary, I guess it’s because the family was gone from London for so long? Anyway, if anyone knows for sure, I’d be glad to hear it.

If you hated A Tale of Two Cities in high school, I highly suggest revisiting it, particularly as an audiobook. It’s still wordy AF. It can still be a bit slow in spots. But I appreciated it so much more this time. In contrast to my newfound warmer feelings for Sydney Carton, were my much stronger repulsive feeling to Madame Defarge. I somehow missed the first time through exactly how evil she was. She’s great to hate. And I hated her so much more this time.

Dickens has his reputation as one of the greatest writers the English language has ever produced, and I get it. I get it now. I hope you give yourself the chance to get it, too.

The Wife, The Maid, and The Mistress

fiction, history, mystery February 3, 2018 Leave a comment

Another one of my weird interests: people who disappear. I don’t think I’m actually unique in this but I will admit it, which I think makes me unique. And kind of weird. But knowing you’re weird makes it ok, right?

Anyway, this is one of those cases.

Joseph Crater was a New York Supreme Court Justice who disappeared on August 6, 1930 and whose body was never found. There is no proof he was murdered, but most people of his stature who disappear without a trace and are never found are frequently murdered.

His disappearance was a factor in the downfall of the Tammany Hall political machine, a New York City political organization started in 1789 and dissolved in 1967. By the time of Crater’s disappearance, Tammany Hall was a thoroughly corrupt enterprise tied to organized crime. Its influence really began to wane not long after Crater went missing – they engaged in a losing battle with reformers looking to clean up the political process in the city. One of the reform leaders was Franklin D. Roosevelt, first governor of New York, then President of the United States.

Ariel Lawhon’s The Wife, The Maid, and The Mistress builds a mystery novel around the three major women in Crater’s life around the time Crater disappeared – his wife, Stella, his maid, Maria, and his mistress, Sally Lou Ritz.

This was a very entertaining novel. Crater was presented as complete asshole, so his disappearance is really no loss. The characterizations of the three women, however, was a fascinating picture of three women, each who are unable to really exercise any agency in their roles in the early 20th century, taking control of something in their lives as they react and deal with the disappearance of this man they were all, in some way, dependent on.

The story moves between the 1920s, the 1930s, and the 1960s, where Mrs. Crater and Maria’s husband meet in a cafe. IIRC, Mrs. Crater is telling Maria’s husband, a non-corrupt NYC police detective who helped investigate her husband’s disappearance, exactly what happened in the months leading up to August 6, 1930.

I’m not going to give away the ending here, although it was an immensely satisfying explanation, because it’s never fun to read a mystery when you know the end. But the book itself, despite the dark subject matter, isn’t particularly dark, and is really more about these three women, their relationships with each other, and their efforts to improve their lives. The characterizations were fun and their relationships, particularly with each other, are so well developed.

I did this one via audiobook at work and in my car, which I very much enjoyed as I traveled all over two counties, working and apartment hunting. This a great book for the beach – an intelligent, not too dense, page turner.

The Stalin Epigram

fiction, history, suspense / thriller July 30, 2017 Leave a comment

Woohoo, I’m finally reaching 2017 books. That’s actually THIS YEAR. I know it’s almost August. Still, go me.

The first book I read this year was called The Stalin Epigram by Robert Littell.

This book wasn’t what I thought it was going to be and for that reason was somewhat disappointing. While it does create an atmosphere of suspense, it really isn’t much of a thriller, which is what I thought I was getting. It’s based on the life of Osip Mandalstam, a widely admired Russian poet, who writes a satirical (and not so satirical) poem about Stalin during the height of Stalin’s power and purges (the 1930s).

Mandalstam writes a forbidden poem, reads it to a bunch of people, gets ratted out to the “Organs” (which is the name for the secret police) and he goes to prison, where he’s tortured, and then into exile with his wife. After he gets out of exile, he’s super jumpy and paranoid and depressed as you would be after being tortured and exiled, so he goes back to Moscow, where he isn’t supposed to go. He is discovered again, sent to a labor camp or a Siberian prison (this time without his wife) and he dies.

I don’t know what the point of this book was beyond telling a fictional account of something that’s well documented. The book is told through several points of view, the main one (to me) being that of Mandalstam’s wife. Other points of view are a weight lifter, one of Stalin’s bodyguards, an actress both Mandalstams are boning (again, more pointless sex writing, ugh), another Russian poet or two (both friends of Mandalstam) and maybe a few others.

The writing was fine, and the characters were interesting and varied, but nobody seemed to really do anything. Like I said, there was no point. The author, I think, has put some pretty serious research into Mandalstam, which is why I thought we were going to get more spy story paranoia and not just “Hey this is what happened.” I think Littell might have actually visited Mrs. Mandalstam in the 1970s before her death to accomplish some of this research, and included his thoughts on the conversations and what they were like after the novel was finished, but again, I’m not sure of the point.

I skimmed a lot of this book, which I guess is why I can’t remember much and entirely missed the point. Like my previous read, this wasn’t great. It was okay. But the font was much smaller, and it was at least 100 pages longer. It took me three months to finish and I put it down for extended periods.

Overall, I wouldn’t recommend it. It doesn’t seem to really know what it wants to be. If you do choose to read it, you won’t regret wasting your life. It’s not that bad. You may, however, find it to be generally disappointing.

The Crooked Maid

fiction May 14, 2017 Leave a comment

How did I stumble across The Crooked Maid? I don’t remember exactly what I was doing but I think I was looking up something about The Quiet Twin, and found it on author Dan Vyleta’s website.

I had no idea that Vyleta had revisited Vienna, this time after the war in 1948, and bought the book immediately. It was the ebook version too, so it was near instant gratification. I started reading it that day.

The Crooked Maid isn’t a sequel to The Quiet Twin, exactly, but it does revisit some of the same places and characters. Anna Beer, wife of Dr. Anton Beer, who we met in the previous novel, is back in Vienna after separating from Beer before the war, but when she arrives back at the apartment she shared with her husband, he is nowhere to be found and in his place is a large stranger, Karel Neumann, who claimed to know Beer during the war.

Anna seems to be something of a fading femme fatale; the kind of woman men can’t resist but whose beauty, while still formidable, is beginning to fade with age. She’s smart and street saavy and quite capable of taking care of herself. Overall, she’s my favorite female character in both books.

Robert Seidel, whose first encounter with Anna opens the novel, is on his way home from boarding school to see his family when his stepfather is hospitalized after mysteriously falling out a window. When he dies, Robert’s brother, Wolfgang, a former SS officer, is charged in his death.

Eva, the hunchback maid of the title and working for the wealthy Seidels, is also interested in finding Dr. Beer.

And Vienna is working desperately at denazification, trying to purge itself of signs of its dark past, and convince the world, and itself, that it was a reluctant participant to the horrors of the Nazi regime rather than its willing cohort.

Unlike The Quiet Twin, there were likable characters in this book and the ending wasn’t nearly as bitter, although things didn’t work out quite the way I wanted them to. Ok, they worked out nothing like I wanted them to, but I guess that’s good right? I always complain about books and movies where I figure out the ending. Why should this be any different?

I did figure out Dr. Beer’s fate early on, though. I still liked the story, and getting to that point though, so that’s a plus.

As with the The Quiet Twin, I highly recommend The Crooked Maid. It can be slow in spots but gets better and better as it goes on and was a contender for my favorite book of 2016.

As a side note for anyone considering picking up the book, you don’t have to read The Quiet Twin before you read The Crooked Maid, but I recommend it. You will pick up a lot of extra info that makes finding little Easter eggs in The Crooked Maid more enjoyable.

The Quiet Twin

fiction, history, suspense / thriller March 16, 2016 Leave a comment

I’m starting this post with a plug.

I bought The Quiet Twin by Dan Vyleta at The Mysterious Bookshop at 58 Warren St. in New York City. I looooove The Mysterious Bookshop. I have a soft spot for independent bookstores and The Mysterious Bookshop is definitely one of my favorites.

The cozy one room store is floor to 12? 15? foot ceiling wooden bookshelves and tables, at least half the back wall is dedicated to Sherlock Holmes, but the rest of the store is full of mysteries and thrillers from all over the world. The green carpet is dated and so is the oversized furniture,  and while many books are new some of the books are used, but it’s extremely easy for any mystery book lover to overlook the antiquated atmosphere and spend an hour? afternoon? day? going through everything from Victorian crime fiction to historical suspense thrillers.

…which brings me back to The Quiet Twin. The story is set in 1939, Nazi-occupied Vienna, in an apartment complex with an inner courtyard. A series of murders have taken place through the city and when Professor Speckstein’s dog ends up murdered as well, he wants to know who did it and why. He enlists the help of Dr. Beer, a physician who lives in the building. Before long, Dr. Beer is in the bedroom of Professor Speckstein’s teenage niece, Zuzka, who is not obviously ill but insists on seeing him. She shows the doctor the oddities of their neighbors she has learned just by watching them through their windows.

By the way, Professor Speckstein is the neighborhood Zellenleiter, an informant for the Nazi party. He’s also a sex offender.

There are a lot of characters in this story, and each one has any number of things to hide.

I kept waiting for the twin to show up, but it becomes obvious, as you read the story, that the twin Vyleta is referring to is the side of ourselves that nobody sees, the secrets we hide from the world, “The Stranger” as Billy Joel would call it.

In this book, Vyleta focuses on what happens to ordinary people when they live in an atmosphere of constant paranoia, and suspicion, where they are constantly being spied on. While the Hitlers, the Stalins, the Pol Pots of the world commit the greatest atrocities, how do regular, usually peaceful people become insidiously complicit? Vyleta seems to suggest they’re petty crimes of opportunity: small betrayals that we may overlook, or may not even remember that we commit, in an effort to secure our own safety.

In retrospect, it is easy to condemn the action and non-action of the populations of Germany and the rest of Europe during the second World War. It’s easy to say now that we would never get caught up in something so violent, that we would condemn something so horrific, that we’d never inform on our neighbors and friends in an attempt to protect ourselves. But would we? Vyleta explores this, and its consequences throughout the story.

A couple of things:

1] The ending is horrifically unsatisfying and bitter. I’ve just found out that there is a sequel, so I’m about to go buy that, but I’m a little nervous that it’s going to be even more unsatisfying than this one.

2] There aren’t many characters to like. In fact, of all of them, I think I liked only two. Don’t get me wrong: I found the characters interesting, I just didn’t particularly like them. Vyleta does some of this on purpose, I’m sure.

3] It can be a bit of a slow read. The atmosphere is tense, but there are long stretches where you just want to speed it up a bit. I found that to be the case anyway.

Overall, though, The Quiet Twin is by far the best book I read in 2015. Suspenseful, disturbing, and a fascinatingly introspective look into human nature during a time where everyone’s actions had the potential to be touched by the creeping evil of Nazi culture, I highly recommend it.

For Whom the Bell Tolls

fiction February 28, 2012 Leave a comment

This story by Ernest Hemingway is frequently regarded as his best, but I preferred A Farewell to Arms.

From Amazon:

In 1937 Ernest Hemingway traveled to Spain to cover the civil war there for the North American Newspaper Alliance. Three years later he completed the greatest novel to emerge from “the good fight,” For Whom the Bell Tolls. The story of Robert Jordan, a young American in the International Brigades attached to an antifascist guerilla unit in the mountains of Spain, it tells of loyalty and courage, love and defeat, and the tragic death of an ideal. In his portrayal of Jordan’s love for the beautiful Maria and his superb account of El Sordo’s last stand, in his brilliant travesty of La Pasionaria and his unwillingness to believe in blind faith, Hemingway surpasses his achievement in The Sun Also Rises and A Farewell to Arms to create a work at once rare and beautiful, strong and brutal, compassionate, moving, and wise. “If the function of a writer is to reveal reality,” Maxwell Perkins wrote Hemingway after reading the manuscript, “no one ever so completely performed it.” Greater in power, broader in scope, and more intensely emotional than any of the author’s previous works, it stands as one of the best war novels of all time.

…spoilers ahead!

Throughout this novel, we usually follow the thoughts and experiences of American Robert Jordan, who is a member of an international coalition that opposes the fascist forces of Francisco Franco during the Spanish Civil War.

Robert ends up working with a guerrilla leader named Pablo who has become reluctant to lead forces into something that would endanger himself and his band. Jordan is behind enemy lines to blow up a bridge and needs their help. In the camp, he meets and falls in love with Maria, a girl whose life has been completely destroyed by the Fascists. Her parents were executed and she was brutally raped. Jordan is suddenly revitalized by Maria. He wants to bring her back to his home and marry her when the war is over.

After another band of guerrillas is killed by the fascist soldiers, the leader of Jordan’s guerrilla band, Pablo, tries to sabotage the operation. After witnessing Jordan’s commitment to his mission, Pablo eventually comes around and the bridge is destroyed, but Jordan is maimed and has no choice but to let the others go on while he lies on the ground, determined to take out as many of the fascists as he can before his inevitable death.

This story took about 175 pages to be interesting, at least to me. I’m a fan of Hemingway’s usual style of simple, sparse prose and short, declarative sentences, but this book wasn’t written that way. The descriptions were long. There wasn’t much dialogue and there was a lot more punctuation than usual. There were big blocks of text that I wasn’t expecting. After that, the story picked up, but then something else happened to me.

Unlike in Hemingway’s other stories, after reading about the death of El Sordo – the leader of the other guerrilla band – I suddenly knew how this book was going to end, with Robert Jordan’s death mirroring that of El Sordo. I hate it when this happens to me. Since I turned 19, I’ve suddenly become rather good at predicting how things are going to go – either I know what events are going to take place, or I figure out the twist early, or whatever. And I can’t un-ring the bell. Once I figure it out, there’s no real way to ignore it, and it takes away some of the enjoyment. I can still enjoy that it’s done well, but the lack of surprise takes a bit of the shine off of the whole thing.

That’s what happened here. So once I knew that Robert Jordan was going to die, I had a lot of trouble getting through the story, partly because I knew what would happen and partly because it wasn’t written in the way I was expecting, which I love.

Death was a huge theme in this book. Robert Jordan knows he will not survive blowing up the bridge, seemingly throughout most of the book, and most of the characters contemplate their own deaths. There’s a lot of friendship in the face of death – it builds camaraderie between the characters in the story, knowing that they could all possibly die at any moment. All the men prepare to make the ultimate sacrifice for the cause.

Suicide is also a theme in this novel. Most of the men would prefer the quick death of suicide to being tortured for information if they were captured. Since they’d be executed eventually anyway, they’d prefer to make it quick. Some of the men carry cyanide tablets with them; it might be something else, but I can’t remember what. Robert Jordan also prefers suicide to torture, but he struggles with it, because his father, who he views as a coward, committed suicide. Consequently, he aims to die in his last ambush against the fascists, which will come after he is maimed and unable to travel.

Suicide recurs a lot in Hemingway’s stories. Obviously, Hemingway committed suicide himself in 1961. His father also committed suicide. In fact, it seems like just about everyone in Hemingway’s family committed suicide. At least three other members of his family besides him and his father took their own lives.

Imagery also plays a role in the novel. Automatic weapons – the way they look and particularly the way they sound – take over and are very prominent. Planes that drop bombs are dreaded more than anything else. The best soldier doesn’t win, the one with the biggest guns and best weapons win. It destroys the romantic notion of war – that it’s a sportsman-like competition with honor and rules.  Like in A Farewell to Arms, disillusionment becomes a theme. Maria’s parents were heroes, but were brutally executed against the wall of a slaughterhouse along with a lot of other people in front of her, and she was then gang raped. There is no real glory for the soldiers in the field; it only comes in official dispatches that are disconnected from the people on the ground.

There is also frequent imagery of soil and earth. We leave Robert Jordan with his heart beating against his chest on a bed of pine needles, he sleeps with Maria and they feel the Earth move, etc…

There is some negative critical reaction to the novel, stemming out of Hemingway’s use of the Spanish language in the book. I haven’t taken a Spanish class in quite some time, but I did know some of it wasn’t accurate. Wikipedia lists that Hemingway uses archaisms, transliterations, and false friends to convey what’s being said. Because dialogue seems to be a literal translation from the Spanish language into English (that’s the only explanation I can come up with for some of awkward language), the words thee and thou are used to distinguish the formal Spanish (tú is “you” in the familiar Spanish, usted is the formal “you”). Thee/thou is used to convey the usted form. It’s clunky writing.

There’s also swearing in the novel, and while it is used freely in Spanish, it’s translated due to censorship as “obscenity” or “muck.” As Wikipedia reminded me, me cago en la leche occurs throughout the novel, which is translated by Hemingway as “I obscenity in the milk.” By the way, in my internet wanderings learning about this story, I learned that the Wikipedia entry for Spanish profanity is extremely detailed, in case anyone was wondering.

Anyway, in spite of the fact that it could be rather slow and I knew the ending before it happened, and even though I prefer other Hemingway works, I did enjoy For Whom the Bell Tolls. It was a great cultural study of what was going on during the Spanish Civil War (for example, Hemingway, through Jordan, notes that both anarchist and communist factions were both fighting to control the Republican cause implying that this meant it was doomed from the start). I came to love Robert Jordan and experienced real sadness knowing his death was coming. It felt real, and I’d highly recommend it as a moving story about courage, love, and friendship in the face of death.

Finally, for anyone wondering, the title of this story is in reference to a poem by John Donne, an English poet, lawyer, and priest who lived between 1572 and 1631.

“No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main. If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friend’s or of thine own were: any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind, and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.“