I read a lot about The Historian on various book blogs, but was a bit unsure about it. I saw it described as the Da Vinci Code with vampires, which didn't really seem like my sort of thing, but I ended up giving it a try.
I can see why it's a little Da Vinci Code-ish - lots of history, lots of information, often narrated to you by various characters. People chasing each other around Europe frantically researching things in libraries. Kostova's characters, however, are much more like people than Brown's info-dumping mechanisms, and her writing is vastly superior. It's a tremendously exciting book - I was quite enthralled in their chase, despite the occasionally clumsy mechanism of letters telling much of the story.
Unfortunately, Kostova's characters suffer a little from the sheer scale of this book - a teenage girl, who is perhaps intended to be the "main" character, simply reads her father's letters to us, and barely becomes a person in her own right. I think that it's very difficult to combine the two though - if you're going to have a novel on an enormous scale and essentially educate your readers about a lot of Eastern European history, it's almost imposssible to create nuanced realistic characters at the same time. Regardless, The Historian is a very enjoyable read, but it's definitely an adventure story rather than a character study.
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I agree with you completely about this book. I wonder, since the author never gives us the main characters name, if she was never intended to become a person in her own right. It was very reminiscent of the Stoker original, down to the very anticlimactic ending.
I did love the idea of a legion of undead, not just as sexual euphamisms, but as bibliophiles having all the time in the world to read all that was ever printed.
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