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>> From the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C.
>> Ev Small.
I'm here to welcome you on behalf of the Washington Post
which is a charter sponsor of the National Book Festival and also
on behalf of the Library of Congress.
I'm a former editor at the Washington Post and now working
at the Library of Congress.
So, I get two good places there.
Just a caveat, you may have noticed the cameras.
The Library of Congress films these talks for webcast on its website.
So, if any of you told your families you were going off to work
for a few hours, please duck down when the camera pans the crowd.
But we wanna make sure you know that.
Right now we're gathered to hear
from Elizabeth Kostova whose first novel, the eerie, hypnotic
and authentic The Historian is what one reviewer called a toothsome
reworking of the Dracula myth indeed.
It's worth pouring out for all of you book lovers here today
that Kostova's undead Dracula is a historian, an archivist
and a bibliophile of sorts, what one reviewer calls a bibliomaniac
which probably describes many of you as well.
A Dracula with a penchant for librarians, what could be better?
[ Laughter ]
>> Kostova spent a good part of 10 years writing The Historian
but it immediately soared in to the stratosphere becoming the fastest
selling hardback debut novel in US history.
A record we think it still holds.
[ Applause ]
[ Inaudible Remark ]
[ Laughter]
>> We need look no farther than right across the mall
from where we're sitting now to the National Gallery of Art
for the momentum for her current novel, The Swan Thieves,
where an attack on a painting propels the story.
Don't anybody get any ideas.
Elizabeth Kostova has worked in a number
of things including recording folk music in Bulgaria and mowing loans
at least according to one source.
But we're lucky she turned to writing.
In her work she conjures up the powerful effects of myths,
the power of obsessions, and the pleasure of old libraries.
One last thing I'll tell you that you might not know.
Her interests in books and libraries started early.
According to a reliable source, her mother who was a librarian took her
and his sisters to the public library and they were each allowed
to check out 30 books for which they had a special shelf at home.
So please welcome book lover, Elizabeth Kostova.
[ Applause ]
>> Thank you so much.
Can everybody hear me well?
Good, okay and I'm already knocking the mic off the stand
but I'll try not to do that again.
I know many of you are librarians and I feel I should say something
about this before I say all the usual formalities which is
that when my mother who was one of my best readers in addition
to being a librarian read the manuscript to of The Historian.
She said, you know, I love this book and I'm just a little concerned
about the fate of all these librarians.
So I was very careful to dedicate my second book to her
which she has appreciated and which we have shared.
I do love libraries and like all of you I love books and I'm so thrilled
to see this outpouring of people and readers today here on the mall.
And I also wanna say I'm so thrilled to see all the reading programs.
I hope that you've all had a chance to check those out.
The programs that help us raised readers in this country.
That 30 books at the library story is true
and I think it is a great gift to children to be given books
and take them to the library.
So, I wanna say thank you very much to the festival for having me.
I'm honored and I'm honored that you're all here.
I'm gonna speak very briefly because what I'd really
like to do is answer your questions and talk
about the subjects you would like to discuss.
So, I'll just tell you as you heard my first book, The Historian,
took me 10 years to write.
The good news for those of you who read it is
that my second book is The Swan Thieves which came out in January is
about a 120 pages shorter.
So, I feel that-- it also took me about four
and a half years to write.
So, I feel I'm getting shorter and faster, I hope.
The inspirations for the two books were very different.
The first one as you know is about Dracula.
I have to say it.
It was a great surprise to me to find myself writing a literary novel
with elements of the supernatural.
I'm always very surprise when people say to me, you know this--
I don't usually, something I feel, I don't usually read vampire books.
I don't either.
I never read vampire books and then I'm always pleased
when they say I enjoyed this one anyway.
So, I was fascinated by-- to hear Isabel Allende's talk.
I hope some of you heard that.
Yes, and she's someone I admire very much as a person as well as a writer
and I loved what she said about how she lives other lives
by writing fiction.
And one of the things that's been very entertaining to me
about having written a book that's about experiences
with the mythical Dracula is
that people still ask me whether this is an autobiography
and so, no it's not.
One of the joys about writing a book about the impressionist
and as you heard some of the scenes
in The Swan Thieves are set right here in the National Gallery
around some of the fantastic paintings
in the 19th century galleries there.
But one of the great things about writing a book
about the impressionist painters is
that nobody asks you ever whether you believe in them or not.
So I would like to actually open this up very early to questions
because I think I'll be able to tell you more
and tell you exactly what you like to know, I hope so.
So if you wouldn't mind coming
up to the mic 'cause I'm actually a little bit hard of hearing
and I'll answer the question you asked if you come
to the mic instead of something I made up.
So that would be great.
Nobody has any-- okay.
[ Pause ]
>> Yes, and please the mic
>> Good morning, ma'am.
>> Good morning.
>> First of all, I very match enjoyed both of your books.
I just like to say that upfront.
I noticed on your website when I've last check it
that there's been someone hired
to write a screenplay for The Historian.
And my experience has been
that really great books often make really lousy movies.
And I was just wondering if you could speak a little bit
to any concerns you might have had or any influence that you have tried
to maintain on turning The Historian into a movie, thank you.
>> Thank you.
Did everyone hear the question?
Well, it's about the movie that's projected for The Historian.
Yes, of course when you write a novel you feel concerned
about what might happen to it when it becomes a movie
if you're lucky enough to sell it for a movie deal.
And it did sell several years ago, quite a few years ago now,
about four and half years ago to Sony-Columbia Pictures.
And it's sold to a studio that has made some wonderful movies,
Red Wagon Pictures, and I'm sure all
of you have seen some of their movies.
They make some blockbusters
and they've also made some really good movies
from books including novels.
Including Memoirs of a Geisha on which they worked
for 7 years very closely with the author Arthur Golden.
They have a track record of working closely with authors which I liked.
But I think when you sell a book to Hollywood in particular you do have
to kind of let go of it because it's likely
to become a very different animal.
And I'm curious to see what they do
but in the end all I could do is choose a studio
that seemed closest to what I wanted.
I will tell you one really quick thing
and then I'll take the next question.
When I first went out to meet with the studio,
they said, well I asked them.
I have one very frank question.
Do you intend to make a horror movie out of this novel?
And they laughed and they said well,
we've heard how you feel about horror.
That you're not a fan of the hardcore genre, and we want you
to know that we intend to make a movie
that will be terrifying and beautiful.
And I thought that was such a good answer for a novel like this
so that gives me a lot of faith in the studio.
Yes, please.
>> The Historian, although I do read a lot of supernatural fiction.
I like other types, historical especially.
What I loved about that book was the nested journals of how you did it
and how you straddled the 20th century's history, cold war
and pre-cold war, and so for me, Dracula kind of emerging
out of this made a whole lot of sense.
But I'm curious, what made you pick that, that framework for the novel,
those interacting journals of interacting people?
>> The question was about the structure of The Historian.
It is a series of documents.
In fact the whole book is a document that's put together
by the main character.
And there are a lot of journals and letters
and even an academic paper in it.
And I stole this shamelessly from Victorian novelists.
They premiere the great novels
and the novelists I read the most often although I read a lot
of contemporary fiction as well.
But I love that sense as a re-- when I'm a reader,
of having been given a document, especially letters and journals.
It also is a way to get very close to characters.
I think there's a part of us and probably not a very good part of us
that would love to read other people's mail.
So even if we shouldn't and we don't, it's there's a kind of joy
in being allowed that close to a character so that was part of it.
The other reason I chose that format was that it's what Bram Stoker used
for his brilliant novel Dracula.
And Dracula, I have no idea whether Dracula's a great literature or not
but it's just one of the best reads I've ever read.
And as you know, it's completely told in documents
and you get an amazing sense of the characters through that structure
so it really was because of the Victorians.
Thank you.
Yes, ma'am.
>> My question is more of a writer process question.
What is your writing process and how did you maintain your stamina
over 10 years in such a dense rich book?
You know to keep going, you know, keep it organized,
keep remembering all the story lines and the threads through it.
>> Thank you for that question about writing process.
You know, I've had a very different writing process
with each of my two books.
I'm now working on a third and again,
it's quite different from the first two.
When I wrote The Historian, I did keep going for 10 years
and I was really fascinated to hear what Diana said a few minutes ago
about writing her first book.
That rang very true for me as well that she kept going partly
because she wanted to prove to herself
that she can finish something and that was incredibly important to me.
I had a feeling I might be stuffing this into a drawer forever
but that I would know I can finish something
and I wanted to be able to do that.
I also had three children under the age of six like Diana and when I--
in fact I started it right before they were born so it was even,
they're even younger than that part of the time and frankly,
I think it was an escape.
I think that it was the part of my day even when it was 20 minutes
of my day when I actually was handling something
that didn't have egg on it.
So it was a great sort of personal vacation including doing the
research and the research took a long time.
That's one of the things that make me a very slow writer.
The writing process, writing process I think is fascinating to all of us
and when I wrote The Historian I--
because that book has a very careful, logically plotted kind
of framework, about halfway through, I outlined all of the rest
of the book and the original--
the first manuscript of it was about 1100 pages, first typescript.
So I really would have lost my way eventually
if I hadn't plotted it carefully and worked on it in the order
in which you read it, pretty much.
I learned a long time later that the best way, the most efficient way
to write a mystery is to write--
to know what the heart of the mystery is.
In the case of detective fiction that's the crime.
In the case of an historical novel that might be a mystery from history
but to know that ahead of time and then go back to the beginning
and work forward to that so I think I must have written
in the least efficient way possible.
But it worked for me.
It's the order in which you read it.
Finally, though I had a sort of--
after I finished that I had a revelation.
I went to-- I was visiting with a friend who's a wonderful novelist
and short story writer and I asked her what she'd been working on
and she said oh, I've been working on my novel this morning
and I said, wow, that's lovely.
What chapter are you on?
And she said well, I don't know and I was shocked by this.
I had no idea you were allowed to write a book in that way
and so I've promised myself
that if I ever wrote another novel I would try to write the way she did
which was to have the archivist story, the characters,
and then to write whatever seemed most compelling at that time,
whatever voice was most important, whenever a scene occurred to you,
and then of course when you do that, you have--
you end up with masses of material which you have to stitch together.
This was the way I wrote The Swan Thieves
which has a heavily psychological, very intimate feel to it
and it was a great process for that particular kind
of story because of that.
But of course, I just spent about over a year putting it together
in the order in which you read it which is now an interweaving
of the 20th and 19th centuries.
Can everyone hear me alright?
It feels like it's bouncing in and out but maybe
that just makes it sort of, I don't know, it gives it texture.
But if you start being able to not hear me, please wave from the back.
Yes ma'am, thank you for that question.
Yes.
>> Hi! It may interest you to learn
that your grandmother Eleanor Stevens was my high school librarian
in Asheville, North Carolina and helped to instill
in me a great respect for books and love for reading.
So yes and--
>> Thank you so much for telling me that.
>> You're welcome and my question is I'm very intrigued by your interest
in myth and its import in our lives,
our understanding of our own psyches.
One author who I think exemplifies this in her writing
and whose books I love very much is Sue Monk Kidd
and her book The Secret Life of Bees.
I 'm just wondering if you could say a little bit more about your love
for myth and your interest in myth.
Thank you.
>> Thank you so much and thank for telling me that.
I'm thrilled.
My grandmother was a wonderful encourager of reading and--
in her family as well as in the library.
I'm so happy to hear that and she read all of Jane Austen allowed
to me by the time I was 16.
So I can't think of a better training for a writer.
So thank you.
I am very interested
in myth although I am certainly no expert on it.
I imagine many of you know much more about it.
I've never studied myth in a kind of formal comprehensive way but I think
that it's fascinating that there are stories that last for us and some
of them have lasted for thousands of years
and they are still powerful for us.
Dracula has become one of those although
over hundreds rather than thousands of years.
In The Swan Thieves I heavily used the myth of Leda and the Swan
which is a favorite subject of painters of course through the ages.
But it's also I think just one of the strangest,
most fascinating stories out there, the story of a human being
and the divine or a human being and the beast.
Do we know whether it's beast or the divine?
It's really an amazing story when you think about it.
I think it's very interesting that if you look, for example,
at the movies that become-- that are sort of box office, enormous hits
or television shows that have millions of people glued to them.
At the heart of those, you find exactly the elements
that we love in our myths.
I had the experience a few years ago
when my children were quite a bit younger.
I'm reading aloud to them from that wonderful book of Greek myths,
the D'Aulaires book which probably some of you have
that has watercolor illustrations.
It's a classic children's work on myth but a pretty sophisticated one.
And my children who were pretty good but they
like most children may never believe in bedtime or baths
so I guess that's normal but when we were reading that book which is all
about things like Helen of Troy and people chained to rocks
so their livers can be eaten out by an eagle.
They would say every night to one another.
Quick, get your pajamas on, get your pajamas on.
We're going to have Greek myths which I think is so remarkable.
There's just something deep in us that responds to these stories
and they can be chosen only by time.
Thank you.
>> And piggybacks on that a little bit.
Would you talk a little bit about your time as a child
and your father telling you the stories of Dracula and how
that all-- did it scare you, did it you know, did that come back
to you as you were writing.
Would you talk a little bit about that?
Thank you.
>> Thank you.
The question was about the stories my father told me about Dracula
when I was a child and I feel less than hesitant to say
that my father is a very nice man.
He is a wonderful storyteller and from the time my sisters
and I were little he told us a lot of great stories,
many of them from his imagination.
>> But some of them as in the case of Dracula from things
like movies he had grown up with and he grew up in Brooklyn and Queens
in the '30s, '40s, early '50s and he went
to all those classic Dracula movies, Bela Lugosi
and all those great, great Dracula classics.
So his Dracula stories were heavily based on those movies which in turn
of course are based on the Bram Stoker book
and in them the noble Englishmen always tracked Dracula to his lair
in his stories and it always worked out very well for the good guys
and they always ended in Dracula's castle.
He told us these stories while we were traveling in Eastern Europe.
He was a-- he is a professor and he was given a post
in Slovenia and then in Yugoslavia.
So the magical thing about this for us as children was
that we often were hearing them while we were actually having a
picnic at the foot of a 13th century castle, for example.
So they were incredibly real that gave me a sense that myth
and history and travel were all kind of one--
could all become together and be one thing in the mind.
So that is why I've dedicated my first book to him.
Thank you for asking about that.
Yes ma'am.
>> Thanks.
The Historian introduces to so many wonderful and exciting new places.
Where has been your favorite place to travel?
>> The question is where is my favorite place to travel then?
That's honestly very hard for me to answer.
It's a -- I love thinking about that.
Many of the places in The Historian are places I know very well.
I lived there or I traveled there long before I wrote the book.
A couple of them I didn't get to until
after I've finished the manuscript either for research or even
after the book was published.
So I had to do a tremendous amount of research
to make sure I knew what those places would have looked like,
smelled like, sounded like at those particular periods
and it would be very hard for me to choose but I have to say
that Bulgaria is extremely, extremely close to my heart.
My husband is from Bulgaria and I've been going there off and on for more
than 20 years and I have a kind of second life there where I know a lot
of writers, publishers but also a lot of people who have nothing to do
with the literally world and are very interesting people living
in a way that is some ways extremely different from what I grew up with
and those, Bulgaria was such an inspiration to me for The Historian.
As you know it's-- it's-- if you read the book about a third
of the novel is set in Bulgaria in the 1950s and when I went back there
on book tour the book was touchingly a huge success in Bulgaria
in Bulgarian translation and when I went back there I met
so many wonderful writers who were struggling,
struggling to have any opportunity.
It's hard to be a writer anywhere but in Eastern Europe
after the collapse of communism,
there was just no funding for the arts.
So a few years ago I started a foundation
with the international royalties from The Historian
to provide competitive opportunities for writers
in Bulgaria, literary writers.
It also provides opportunities for American writers to go to Bulgaria
and work with translators and with Bulgarian writers
so I really urge you to check it out.
It's become much bigger than just my own project and if you
like to see the website for it.
If you're a writer and you like to apply for example,
it's www.ekf for Elizabeth Kostova Foundation dot edu.
Thank you for asking that.
[ Applause ]
>> Actually I think you just answered my question.
I read The Historian as a peace corp volunteer in Romania
on the Bulgarian border and I was pretty surprised and please
that the spot on psyche and kind of characters of the Eastern Europeans
in the book, so congratulations.
How did your interest in Eastern Europe start since we've already,
you just explained where you've been?
>> This-- that's amazing that you did that, wonderful.
It must have been a great experience, peace corp in Romania.
And I have been interested in Eastern Europe since I was seven
because of my father's career because he took us there
and we lived in Slovenia for about six months so it was long enough
to really-- for us to really get a feel for it.
And I've stayed interested ever since really and so did my parents,
so it just seemed like a natural place to set a novel
and I'm very pleased that it seemed, with your experience there
which I'm sure was profound.
I'm very pleased that you found it accurate
for what you know people there, so thank you.
>> I also have a Bulgarian directed question.
My father-in-law escaped Bulgarian-- communist Bulgaria and so my husband
and I were thrilled to see so much Bulgaria in the novel
and also I can see my father-in-law and his personality and quirks
in the novel which was really fun
and I guess my followup question is how much of that part
of the world Romania-Bulgaria inspired your story
and how much did you have to include all your great descriptions
of the scenery because of the material that you chose?
>> Thank you.
Your family sounds very interesting and again,
I'm glad it seemed accurate to you.
I found that setting a book, that writing a book about Dracula
of course makes Romania a major topic and I really tried
to include scenery that seemed to fit the story itself.
The places, to have the characters go to real places and many
of those places you can go.
In fact I was sort of half pleased, half horrified to hear
that there are historian tours in both Bulgaria and Romania now.
I really recommend that you-- I mean they may be very good tours
but I recommend you just take your backpack and get on the train
and ignore them because you'll see much,
probably much more off the beaten path places.
But I did try not to simply hit famous places in those two countries
but to really incorporate the story and the scenery
and they are beautiful countries.
I mean, if any-- most
of you probably saw the movie Cold Mountain.
That was field in the Carpathians in Romania
which is why the mountains don't look quite right but they--
it's gorgeous, they are wonderful countries to visit.
Does that answer your question or was there another part?
>> No the last three has covered my question.
Thank you.
>> Alright.
Good. I just wanna tell one really quick story.
When I was in graduate school I was in a wonderful writing class
that included some graduate students from other departments
at the University of Michigan.
And there was a young woman there who announced on the first day
when we had self-introductions that she was from Romania and I was
in the middle of writing The Historian
and I'm feeling pretty shy about it.
I mean I wrote it in private, mostly in private, for about--
for those 10 years and I went over to her after class one day
and I said you know, I was fascinated by the fact
that you said you're from Romania and I just wanted--
I wondered if I could talk with you
because I'm writing a novel that's partly about Romania and she looked
at me and she said oh, that sounds great.
I sure hope it's not about Dracula.
So I'm afraid, you know, and I have to add that she's one
of my best friends now and she helped me enormously
with The Historian and ended up really approving of the book
and helping me with the Romanian dialect and Transylvanian customs
and is very knowledgeable.
But I think that Eastern Europe of course has had its share
of stereotypes and so I've also tried
to stay away from some of those.
Last question.
>> Vampires have been a real pop culture phenomenon
in the last couple of years.
Did you know when you started writing about vampires
that you would be part of this whole plethora of books and movies
and TV shows about vampires?
>> You know when I wrote The Historian,
I have to say it was a little bit before that wave
that has included the Twilight series and all but it was
after Anne Rice and as I said, I'm not really, to be honest,
I'm not a reader of genre vampire literature so I wasn't very familiar
with a lot of those books but I did--
I have been astonished since then by this wave of--
this parade of vampires into popular culture.
I do think that this is nothing new.
I mean, vampires live up to their reputation
by never ever dying even if you want them to.
And I think it and this started in about 1760 in literature
and it happens every 40, 50 years and I think again
in the mid 21st century when everybody has forgotten this
and were on to something else, vampires will come back and some
of us will be saying to our grandchildren oh,
I think there was some kind
of vampire craze back in about 2007 or 8.
>> So it's-- I think it's the nature of vampires and again,
I think that speaks to the power of myth in our lives
that we love this-- we love and we love to hate this figure
of ourselves in the form of the vampire, something human
but also evil, something recognizable.
It's a lot scarier and a lot more interesting than say the blob
or something that doesn't seem as close to us.
I think we're fascinated by that so for anybody who is
around in say 2065 or 70, let's just keep an eye out
and see if they come back.
Thank you so much for all your wonderful questions.
.
[ Applause ]
>> This has been a presentation of the Library of Congress.
Visit us at loc.gov.