In Elizabeth Kostova's Carrel
Dave Weich, Powells.com
Perhaps you've heard that Elizabeth Kostova's father told her Dracula stories when she
was young. You know Dracula, of course, from Bram
Stoker's novel, or from the movies, cartoons, and chocolate breakfast cereal it inspired. At the
very least, several small children dressed as the infamous vampire have hit you
up for candy on Halloween. Five centuries after his death, Dracula lives.
What if, all this time, he's been paying attention? What if Dracula has been listening in?
Part mystery and part travelogue, The
Historian sprawls across Europe, from Amsterdam to Istanbul. Feeding off
Cold War tensions, epistolary intrigue, the supernatural, and a pair of budding
romances besides, Kostova's debut satisfies on so many levels that a bidding
war among publishers escalated well into seven figures. Already,
translations are slated for twenty-eight languages; Sony has purchased the movie
rights.
Which explains, really it does, why the author of the summer's breakout book wound up talking about lemon pound cake, good writing font, Pablo Casals's hands, steam whistles, false documents, Bulgarian antique stores, and happiness.
Laura
Miller assured Salon.com readers, "This year, the publishing business finally delivers
on its promises: Elizabeth Kostova's The Historian is a hypnotic yarn,
saturated in authentic history and eerie intrigue."
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"Kostova may have outdone Stoker or even, for that matter, Hollywood's numerous Dracula reincarnations with her chilling revelation of what motivates her blood-thirsty monster. Before the sun sets, grab this book and take a long and satisfying drink." USA Today
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Dave: Let's start with the hard-hitting questions: Growing
up, did you ever wear those plastic vampire teeth?
Elizabeth Kostova: I did. I remember having a pair and loving
them. The problem is they fall apart really fast. And I was delighted, on my
book tour—at the Harry Schwartz store in Milwaukee, they handed out those
plastic vampire teeth at the door to everybody. They gave me all the extras.
Dave: So your father told you Dracula stories when you were young.
What other kinds of stories did he tell?
Kostova: Those were certainly the most Gothic; they were pleasantly
creepy, full of crypts and creaking doors. The other stories he told were much
more along the lines of fairy tales—a king has a problem to solve, and
he calls his ministers in...
The Dracula tales were the only ones based on a really specific tradition;
he based them on the Dracula films he grew up watching during the Great Depression.
Dave: I didn't go back and count, but I wondered how many languages
are described in the book, being read or spoken. How many languages do you speak?
Kostova: Probably half a dozen are referred to in different ways. The
only language I speak really well is English. But I also speak Bulgarian pretty
well. I used to speak French quite well, but that's gotten rusty.
Dave: But you did a bunch of traveling when you were younger, and then
again recently, right?
Kostova: I did. A lot of my travel was in Eastern Europe, before I
started writing the book. I've been back a few times since then, but the wider
travel, in Western Europe and some parts of Eastern Europe, I did before I began
composing it.
Dave: Do you have a favorite bookstore in Eastern Europe?
Kostova: I really don't, and one of the reasons is that they change
constantly. When I first went to Bulgaria in 1989, it was the end of the communist
era, literally the last days. The bookstores were government-run; they all had
the same books in them. The really interesting place to buy books was antique
stores, where there was often a mix of old furniture, Ottoman jewelry, and the
occasional odd, really old book. Those were wonderful stores, though many went
out of business during the very hard times that followed the change to capitalism.
I wish I had a better answer. There are probably great bookstores in places
like Prague, but in Bulgaria nothing is stable. And it's not like Paris where
there is a tradition of old bookstores or kiosks.
Dave: If you could spend time in any city's libraries, independent
of specific research materials you might need, which would you choose?
Kostova: That's a hard question. I think Oxford. Those libraries are
so beautiful, and not only are they full of treasures, but they're such a pleasure
to sit in. And smell—they smell so good.
Dave: There's a lot of talk in your novel about the smell of certain
books.
Kostova: That's true.
Dave: Do we need to go deeper here? What is it with you and the smell of books?
Kostova: I think everybody who loves books, especially old books and
research, has a kind of fondness for the smell of old books. And I have to admit
that when I go into a library, especially if I'm in the stacks by myself, I
pull books off the shelf and smell them.
I should add that not all old books smell good. If they've been in a damp
environment, they can smell pretty bad.
Dave: How about some word association? I'll throw out a few words,
and you tell me whatever comes to mind.
Kostova: Okay.
Dave: Bulgaria.
Kostova: Mountains.
Dave: Garlic.
Kostova: Olive oil.
Dave: History.
Kostova: Horror.
Dave: Trains.
Kostova: Steam whistles.
Dave: Constantinople.
Kostova: Istanbul.
Dave: Happiness.
Kostova: Travel.
Dave: When I said history, you said horror.
Kostova: I did....
You know, if you spend enough time studying medieval history or twentieth-century
history, you develop a fairly dark picture.
Dave: Have you always liked studying history?
Kostova: I really have. I grew up in the kind of family where questions
about history come up at the dining table and somebody is sent to get the encyclopedia
in the middle of the meal.
Dave: At one point in The
Historian, Paul explains, "I felt the loneliness, suddenly, of standing
outside my institution, my universe, a worker bee expelled from the hive."
When I think of the Gothic, I tend to think of a novel like Wuthering
Heights, where the characters have been cut off from society. The horror
comes from a kind of claustrophobia. In Paul's case, though, you've written
a character that is thrown into society, into something like a vast,
unidentifiable doom.
Kostova: That's true, and at the same time you can argue that at that
moment Paul is thrown out of society—his society is the academic world,
which has been very safe and sheltered. All of a sudden, he's propelled out
of his cocoon by an artifact, propelled into history; within days, he's on the
other side of the world.
But that's interesting what you said about the Gothic. I've never really thought
about that as an essential element of Gothic fiction, but it's so true.
Dave: For some reason, Wuthering
Heights has always stuck with me. When I read it, in college, I wouldn't
have said I loved it—I enjoyed it—but I still think about it all
the time.
Kostova: I thought about Wuthering Heights, and reread it, while
I was writing The Historian,
even though the stories are completely different. The reason I decided to reread
it—I read it a long time ago, too—is that it is a long, long told
story. The housekeeper sits down with her mending, and the guest says, "Tell
me the story of Wuthering Heights." She says, "Oh, certainly," and begins darning
a sock or something. Thirty-five chapters later, she says, "Well, I finished
my sock, and that's the story of Wuthering Heights." It doesn't happen in real
time.
That structure is so fascinating. There's something about storytelling, about
a story that's actually told by a person, that goes well with the Gothic. The
Gothic is always about things we never can quite believe, and hearing them told
by an actual person sort of helps us believe.
Dave: In The
Polysyllabic Spree, Nick
Hornby holds up Charles
Dickens—specifically, David
Copperfield—as a foil to minimalism. There's something to be said
for stuffing lots of story between front and back covers, he argues. A certain
type of writer—and a certain type of reader—isn't particularly
interested in getting to the end quickly.
It's hard to talk about your novel without addressing its length. You clearly
weren't aiming for a quick, 250-page read.
Kostova: I don't know whether I'm just very long-winded, but Dickens
is also one of my favorite writers. I very consciously had the long Victorian
novel in mind when I was working on The
Historian.
For one thing, I wanted to see if it would be possible to blend suspense with
that sense of We have all the time in the world for story. Dickens does
that. When you read Great
Expectations, you really want to know what is going to happen in the next
chapter. And yet it's so, so long. I was interested in tinkering with that.
Dave: What are some other favorite long books?
Kostova: This is so geeky, but I love Middlemarch.
I'm a great fan of Henry
James, whose books tend to be somewhat shorter than Dickens and [George]
Eliot,
and of course have a much later sensibility, but I love their length and indirectness
and the elegance of the prose; also, the sharp, indirect portrait of the characters'
psychology. I love Hardy,
too—another set of long books.
Especially for this book, I really enjoyed reading Wilkie
Collins: The Moonstone
and The Woman in White.
Those are some of the first great mysteries in the English language.
I was very interested in the fact that they're mysteries. The Moonstone
is a complete page-turner, and yet it's extremely long; it has many stories
within stories.
Many of those writers, especially Collins, experiment with false documents.
I think that's a fascinating form.
Dave: Hornby writes about Wilkie Collins in The
Polysyllabic Spree, too.
Kostova: I have to read that.
Dave: The
Historian being your debut, and being such a great success, does
it feel at all odd that suddenly, and who knows for how long, you are known
to millions as "the Dracula writer"?
Kostova: It does. I think of myself as a literary writer. I worked
on this book for a long time, as well as several shorter works, in a very private,
literary way. It is odd. Some of it is about Dracula, not me; Dracula has eternal
cachet. I wasn't trying to cash in on that; I'm really fascinated by
the Dracula legend—but it is kind of startling, you're right, to see
my name linked up with Dracula now.
My next novel, which I started last summer, is very different. It's not Gothic.
That's not in response to this; it's just that this was one experiment, and
now I'd like to learn something completely different.
Dave: For some amount of time, at least, you'll continue writing fiction?
Kostova: For as long as I can put my fingers on a keyboard. I can't
remember a time when I didn't want to be a fiction writer.
Dave: What about nonfiction?
Kostova: I'm very interested. I've actually written and published essays.
I don't feel quite as comfortable in that form, but I'm fascinated by it.
Dave: What subjects interest you?
Kostova: I published a book ten years ago, in a small edition, that
I co-authored with a North Carolina artist. It's called 1927. It's an
oral history and travel memoir about his travels in the nineteen twenties.
I'm very interested in travel, in oral history and documentary writing, and
in art history, especially painting.
As a reader and a writer, I like essays that mingle some kind of learning
or erudition with humorous or reflective writing about daily life. I know that
sounds really vague, but you know it when you read an essay where the author
pulls it off—reflective, personal essays that aren't too personal.
Dave: What magazines do you read?
Kostova: My favorite is National Geographic.
Dave: So far, what has been the most surprising response to your book?
Kostova: Most surprising? In a lovely independent bookstore where I
read and signed, there was a long line, and about halfway through the line,
a woman approached me with her book. She said, "I saw you on Good Morning
America this morning. I thought you might be tired and hungry on your tour,
so I made you a lemon pound cake." And she put this cake on the counter in front
of me.
I was so surprised. For a minute, I thought I was going to burst into tears.
It was just so touching. I didn't know what to say. Then of course I thanked
her profusely. In her kitchen that morning, she had made me this cake from scratch!
I thought it was so great, partly because it's so un-Gothic. She didn't come
up and say, "I thought you'd like this rubber knife." No, a pound cake.
Dave: Wow. Good answer.
Kostova: Thank you.
Dave: When Ian McEwan was
here, he said, "If I was commanded by the government to exchange whatever writing
ability I had with someone else's other ability, I'd say to Ry Cooder, 'You
can have my writing ability; I want your playing ability.'"
If you could have someone else's ability, whose would it be?
Kostova: That's so tempting. It's like a whole candy shop. Does it
have to be someone alive?
Dave: Have it your way. Make your own rules.
Kostova: I think I would want for five minutes to play the cello with
Pablo Casals's hands. But it's so hard to choose.
Dave: If the opportunity arises and you change your mind, I won't be
offended.
Kostova: What if I change my mind twenty times before dinner tonight?
Dave: Take the night to think it over. Call me tomorrow.
What was your favorite class at Yale?
Kostova: I had a lot of great classes, but I think my favorite was
an Art
History lecture that was taught over and over for decades by Professor Vincent
Scully, who was one of the great professors of the twentieth century there,
maybe anywhere.
The class I took was a famous Western Art History survey, with slides. The
auditorium seated five hundred people. He taught it year after year after year,
and every time he got so excited that he enflamed whole generations of art historians.
Every semester.
He got so excited that he would occasionally poke a hole through the screen
with his pointer. You'd be looking at the doors of the Duomo in Florence, and
he'd rap the pointer right through; he ruined a lot of screens over the years.
There also was a legend that one day he was so carried away with his topic that
he fell off the front of the stage. I don't know if that's true, but it was
a beloved campus legend.
His ardor up on the stage about some of the great architectural and art sights
of Western Europe made me go to those places as soon as I could save money from
my bookstore job or mowing lawns or whatever I was doing. Eventually I went
to this wonderful monastery in the Pyrenees of Southern France, the first still-existing
example of Romanesque architecture, built in the year 1000.
I'm only one of thousands and thousands of students he inspired. That was
certainly the best class I took in college.
Dave: I'm assuming you write on a word processor. If that's the case,
what font do you work in?
Kostova: Times. I used to work in New York, which is closely related
to Times. It was sort of a watershed in my life when I moved over.
Dave: Why did you change?
Kostova: I was starting to feel that New York, although it's beautiful,
looked very dated to me. That's usually not a problem with my aesthetic, but
it had started to become somehow hard to read. I think it was because it looked
like typewriter typing, but it wasn't on a typewriter and that looks kitschy.
If it had really been a typewriter, that wouldn't have been a problem.
I moved over to Times about twelve years ago and I've been happier ever since.
Dave: Is Zingerman's in Ann Arbor all that it's cracked up to be?
Kostova: It is. It's the best.
Dave: What's your favorite dish?
Kostova: Macaroni and cheese, which is very different at Zingerman's
than anywhere else in the world.
Elizabeth Kostova
spoke from Laramie, Wyoming, on July 15, 2005, several days before her visit
to Powell's. In case you're wondering—she was—
about Zingerman's, well, Kevin
Smokler, another Michigan native (Kostova hails from Ann Arbor), told me to ask.
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