The New Annotated Dracula [Englisch] [Gebundene Ausgabe]

I just purchased THE NEW ANNOTATED DRACULA for the tidy price of $40, overcome with the desire to seek out and purchase the definitive edition of what may very well be the greatest horror story ever told. DRACULA has been in continuous publication since its debut in 1897, and that fact alone is a testament to the narrative's (like its primary protagonist's) immortality.

So did this edition measure up?

No.

Why?

Well, first of all, let me just say that by no means does this edition claim to be anything it is not--the sinlge most exhaustively annotated version of DRACULA ever. A good third of the book is entirely removed from the novel altogether, including prefaces and introductions in front of it, and numerous, NUMEROUS appendecies and afterwords after it.

However, that aside, I cannot really sanction this as the best version of DRACULA ever published, as many of the press reviews printed on the back of the jacket will tell you.

I have two main problems with this edition.

First of all, the lesser problem is that of the annotation itself. If you're the kind of fastidious person I like to think I am, you'll want to sit and read through every note on every page. Once you get through the first page of the novel, however, you'll have most likely changed your mind about that. I took me no less than two hours to read all the way through the preface, introduction, and introductory essay THE CONTEXT OF DRACULA before I even got to the novel, at which point I spent another half hour reading every single notation and, feeling really freakin' tired by this point, came to the somewhat depressing realization that I had only gotten through the first page of the novel.

The problem is that this edition is so heavily, HEAVILY annotated that it's virtually impossible to keep track of the actual narrative if you bother to read all the notes, which can go on for pages all on their own, and number up to three or four in a single sentence. However, it should be said that this is nothing less than I suppose you'd expect to find in the most heavily annotated version of DRACULA ever published; still, I found I was a little unprepared for the work that went into reading it.

My second problem, and my main problem, with this edition is that it proceeds under the ludicrous concept that DRACULA is not a work of fiction, but in fact a collection of real documents edited together by Stoker himself.

Oh yes. You read that right.

Right from the preface, Leslie Klinger the author of the notes and the novel's supplementary material, tells us that he will be annotating DRACULA as though it were a real story. When I first read this, it seemed like and interesting idea, and I was curious to see just how he would go about doing it. Unfortunately for myself, I was not pleased to find out.

Klinger goes on to say that Bram Stoker actually knew the Harker characters socially, and, having learned of their horrifying tale and believing that Dracula was not destroyed, resolved to publish their papers in order to warn the world of the threat of vampires, at which point Count Dracula himself appeared to Stoker and forced him to make changes to the narrative so as to make it seem more ficticious and to misinform the public about vampires, in order to protect himself from reprocussions.

Once again, I assure you that you read that right.

In taking this preposterous approach, Klinger not only effectively nullifies his own notations, making all that excessive reading pointless since it proceeds from a ficticious concept anyway, but also actually manages to lessen the effect of the novel as a great work of fiction. By taking the authorship away from Stoker and placing it in the hands of people who have never existed, you destroy that which makes DRACULA so remarkable in the first place: it is a book crafted out of a mightily massive mess of vampiric folklore and mythology combined with the social climate of the Victorian era as well as Stoker's own love of Gothic horror and the macabre. It may be difficult to believe that a simple Irish scholar could have crafted the single most influential piece of horror literature in history on his own, but it's sure as hell a lot easier to swallow than the idea that a 500-year-old vampire helped him do it.

Overall, this edition is NOT the way to read DRACULA if you've never read it before. I can only reccomend this to those who already know the novel inside and out, and want to know even more while toying with the possibility that it really could have happened. Which, incidentally, it didn't.

I honestly got more out of thumbing through the $4 pocket-sized paperback edition of DRACULA I first read when I was 10 than I got from dragging myself through THE NEW ANNOTATED DRACULA.

You have been warned.

I've always wanted to read Dracula, and I've thoroughly enjoyed the other annotated versions in this series. I've also been eyeing editor Leslie Klinger's three-volume annotated Sherlock Holmes for a while. Upon seeing this edition in a book store, I thought that a little hand-holding and behind-the-scenes insight would make this a fun read.

While this book is both gorgeous and thorough, and I applaud Klinger's exhaustive efforts, I was surprised and disappointed upon discovering that in both this edition and the Sherlock Holmes series, he employs the 'gentle fiction' that the stories are based on actual fact while preparing his annotations.

For me, being a casual but curious reader, an annotated edition should be a one-stop-shop to discover the facts behind the tales, without the reader having to do research. Instead I found that these two series superimpose the idea that they are based on true events. At first I thought I could just ignore the superfluous annotations (which would have trimmed or altered them by a full quarter.) But as I got further into it, they are not so easily ignored. There came a grey area where I began to wonder if what I was distilling from the fictionalized annotation was even close to the facts. For example, at one point early on it is insinuated that the story didn't actually happen in Transylvania, and that this was simply a cover up contrived by Stoker. I would instead have been more interested to know if Stoker had considered other locales and what course he took to finally choose Transylvania. Unfortunately, I may never know without reading a future annotated edition which dispenses with the 'true story' fiction, or without reading the other books mentioned and used by Klinger. Being a casual reader of Dracula I have no interest in delving into these other works and had instead hoped to discover more from this edition.

Another reviewer has stated that Klinger must not like the novel Dracula, and I have to disagree. Klinger clearly loves this book with all the efforts he put into his edition. However, the annotations do come across a bit on the terse side, even chastising Stoker at times, certainly when taking the fictional stance that Stoker altered the original words of the players. I can imagine that to sustain this fiction that the story actually happened must have been a monumental task for Klinger, but these accomplishments are lost on this reader. On a lesser note, it was a little distracting that Sherlock Holmes seemed to be mentioned so often in the annotations. I'd also like to note that the publishers did a disservice in their reproduction of Klinger's once-beautiful photographs. They are often dark, lacking contrast and detail.

Dracula was an enjoyable book, and Klinger's insight was thorough. Unfortunately, while this edition could have been the de facto annotated edition of Dracula, by taking the position that this is a true story, the editor has ensured that the book will sit merely as a curiosity until such time that his annotations can be re-edited to remove the 'gentle fiction.'

"The New Annotated Dracula" offers annotations and supplementary material by Leslie S. Klinger, who annotated the 3-volume "The New Annotated Sherlock Holmes" for Norton. This is a handsome, cumbersome volume, 8 "w x 10 "h x 1 "d, weighing a hefty 3 pounds. There are color and black-and-white illustrations scattered throughout: photos of people, movies, stage productions, posters, and Dracula paraphernalia. Annotations run in a column beside the text, in slightly smaller font, and some pages fill up with nothing but annotations. This format makes the annotations easier to read than nanofont at the bottom of the page, but it makes the text of the novel more difficult to read.

There is an introduction by Neil Gaiman, followed by a 32-page essay by Klinger on "The Context of Dracula". Here he provides some basic information about Victorian England, "Dracula"'s reception in 1897, a brief history of vampire literature, and some biographical information on Bram Stoker. And Klinger introduces his gimmick: For the sake of his essays and annotations, Klinger assumes that "Dracula" is a historical document written by Bram Stoker to get the word out about Dracula -or perhaps to make people believe the vampire dead- based on the accounts of his acquaintances, who are the characters in the narrative. Stoker is supposed to have gotten his information from the (fictional) "Harker Papers", in which Jonathan Harker described the events of the novel. This silly fiction of Klinger's turns out to be annoying and confusing.

There are over 1500 annotations, and, to put it bluntly, most of them are taken from Clive Leatherdale's annotated "Dracula Unearthed" (1998), which is the most extensively annotated edition ever produced. Some are taken from Leonard Wolf's groundbreaking "The Essential Dracula" (published as "The Annotated Dracula" in 1975), which was the first annotated edition of "Dracula". I compared a few chapters note-for-note with "Dracula Unearthed". Most of the annotations came from Leatherdale, to the extent that his name should be on the cover. Klinger has re-worded them and, in cases where Leatherdale referred to source material, he has quoted from the source where Leatherdale only indicated page numbers.

The annotations that originate with Klinger -and they are the minority- fall into a few categories: comparisons between the published text of "Dracula" and a manuscript currently held by Paul Allen, comparisons with a 1901 abridged edition of the book, comparison to films, the occasional piece of Victorian trivia, and speculation on the text per Klinger's "gentle fiction" of it being based on the "Harker Papers". Annotations in the latter category are confusing, as the reader must stop and think about whether he is reading information or a further fiction. Comparisons to the manuscript are a curiosity, but we don't know what stage of the novel's development it represents. Klinger doesn't explain that the 1901 abridgement was aimed at a more popular audience and eliminated 15% of the text. The deletions remove some of the novel's subtext, making it more fluid but less interesting and perhaps less controversial. Klinger annotates only some of the deletions, however, not all of them.

Supplementary material follows the novel: "Dracula's Guest", which was a false start to the novel, later published as a short story. "The Dating of Dracula", which spins a fiction about the dates the events of the novel took place. "The Chronology of Dracula" charts the novel's major events. "Fictional Accounts of the Count" talks about book's that have taken up Stoker's Dracula character. "Sex, Lies, and Blood: Dracula in Academia" is a cursory presentation of the fashions of academic interpretations of the novel. "The Public Life of Dracula" lists stage and film productions of "Dracula". "Dracula's Family Tree" is a light treatment of vampire folklore in Eastern Europe and a look at modern-day fictional representations (speaking, of course, as if they are real).

It's difficult to say what audience "The New Annotated Dracula" is suited to. If you are looking for a scholarly annotated edition that offers more than the Norton Critical Edition, get Leatherdale's "Dracula Unearthed" (it is available in the UK). If you want something packed with interesting tidbits but a little lighter, try Leonard Wolf's "The Essential Dracula". The drawback is that it was written before the discovery of Bram Stoker's working notes, so some of the information is outdated. If you just want to read the novel, I recommend the Norton Critical Edition. This "New Annotated Dracula" is too big and heavy for that. "Dracula" aficionados are going to balk at "The New Annotated Dracula". I think it's intended for people with a casual interest in the novel who don't mind the bulk or the nonsense, but this edition contributes nothing to "Dracula" scholarship.