The record-breaking author on her new book
▶ Novelist Elizabeth Kostova tells James Kidd about how her love of Bulgaria inspired a dark journey to unearth the painful secrets of its Communist past
Elizabeth Kostova is a novelist whose own life rivals the enigmatic twists she creates in her art. Take The Historian, Kostova’s debut novel. Ten years in the writing, it was the subject of one of the fiercest bidding wars in recent publishing history. While the US$2 million (Dh7.34 million) advance threatened to overshadow the book itself, it proved money well spent when Kostova’s artful recasting of the Dracula myth became the first ‘first novel’ to go straight in at number one on the New York Times bestseller lists. Twelve years after her seemingly overnight breakthrough, 52-year-old Kostova still sounds bewildered about what happened. “It was a huge surprise,” she tells me, in London. “I didn’t expect that The Historian would actually ever be published. I knew it was very hard to categorise. And I knew just enough about publishing that booksellers like to know what bookshelf a novel will be on.”
When The Historian began flying off those same bookshelves in vast numbers, Kostova managed to enjoy her success without being overwhelmed by it. This, I suspect, owes much to the fundamental equanimity of Kostova’s character.
Although she confesses that, “I have never been totally comfortable being the centre of attention,” Kostova comes across as impressively level-headed. Her unmistakable passion for her art tends to be balanced by a flash of humour, or awareness of broader, becalming perspectives.
When I ask why all three of her books have taken so long to finish (10 years for The Historian, five-anda-half for second novel The Swan Thieves, eight for her most recent work The Shadow Land), she says: “I procrastinate by having a life. I have a very full family life and a life of service to the literary community. I have taught a lot as well. But I have realised over the years that [writing slowly] helps me mentally to chew on material.”
Back in 2005 when The Historian was published, the American writer’s own life helped her to navigate the notoriously perilous path between obscurity and fame, the struggle to make ends meet and sudden wealth. “If something like the startling, overnight publication of a book on a big scale happened to a younger person, that can be really a very difficult thing to metabolise and recover from,” she says.
In 2005, during The Historian’s startling publication, Kostova was 40, married and the mother of three children: then nine, six and five respectively.