Dracula Ignota
For the heretofore unnamed grass roots sort of book club this month, we settled on Bram Stoker's gothic masterpiece Dracula.
None of the three current members have read it (despite the fact that I, at least, have been assigned to read Mary Shelley's Frankenstein for two different courses), and we collectively decided that we had waited long enough.
Thing is, with a book like Dracula, you think you more or less know the story, from the assortment of movies and cultural references, and from the even larger assortment of criticism about how the movies have entirely strayed from the content or spirit of the book. I had assumed that by means of the movies and the criticism, I could reverse engineer the content of the original novel pretty well.
Needless, to say, I've had some surprises:
Count Dracula has a long white mustache. Not sure how he keeps the people juice out of it. Enough said on that.
Also, the Count, contrary to what so many people (and at least half of Romania, apparently) wail about, claims not to actually be Vlad the Impaler (also known as Vlad Dracula or Vlad Tepeş), but rather a proud descendent of him. Of course, that assumes you trust Dracula's account in the first place, and for all the Romanians defending one of their national heroes, I don't know how much consolation that really serves anyway. I still say that a vampire claiming to be Queen Elizabeth the First's grandson would be less shocking to the English than any assertions that Queen Elizabeth had been a vampire herself, but maybe that's just my personal bias.
Transylvania, for being in Romania, sure is devoid of Romanians in the book. Maybe they're all off in the woods grilling mititei somewhere, but the Transylvania of Bram Stoker's world, at least as narrated by Jonathan Harker, is populated by Hungarians (not terribly far from the truth — they're the largest minority in western Romania), Gypsies for which Stoker uses the Hungarian name Szgany (also a large minority in Romania), Slovaks (whose traditional clothing of large belts and cowboy hats Harker derides at every opportunity), some Czechs, a handful of Slovenians, some Moldovans, and . . . no, I think that's it. Oh, there's a Serbian or two hanging around as well. In fact, the only person who might actually be Romanian is a villager in Bistrița who shouts "stregoica!" at Harker as he leaves town for Dracula's castle.
Back to the critics, almost all I've ever heard is how inadequate was the research Stoker seems to have done on Romania. Aside from the lack of any actual Romanian characters, it seems he actually did some pretty good homework: his geography is not bad (probably through the use of maps), and he throws in some nice tidbits like mămăligă and impletața. I've never had the latter, but mămăligă (Romanian polenta) is some tasty stuff. If you have to face a vampire in the evening, it's not a bad breakfast to start the day with.
Lastly, Quincey P. Morris. Wow. I think he may have been included in the Coppola film, but I don't recall him very well. At any rate, what says Gothic Horror more than a genteel Texan expat slinging marriage proposals at the female characters? If he'd proposed to a beguiling Transylvanian rather than a giddy vacuous Englishwoman, perhaps he wouldn't have been shot down. I'll have to give him some pointers on that, should I ever run into him.
Incidentally, while I was looking up a couple of the bits of info I couldn't remember off the top of my head, I found this site, which blogs the various journal entries and letters which make up Dracula in real time, presumably so you can experience it at its real-world pace. An interesting idea.
None of the three current members have read it (despite the fact that I, at least, have been assigned to read Mary Shelley's Frankenstein for two different courses), and we collectively decided that we had waited long enough.
Thing is, with a book like Dracula, you think you more or less know the story, from the assortment of movies and cultural references, and from the even larger assortment of criticism about how the movies have entirely strayed from the content or spirit of the book. I had assumed that by means of the movies and the criticism, I could reverse engineer the content of the original novel pretty well.
Needless, to say, I've had some surprises:
Incidentally, while I was looking up a couple of the bits of info I couldn't remember off the top of my head, I found this site, which blogs the various journal entries and letters which make up Dracula in real time, presumably so you can experience it at its real-world pace. An interesting idea.