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cami_tralerighe 's review for:
Dracula
by Bram Stoker
I really liked the plot, for sure it lives up its reputation and my expectations.
What I didn’t expect was the writing style: the story is told through characters’ journals, letters, telegrams and memoranda, and for me it perfectly fits the events told!
This way we haven’t an overall view, no omniscient narrator who let transpire their knowledge of the events, only the characters facing events, their emotions, their fears and their choices.
The main characters – beyond Dracula, who never appears in first person, and seldom is physically present on the scene of action – are Johnathan Harker and his fiancé Mina, her friend Lucy, her three suitors Doctor John Seward, Quincey Morris and Lord Arthur Godalming and Doctor Van Helsing, but the story is told mainly by Johnathan, Mina and Dr Seward through their personal journals, which weave together events, seen through their different points of view, and complete each other’s blind spots.
In the first half of the novel this style increases the mystery aura around Dracula: ever stranger events take place, apparently without any link between them, but the modern reader knows well who is behind everything! When characters discover the truth, the style helps create a strong empathy with them because all is told from their – partial and personal – point of view.
The weak point I can’t not underline – for me it’s quite important, especially because of my current reading slowness – was the extreme slowness in the sequence of events in some points of the plot. Particularly, at about half of the book there are a few chapters I read with a great effort. I had the impression that the main characters where waiting for “something” to happen, without doing anything.
The ending, on the other hand, is excellent: in the last chapters there is a crescendo of suspense, perfect for the situation, which reach the climax a few pages before the last one with the denouement. I loved the last entry too, written seven years later: we can feel all the bittersweet feelings and memories associated with the adventure characters lived.
My favourite character, especially in the second half of the novel, was Mina. Despite the historical time, despite prejudices, despite stereotypes of the woman too weak to take part in the action, too weak even to hear about it, she – and before her was Lucy – is actually the one who put together the group, who encourage men to work together for a common cause and push them to risk so much. Though she is faithful to the role Victorian society impose to her, she is a strong woman, she can think rationally, more than men around her do. For creating a character like this in an age like that, Stoker deserve my respect!
What I didn’t expect was the writing style: the story is told through characters’ journals, letters, telegrams and memoranda, and for me it perfectly fits the events told!
This way we haven’t an overall view, no omniscient narrator who let transpire their knowledge of the events, only the characters facing events, their emotions, their fears and their choices.
The main characters – beyond Dracula, who never appears in first person, and seldom is physically present on the scene of action – are Johnathan Harker and his fiancé Mina, her friend Lucy, her three suitors Doctor John Seward, Quincey Morris and Lord Arthur Godalming and Doctor Van Helsing, but the story is told mainly by Johnathan, Mina and Dr Seward through their personal journals, which weave together events, seen through their different points of view, and complete each other’s blind spots.
In the first half of the novel this style increases the mystery aura around Dracula: ever stranger events take place, apparently without any link between them, but the modern reader knows well who is behind everything! When characters discover the truth, the style helps create a strong empathy with them because all is told from their – partial and personal – point of view.
The weak point I can’t not underline – for me it’s quite important, especially because of my current reading slowness – was the extreme slowness in the sequence of events in some points of the plot. Particularly, at about half of the book there are a few chapters I read with a great effort. I had the impression that the main characters where waiting for “something” to happen, without doing anything.
The ending, on the other hand, is excellent: in the last chapters there is a crescendo of suspense, perfect for the situation, which reach the climax a few pages before the last one with the denouement. I loved the last entry too, written seven years later: we can feel all the bittersweet feelings and memories associated with the adventure characters lived.
My favourite character, especially in the second half of the novel, was Mina. Despite the historical time, despite prejudices, despite stereotypes of the woman too weak to take part in the action, too weak even to hear about it, she – and before her was Lucy – is actually the one who put together the group, who encourage men to work together for a common cause and push them to risk so much. Though she is faithful to the role Victorian society impose to her, she is a strong woman, she can think rationally, more than men around her do. For creating a character like this in an age like that, Stoker deserve my respect!