The Haunting

I am haunted by my past. Not from something I have done - or regrets from something I have not. No, it is more intangible than that. It happens when I sleep and ghosts from my past emerge in a dream. Dreams that have nothing to do with a past experience but hint that the person is here to visit and remind me of something. They are long-lost friends, ex-enemies, lost loves, almost anything. And I wake with a pang that I have left something undone - or not understood an event, or perhaps need to better internalize some missed moral. My regrets, those that haunt me, are not a transgression or an omission, but that there is something I don't understand in all of this - and I should.
I felt that way following my recent read of the 600+ paged The Historian. The novel is a fascinating story involving the historical search for Drakulya in to races 2 decades apart. Perhaps the plot and story line from this new-coming author is not award winning, but I was held to the pages just as much for the descriptions of foreign cities as for the suspense. The characters weave in and out of exotic European cities, Istanbul, Budapest, Sofia and a long list of unnamed towns full of history. The cities and the mysterious characters left me in a fog. As if not far off, just beyond my periphery, loomed some figure dragged from the past. In their case it was the Vlad Tepes.
I don't think that a semi-mortal vampire is lurking behind me at every turn. But the book made me pause and contemplate the way the past haunts me at times. I think that history is this way for many. It is mysterious because we really cannot know it. We can guess, surmise and hypothesize, but we cannot know. So much is left to the imagination. And perhaps the best historians are those that view the past (or a shadow of it as Plato suggests) and realize there is something undone, or unlearned - or for the wisest - that they need to internalize a moral.
At any rate, for what it's worth. It is a good read. Sometimes slow, but as I mentioned, the prose takes you to distant cities. And having been to several of these locations, I truly felt I had returned to a foggy Europe. So, grab the book and try to fit in a last minute summer read.
HRP