So much of his dialogue ends up like a shotgun blast of weirdly worded English that half the time he speaks I have to jump back to listen again so I understand what he's yammering about.
The most egregious example is right when he's first introduced.
"Tell your friend that when that time you suck from my wound so swiftly the poison of the gangrene from that knife that our other friend, too nervous, let slip, you did more for him when he wants my aids and you call for them than all his great fortune could do."
Is he supposed to be funny? Is it just 19th century phrasing thats gone out of date? Its like listening to Yoda recite Shakespeare.
by KindlyOlPornographer
20 Comments
I think Stoker was trying to write a Dutch person who had poor English. He should have just played it straight instead of trying to write an accent.
Like the other user said, he’s just supposed to have bad English.
I don’t remember him being exceptionally difficult to understand when I read the book last year, though. Maybe the narrator’s performance is making things more confusing, or maybe it would help to read along with those sections?
You might be listening to the wrong Audio Book. You want the one with Tim Curry in it.
As for old Abe, VH speaks broken English, and when heard it sounds very characterful but when read it’s hard I imagine.
During the era most people HEARD books not read them (as books were usually read aloud to groups) thus the writing style is very different before the invention of pulp printing allowed the mass distribution of books at remarkably cheap prices made private reading the main way people experienced books.
Did anyone else honestly find the entire book to be goofy af? Like how many blood transfusions are we gonna do here before your characters learn a single thing Bram? How many pages are we going to devote to nerding out about shorthand? The accent is just part of a rich tapestry of goofiness.
It’s like how Quincey has the funniest fucking Texan slang that doesn’t exist at all.
Van is supposed to be Dutch so Bram is just trying to write his really bad English. He’s the Chewbacca of the crew. Incomprehensible.
It feels like it should be read in iambic pentameter.
Bram Stoker thought he could write natural-sounding dialogue for a character who spoke broken English as a second language.
He miscalculated to an astonishing degree.
Damn. I thought your complaint about Van Helsing would be the same as mine. I can’t stand how the whole time he’s suspecting that Dracula is a vampire, he keeps thinking about it out loud so much, which makes everyone go “what is it?” And he’s just like “No no. In time I will reveal the thing I won’t shut up about, but not yet!” It’s like Stoker wanted to do the bare minimum but didn’t want to just write “and then something suspenseful happens”.
Yeah, I listened to the audiobook about a year ago? It was…interesting. I did get used to it, but it seemed to drag on. I might have preferred to read it.
I’m reading this line in Boomhauer’s voice now and I can’t stop chuckling at it.
Maybe Stoker was just really ahead of his time.
I read Dracula last year and half jokingly referred to it as the endless ramblings of Professor Van Helsing.
I hope you’re listening to the full cast version with Tim Curry as Van Helsing.
I started reading it recently, having spent years reading about how Van Helsing is annoying. So I was kind of surprised how I didn’t find him annoying or hard to understand when I reached his part in the book.
The zookeeper on the other hand, I have no idea what that guy was talking about. It was like reading Aramaic translated into Latin, then translated into Jimmy Nail (a dialetic of Gordie, spoken by few, and understood by far less).
I actually quite like that the original Van Helsing is nothing like a traditional badass hero. He’s a weird goofy professor, but he’s also an experienced vampire hunter.
Interessting. In “Salute, Jonathan” he makes an much more articulated impression. I mean he is an academic of his time probably being much more aquainted to french than to english. Modern day dutchmen have sick english skills despite their accent.
I have always felt so guilty of not really liking Bram Stocker’s Dracula, the book feels… lacking. It could have been so much more with proper execution but i have felt the writing is silly.
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Glad i’m not the only one thinking that at least. Carmilla is in comparison better written tho.
It is really odd dialogue, I think it’s meant to show what a colorful, “ethnic” character he is. ‘
I read the book when I was about 18, and found it incredibly long, boring, and non-scary. Of course by then I’d seen tons of horror movies and probably was more than a bit jaded.
I felt the same way reading “Frankenstein.” I suppose it was shocking for its time, and maybe Hollywood has jaded my view of what monster are, but I was SO BORED.
Kudos to you, though, for having the gumption to give the audiobook a go. I hope you stick with it, despite the weird dialogue.
I’m also listening to the audiobook at the moment. The over-egged accent doesn’t bother me as much as Van Helsing’s (in)actions. I thought he was supposed to be shit hot, but he’s really not all that. The amount of time he wastes being enigmatic but ultimately not helping poor Lucy.
I found her final days infuriating. Van Helsing arses around decorating the place with garlic as if that’s a foolproof solution. Surely she’d have had a better chance if he or one of the lads had stayed by her side every night? He’s all shocked everytime finds that Dracula has been during the night, but what did he expect? The scale of his incompetence is demonstrated by the fact that they actually end up running out of people to do blood transfusions.
(I have strong feelings about all this.)
Bear in mind I’m only halfway though, so perhaps he’ll redeem himself…
I thought you were going to say you specifically listened to the audiobook reading by Christopher Lee and only realised in the last fourth of the book the book was abridged.
Because that’s what happened to me.
I didn’t have issue with it but your description makes me laugh so there’s that