Wickett's Remedy by Myla Goldberg (2005)

This is by the author of Bee Season, an unusual book, as is this one. The setting is Boston early 20th century, centering around the flu epidemic of 1918, where more people lost their lives than in all the wars of the century. The main story line follows working class Lydia, who works in an apartment store, then marries an intellectual man Wickett, they invent Wickett's Remedy, and she ends up working on Gallops Island, helping with research on the epidemic. Her story is intertwined with various others, including Quentin Driscoll, the owner of QD Soda company. Since I was listening to the book instead of reading it, in the beginning it was disconcerting to hear different voices and lead-ins with varied sound effects. I was forced to go look at the copy in our library, so I could see the printed version. Goldberg uses alternate ways to tell the story or give various sides to the story:
1. The whole book is full of side notes - comments printed in the outside margin of the book - like notes one would write when studying a text book. These side notes are most often comments from a person mentioned in the main story. Someone's thoughts at the time, remembering Lydia or an incident a different way. Sometimes the person has already passed away, but comments on how it "really was" for them.
2. Actual articles from the newspapers of the times, mostly strange human interest stories or letters to the editor about public spitting, lack of phone service, etc., all giving a flavor of the crisis. (These were accompanied by obnoxious newsroom sounds.)
3. Articles from the QDispatch, a fictional newsletter of the QD Soda company, that give the story of Quentin Driscoll and his soda empire. (These were accompanied by a cheery jingoistic kind of music and read by a high pitched female voice.)
4. Letters (accompanied by typing sounds) from various characters, sometimes you don't know who is writing, but you figure it out in the end.

Goldberg ties everything together in the end, but not necessarily in a satisfying way. Then again, the world doesn't always work out the way we would like, and this one definitely did not, but it was still an intriging book. It appeals to me as historical fiction with wonderful insights into the life of those times (she had done her research), differences in classes, men going of to the war in Europe, medicine at that time, etc. Goldberg gets points from me for thanking reference librarians for helping her with the research.

The Historian by Elizabeth Kostova (2005)

This book was a Christmas present from a colleague, given to me because it is about Eastern Europe and it deals with libraries and archives. And these are the things I really loved about the book. The three generations of characters are constantly looking for clues in primary documents in libraries and archives. And the book itself, though labeled a novel, has an engagingly realistic Note to the Reader, explaining that this was all compiled by the author from letters and notes in her possession, as if she herself were a middle aged scholar, and the events described were from her youth, and that of her father and his teacher. I loved the map of Europe on the end papers of the book. Novels rarely have this touch of reality, especially when they are describing real places and buildings. Their travels through Eastern Europe were both fascinating, and at times a bit familiar - when dealing with travel restrictions in the former Soviet Union. Istanbul seemed exotic to me.

I liked the basic story too. A motherless girl lives and travels around the world with her father. Then he takes off on a trip without her, and she feels she has to follow him, as he is searching for something relating to Dracula, following old paths he trod before looking for his professor, who had disappeared mysteriously. On that long ago venture he was with Helen, the professor's daughter, who travels with him through Hungary, Romania and Bulgaria. Anyway, there is enough suspense, romance, and all good things a novel needs.

What I did find disconcerting at times, was the juxtaposition of these academic, research focused characters in this mystical world of vampires. I didn't mind that one of the librarians turned evil, and I believe in a little bit of mysticism - the power of mind over body, of good spirits, maybe even guardian angels of sorts, and I know there is evil in the world, mostly created by us mortals, though I do not understand the depths of it at times, but vampires just don't fit into my world view.

In the middle of reading this book I couldn't resist looking up Dracula and vampires in the Wikipedia. The Dracula entry is on Bram Stoker's 1897 book, though it links to many other related articles. It is interesting where Stoker got his inspirations - a bit from folklore, a bit from Romanian history, though it is not clear that he knew much about Vlad Dracula, or Vlad the Impaler from the 15th century. But what I also found interesting, having never read the original Dracula, was that it consists of journal entries, letters and news clippings, a technique also used by Kostova. I will have to read the original to see. Another book that used this method of telling the story was Myla Goldberg's Wickett's Remedy.

Looks like many different cultures have had some type of myth about vampire-like creatures. I don't think the Latvians do. Their evil never gets that evil - it is mostly an expansion of negative human traits like laziness, dishonesty, cruelty. Even the devil is a not too bright trickster. So maybe that is why these really deep evil creatures are so repulsive to me and I do not enjoy horror movies or books, and keep wondering how I keep stumbling into books on this theme.

This time it was worth it.