The Castle of Otranto

The Castle of Otranto
Horace Walpole, 1764

I'm not quite finished, but what with the band concert tonight and me having to get this blog done by tomorrow, I don't think I can make it. So I'll just blog about what I've read thus far.

One thing that really bothers me about the book is that there aren't quotations around characters' lines. It's kinda hard to understand who is saying what. But other than that, I'm pretty surprised to find that I can understand what's going on in the story fairly easily. (Unlike last year when we had to read Herman Melville's Billy Budd. I read about fifty pages and realized that the only thing I was positive had happened was that someone had spilled some soup....)

This book, however, is pretty easy to get into. The only part that really confused me ('cept for the lack of "") was in the very beginning when Manfred's son, Conrad, was killed by a giant helmet that fell from the sky.... Or at least, I think it did...... That might be where I'm getting confused.....

And I'm still going to finish the book even though I am now done with all my blogs! ^-^

The Historian (finale)

I stayed up late Sunday night to finish, but I did it! And I must say, it was a pretty good book.

I was right when I predicted that Helen was the narrator's mother. I mean, it's just too coincidental that her father would be hanging out with a woman named Helen that's not the girl's mother. What are the chances?

The epilogue was kind of sad though. Her father is killed by a land mine, and Barley isn't mentioned, so I really don't know whether he and the girl got married or whatever. But the girl gets a dragon book of her own, so that's kind of interesting.

Another thing, I mentioned that the book was titled The Historian because Paul became a historian in search of Dracula. But really, it's Dracula himself that is the historian. He has a really huge, hidden library full of rare books about torture, folklore, and even biographies of himself.

The Historian (part 8) and still no internet....

I read a lot over the Thanksgiving break, but still haven't finished the book. I'm over half way done though and things are really starting to get interesting. I've realized a couple of things as I read:

1. I probably should have read Dracula first. It's mentioned a lot in The Historian and I don't always get the references. In a passage I read last night, more letters from Rossi were found with Helen's mother. In them, he says how he and a guide made their way up to an abandoned fortress reconstructed by Vlad the Impaler, and how he almost wished they had gone at night so that he might see fires erupting from the ground and the packs of wolves encircling the wagon just as Jonathan Harker had seen on his way to Count Dracula's castle. (Luckily, I had read that part, so I understood the Dracula allusions.)

2. As I had predicted, Helen is a descendant of Vlad Tepes. Paul often says how she reminds him of Vlad throughout the story ever since Turgut showed them his life-size portrait of the man in Istanbul. With the appearance of Rossi's letters, my suspicions were confirmed.

Hopefully, I'll finish this book by the weekend and have internet again as well...

The Historian (part 7)

Ok, so that librarian dude that was following Helen and Paul around at their university? Yeah, turns out when he got hit by that car, he didn't really die. He turned up in Istanbul to try and steal the documents concerning Sultan Mehmed II and Vlad the impaler before they could look at them. I don't know why it never occurred to me that he wasn't really dead. I mean, he is a vampire, after all.

I'm also starting to understand why this book is called The Historian. At first, I thought it was a reference to the narrator growing up and becoming a historian, but now, I realize it's more about her father. Each place he goes, it seems that he learns more about the history surrounding the old cities, but is nowhere near finding Professor Rossi. I actually don't think they'll find him in the tomb at all. I don't think they'll ever find him. It just seems like such a wild goose chase to me....

The Historian (part 6)

Just as I suspected: The narrator has run off in search if her father. And Barley went with her, so that's kind of a relief. (I knew he was going to be important from the moment he was introduced, so there was no doubt about that. I just didn't know where or when he was going to show up again.)

So the narrator and Barley are on the train to Paris and she tells him the story thus far and then they read more of her father's letters that he had left her. He and Helen reach Istanbul and are in the process of searching for a document that Rossi had only described in his notes as a bibliography for the Order of the Dragon. Luckily (perhaps it was more than luck), they meet a man named Turgut Bora, who knows a lot about Vlad Dracul and even has a dragon book of his own! (That's why I don't believe it to be a coincedence that the three of them meet...)

Back on the train, the narractor decides to take a nap while Barley goes to the dining cabin to get some tea (I could tell that was a bad idea....) and when she wakes up, there is a stranger in her compartment "reading" a newspaper. (I immediately thought he was a vampire and wondered if this was the same figure that had been following the narrator and her father that I had mentioned in an earlier blog.) THEN, he asks her "Where is your father, my dear?" and she runs from the compartment to find Barley, who pays off a waiter to let them slip out the kitchen door, leavving the vampire stuck on the train until it stops again and Barly and the narrator stranded in a small town in the middle of nowhere.

The Historian (part 5)

So I'm finally at part two of the book! But part one leaves off with the narrator and her father at Oxford College, and then.... Her father disappears!!!

He's left her a note saying that she is to travel back to Amsterdam (where they live) with a graduate student named Stephen Barley (who had been her tour guide of the college the day before) and he'd be home soon. (And here's a prediction: Barley and the girl end up together in the end. If they don't, I'll be very surprised...)

So she gets home, and immediately goes and ransacks her father's office, trying to find some shred of evidence as to where he might have gone. She finds an envelope filled with letters written by her father and all addressed to her, as if he might ever need to send them. The first one reads:

"My dear daughter,
If you are reading this, forgive me. I have gone to look for your mother."

I'm still betting her mother is Helen Rossi....

The Historian (part 4)

Things have started to heat up. The narrator's father (who is named Paul, I had forgotten) is stalked by a vampire-bitten librarian... Which, if you think about it, is quite funny. When trying to check out Dracula from the library, Paul meets a fellow graduate student by the name of Helen Rossi (and here, the narrator pauses in her father's story to tell the reader that she had always like the name Helen because that was her mother's name, but she didn't know very much about her mother, which leads one to assume that Helen Rossi turns out to be her mother in the end) who thinks she's Professor Rossi's daughter who abandoned her pregnant mother in Romania! (There's some suspicion about this because Rossi never mentioned anything in his letters about Romania, nor did he know what Helen's mother was talking about when she had written him telling him she was pregnant.)

Anyway, in the stacks, Helen is accosted by the vampire librarian and with the help of Paul and a crucifix pilfered from the local church, subdue the librarian long enough to find out a little about Professor Rossi's disappearance. But I think the vampire actually bites her... It's mentioned that she's holding her neck, but I haven't had a chance to read any more than that.