Lately, I've been catching up on my fiction reading. It's not the best use of my time, but I mean, you can't read philosophy on the bus or while eating lunch. (I suppose you *could*, I just lack the concentration for it.) Anyway, I've been reading Elizabeth Kastova's The Historian. This was one of those books that all the magazines and newspapers pegged as a "Great Summer Read!" - you know what I'm talking about.
Anyway, but this is a COOL one of those "great summer read" books. Seriously. It's a book that is all about hunting Dracula, but rather than another trite horror or adventure book, this one is about *research.* It's about a graduate student hunting down Dracula because Dracula kidnapped his advisor (Note: While I adore Eric, except when he drives me crazy, he should NOT expect me to chase him around the world if/when Dracula or any other Hammer horror monster caputres him....). Anyway, the book is told through a series of flashbacks and letters, and it's wonderfully well written - tense and interesting. It works great.
There are at least *three* different quests for Dracula in the story, all layered on each other, and each one nicely corresponding to major events in contemporary European history (pre-WWII, the Cold War, and detente). So, the book is a nice mirror of modern politics, with a lot of shadows of East/West conflict worked in (after all, Vlad fought Ottomans). Best of all, the book avoids lame clues and puzzles. Rather, the protaginists search in libraries for old documents, that give them clues (like a new location or person is mentioned in a document, and investigating THAT element leads them to another library and another set of old documents). So, no The DiVinci Code style antics - just (relatively) more serious investigation and trotting all over the Continent. Even the way the investigations proceed - the main characters rely on lots of experts to uncover Dracula's hiding place rather than figuring everything out themselves - smacks of a fun realism. It's a great read. [And the cast of characters are almost all graduate students and academics. And they read like (almost) REAL scholars. It's totally fun. There are not enough adventure books with proper Ph.d's....]
I've also come to realize there should be a new literary genre: literary works about monks who investigate stuff/fight monsters. There's one part in The Historian where the characters find a journal entry from a monk who encounted Dracula in the 1500s. It's just wicked cool to me. I'm a huge fan of Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose, which I first found through the (very fun) Sean Connery movie. I read the book a few years, and while I'm sure I missed plenty of the theology and linguistics, I still loved the murder mystery at the heart of the book. Seriously, crime fighting monks - we need more of them!
I think monks are fucking wicked. Especially medieval monks. I love them, I think, because of the odd contradiction of their existence. Monks were one of the few groups in medieval Europe that could read and dedicated themselves to thought and study. They spent time copying books. Great guys. At the same time, they would have been burdened with the weight of a stifling Church orthodoxy, that would have prevented *too much* free thought. What a weird life.... I know I'm dangerously romanticizing it, but it fascinates me.
Seriously - this is my cry to the literary world - more crime figthing monks!
It's Saturday. I'm going out now.
Anyway, but this is a COOL one of those "great summer read" books. Seriously. It's a book that is all about hunting Dracula, but rather than another trite horror or adventure book, this one is about *research.* It's about a graduate student hunting down Dracula because Dracula kidnapped his advisor (Note: While I adore Eric, except when he drives me crazy, he should NOT expect me to chase him around the world if/when Dracula or any other Hammer horror monster caputres him....). Anyway, the book is told through a series of flashbacks and letters, and it's wonderfully well written - tense and interesting. It works great.
There are at least *three* different quests for Dracula in the story, all layered on each other, and each one nicely corresponding to major events in contemporary European history (pre-WWII, the Cold War, and detente). So, the book is a nice mirror of modern politics, with a lot of shadows of East/West conflict worked in (after all, Vlad fought Ottomans). Best of all, the book avoids lame clues and puzzles. Rather, the protaginists search in libraries for old documents, that give them clues (like a new location or person is mentioned in a document, and investigating THAT element leads them to another library and another set of old documents). So, no The DiVinci Code style antics - just (relatively) more serious investigation and trotting all over the Continent. Even the way the investigations proceed - the main characters rely on lots of experts to uncover Dracula's hiding place rather than figuring everything out themselves - smacks of a fun realism. It's a great read. [And the cast of characters are almost all graduate students and academics. And they read like (almost) REAL scholars. It's totally fun. There are not enough adventure books with proper Ph.d's....]
I've also come to realize there should be a new literary genre: literary works about monks who investigate stuff/fight monsters. There's one part in The Historian where the characters find a journal entry from a monk who encounted Dracula in the 1500s. It's just wicked cool to me. I'm a huge fan of Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose, which I first found through the (very fun) Sean Connery movie. I read the book a few years, and while I'm sure I missed plenty of the theology and linguistics, I still loved the murder mystery at the heart of the book. Seriously, crime fighting monks - we need more of them!
I think monks are fucking wicked. Especially medieval monks. I love them, I think, because of the odd contradiction of their existence. Monks were one of the few groups in medieval Europe that could read and dedicated themselves to thought and study. They spent time copying books. Great guys. At the same time, they would have been burdened with the weight of a stifling Church orthodoxy, that would have prevented *too much* free thought. What a weird life.... I know I'm dangerously romanticizing it, but it fascinates me.
Seriously - this is my cry to the literary world - more crime figthing monks!
It's Saturday. I'm going out now.
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Re: your post. I've heard good things about The Historian - maybe once I finish my current project (the 9/11 Report) I'll pick it up. And I LOVE The Name of the Rose (but then, I'm into that theology junk) - but I've never seen the movie. Have you read any of Eco's other stuff?