The Prague Cemetery by Umberto Eco
Book Description
November 8, 2011
The highly anticipated, controversial novel, sold in more than forty countries"" Nineteenth-century Europe--from Turin to Prague to Paris--abounds with the ghastly and the mysterious. Conspiracies rule history. Jesuits plot against Freemasons. Italian republicans strangle priests with their own intestines. French criminals plan bombings by day and celebrate Black Masses at night. Every nation has its own secret service, perpetrating forgeries, plots, and massacres. From the unification of Italy to the Paris Commune to the Dreyfus Affair to "The Protocols of the Elders of Zion," Europe is in tumult and everyone needs a scapegoat. But what if, behind all of these conspiracies both real and imagined, lay one lone man? What if that evil genius created its most infamous document? Eco takes his readers on an unforgettable journey through the underbelly of world-shattering events. Eco at his most exciting, a book immediately hailed as a masterpiece.
Editorial Reviews - Amazon.com Review
Nineteenth-century Europe—from Turin to Prague to Paris—abounds with the ghastly and the mysterious. Conspiracies rule history. Jesuits plot against Freemasons. Italian republicans strangle priests with their own intestines. French criminals plan bombings by day and celebrate Black Masses at night. Every nation has its own secret service, perpetrating forgeries, plots, and massacres. From the unification of Italy to the Paris Commune to the Dreyfus Affair to The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, Europe is in tumult and everyone needs a scapegoat. But what if, behind all of these conspiracies both real and imagined, lay one lone man? What if that evil genius created its most infamous document?
Eco takes his readers on an unforgettable journey through the underbelly of world-shattering events. Eco at his most exciting, a book immediately hailed as a masterpiece.
A Note from the Author
Dear Amazon Readers:
The nineteenth century teemed with mysterious and horrible events: the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, the notorious forgery that later inspired Hitler; the Dreyfus Case; and numerous intrigues involving the secret services of various nations, Masonic sects, Jesuit conspiracies, as well as other episodes that—were they not documented truths -would be difficult to believe.
The Prague Cemetery is a story in which all the characters except one -the main character -really existed. Even the hero’s grandfather, the author of a mysterious actual letter that triggered modern anti- Semitism, is historical.
And the hero himself, though fictional, is a personage who resembles many people we have all known, past and present. In the book, he serves as the author of diverse fabrications and plots against a backdrop of extraordinary coups de théâtre: sewers filled with corpses, ships that explode in the region of an erupting volcano, abbots stabbed to death, notaries with fake beards, hysterical female Satanists, the celebrants of black Masses, and so on.
I am expecting two kinds of readers. The first has no idea that all these things really happened, knows nothing about nineteenth-century literature, and might even have taken Dan Brown seriously. He or she should gain a certain sadistic satisfaction from what will seem a perverse invention—including the main character, whom I have tried to make the most cynical and disagreeable in all the history of literature.
The second, however, knows or senses that I am recounting things that really happened. The fact that history can be quite so devious may cause this reader’s brow to become lightly beaded with sweat. He will look anxiously behind him, switch on all the lights, and suspect that these things could happen again today. In fact, they may be happening in that very moment. And he will think, as I do: "They are among us…"
--Umberto Eco
Review
"[Eco's] latest takes that longtime thriller darling, the conspiracy theory, and turns it into something grander...Sold to 40 countries and said to be controversial; a speed-read with smarts." -- Library Journal, Pre-Pub Alert, "My Picks"
"A whirlwind tour of conspiracy and political intrigue...this dark tale is delightfully embellished with sophisticated and playful commentary on, among other things, Freud, metafiction, and the challenges of historiography." -- Booklist
"Intriguing, hilarious...a tale by a master." -- Publishers Weekly boxed review
"He's got a humdinger in this new high-level whodunit...a perplexing, multilayered, attention-holding mystery." -- Kirkus, starred
"I find this book fascinating, perhaps the best Eco has written in years. Eco takes on conspiracy theories in the feverish political activism of nineteenth-century Europe--freemasonry, the Italian Risorgimento, the Paris Commune, and above all the forgery of the slanderous The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. What if there were a single mastermind behind all these conspiracies? It's already a bestseller in Italy, and I can't get enough of it!" ---- Huffington Post
Notes by readers
Brilliant writing, odd story, By Nancy E. Turner (Tucson, AZ USA)
Umberto Eco is anything but a pedant in his writing. The world was in turmoil between 1885 and 1905. Eco has thrown the whole mess of Europe in the late 19th century into one story, threaded it all through the hateful and vengeful eye of a delerius psychotic, and made it all make sense. The book is chock full of everything from Sigmund Freud (spelled Froid [umlaut]) to Napoleon, and for my money, I believe much of the backstory is true to history as I have learned it.
The style is gripping, entertaining, and rife with hidden meaning between the lines so that the reader seems to know what the narrator/main character does not. Simonini reveals from about the second page that he is the multiple-personality, the psychotic, the borderline person whom he seeks. We know it. We even begin to realize that others who know Simonini also know him as either a fraud or a lunatic. One of the masterful ways in which this is done is the character describing everyone he hates. Germans. Jews. French. Russians. The one thing that makes this so different from all his other novels is the level of sexual perversion graphically described, the twisting of motives of everyone from Jewish Rabbis to Templar Masons, of course through the eyes of a madman, and the level of depravity it makes the reader FEEL. Now, any author desires to elicit emotion from a reader, even if it is anger. Eco managed to step on all my buttons. This book is thick with hate speech, promiscuity, and murder. The writing is flawlessly brilliant, but the subject matter is not gentled by even the smallest point. One does wonder, since the book is translated from Italian, whether the translator is the brilliant here, but likely, they are equals. I read this for the Vine program, and if not for needing to supply a review, probably would not have finished it. It is so completely grim, so dark, foreboding, and evil, that I felt exhausted by it.
Funny, Erudite, Annoying and Brilliant and Over My Head, By Patrick McCormack (New Brighton, MN USA)
Everything Eco writes starts with an off-putting tour through a forest of symbols and a closet jammed with old conspiracies, until the average reader throws the damn thing at the wall.
This is no different, although the racist rambler at the center of the opening scenes of this novel is appalling, like Don Rickles on medieval crack.
This novel is a thriller in clown pants, a consipracy of dirty priests and nasty freemasons and horrible men and the smelly calvalcade of southern European bigotries. It is great fun, and surprisingly a rolicking good tail, but why, oh why has Mr. Eco never learnt to lead the reader into the labrynth of his genius?
So, if you are in the mood for a good book that starts with a Master's degree level of litarary sophistication in one huge swallow, this is the book for you. If you are in a book that takes you through all of the many furtive nasty cracks in a bad man's mind, in order to make a point, this is the book for you...
I cannot help but think that this must be literature, because it is too dense to be a dime novel.
If he wears you out (and Mr. Eco does wear out a reader) within the first 25 pages, so be it. Having finished it, I have the same reaction to this as I did to reading Genet.... brilliant. Sick. Worth it. Never again.
If he wears you out (and Mr. Eco does wear out a reader) within the first 25 pages, so be it. Having finished it, I have the same reaction to this as I did to reading Genet.... brilliant. Sick. Worth it. Never again.
Eco at his second best, By Thomas F. Dillingham (Columbia, Missouri USA)
Commenting on any work by Umberto Eco is a daunting task. Eco's massive learning, deployed in each of his books not to impress but to reinforce the depth and complexity of his thought, as well as the intricacy of the narrative structures he delights in creating, combine to force doubt and uncertainty in the mind of a reviewer--have I missed something crucial?
Are the subtleties too remote for my comprehension? Of course, these are good problems to have, since they are part of the constant pleasure of reading Eco (whether nonfiction or fiction), and recognizing them as signals that the characteristics of Eco's work are present in this latest novel.
The Prague Cemetery purports to be the memories of a man of the 19th century, or arguably two men, since we are shown that "Captain Simonini" is also "Abbe Dalla Piccola" -though neither of the two men understands at first how they can both inhabit the same body -but they are a case of multiple personality disorder, comparable to a woman (Diana) who is being studied and exploited by psychologists and clerics who find her two personalities (one a "Satanist" who follows a sect of Freemasons, the other a pious and devout Catholic who is horrified by the behavior of her alternate personality). The fact that Captain Simonini encounters a certain "Froide," who is a psychologist working with the famous Charcot in Paris, reinforces the novel's interest in the transition from older forms of psychic research (uses of hypnosis by Mesmer and his followers) toward the "talking cure" and acceptance of the importance of dreams and childhood trauma in the exploration of adult emotional psychopathology.
Simonini is at the center of this intricate plot, which begins with his self-introduction and an extended tirade--alternately repulsive and hilarious--in which he establishes himself as one who loathes and despises nearly every group and nationality he has encountered in Europe--he deploys the national and ethnic stereotypes familiar from all expressions of bigotry, and he repeats these corrosive hatreds throughout the novel at almost every occasion when he encounters a member of a group he finds subhuman and inferior to, especially, himself. Among these, he includes all women, of any race or ethnic group, and regularly expresses his horror at the thought of close contact with any woman (though he never shows any sign of attraction to his own sex, either). His most powerful and profound hatred, however, is directed toward the Jews, and that constitutes the driving force of the whole narrative of his life and activities. He hates the Catholic Church, especially the Jesuit order, and Freemasons, as well, and this convenient group of targets he uses by exploiting their rivalries and by setting them against each other through his schemes and publications, leading finally to his "masterpiece," the combination of dozens, even hundreds of anti-semitic tirades into what would become the infamous Protocols of the Elders of Zion. (The vituperative remarks by Simonini toward so many groups make him somewhat reminiscent of Thomas Bernhard's narrative voices in such works as Concrete and Old Masters, but also of William Gass's repellent narrator in The Tunnel. I don't mean to suggest imitation, here, but simply that there are other characters of similar unpleasantness.)
Simonini, by disguising himself, as well as by employing his alternative persona, Abbe Dalla Piccola, becomes embroiled at various points (after leaving Italy, where he had been involved in trying to undermine the unification efforts of Garibaldi and his cohorts) in the secretive activities of various spy networks--the Prussians, the Russians, the French, and so on, and in each case, it becomes clear that spies and secret services have no particular loyalty to any government--in fact, a principle of successful spy activity seems to be that one must always be ready to transfer one's services to the next government in power. The various assignments Simonini receives from his controllers set him to encouraging activities by anti-Catholic, anti-Freemason, and anti-semitic groups and writers, all of whose works he encourages by offering his own (or his grandfather's) well-worn writings. Another principle of such hate-mongering is that it does not matter whether the claims or stories are true or not, nor does it matter even if they are cribbed from fictions, since the readers who seek them out want only to have their preconceptions confirmed, and they will read and re-read minor variations on the same old legends and lies, finding that the familiarity of the stories is confirmation that they must be true. Recycling narratives is a sure method for attracting true believers.) Simonini uses an old "legend" of gatherings of rabbis in the Jewish cemetery in Prague, where they reinforce their beliefs in the inevitable "victory" of the Jews as they describe the many ways in which Jews will infiltrate all institutions of Gentile society until they are entirely in control of all political, social, economic, and educational structures, and thereby dominant throughout the world. This is the "doctrine" of the Protocols, of course, and Simonini's variations on them lead to his final composition.
The chronology of The Prague Cemetery is complicated in that Simonini and Dalla Piccola are writing a "diary" in 1897 that attempts to reconstruct (from other notes and documents) the activities of the preceding forty years, including Simonini's involvement in the Garibaldian campaigns in Italy, later the Paris Commune as well as other developments during the tumultuous post-Napoleonic period in France, as well as trying to work out their relationship to each other and the implications of trying to keep secret the murders and other activities they have both been involved in.
The chronology of The Prague Cemetery is complicated in that Simonini and Dalla Piccola are writing a "diary" in 1897 that attempts to reconstruct (from other notes and documents) the activities of the preceding forty years, including Simonini's involvement in the Garibaldian campaigns in Italy, later the Paris Commune as well as other developments during the tumultuous post-Napoleonic period in France, as well as trying to work out their relationship to each other and the implications of trying to keep secret the murders and other activities they have both been involved in.
As I began to read this novel, I almost immediately said to myself that I felt as though I were back in high school, reading a novel that I had found in the library, Eugene Sue's The Wandering Jew. It is a novel of complex intrigues and skullduggery, variously condemning the influence of Jesuits, the Papacy, the Freemasons, and other groups--very much the roster included in Simonini's rants. Sure enough, as early as page 61, we encounter our first direct reference to that novel--one title among many (by Dumas and Hugo, especially) that will occur throughout; the literary world of Paris late in the 19th century is also shown to be deeply imbued with anti-semitism, indicating Eco's apparent view that no element of European society, whether aristocratic, capitalist, socialist, or laboring class can be exempt from the beliefs in conspiracies and exploitation by the Jews against all the rest of society.
We are told in an endnote that except for Simonini and several minor characters, all the characters and incidents in this novel are based in historical fact, and all represent the "secret history" of the evolution of the more powerful and insidious versions of anti-semitism--leading directly to the "Final Solution"--in Europe. Eco does not suggest that the Church nor the many variations and sects of Freemasonry are entirely responsible for the propagation of anti-semitic materials, but they are variously complicit because it suits their purposes to attack their perceived opponents and to link those opponents to already established negative groups--most conveniently, the Jews.
It won't do to repeat the incidents of this complex plot, but it is worth noting that Eco's novel, this time, is negatively affected by the frequent repetition of what are essentially the same rants--numerous extended and vituperative denunciations of targeted groups are deployed at too many points of this work, making the reader shrug after a while with a "here comes another one" feeling. Eco is certainly ingenious in supplying variations and in using these rants as occasions for the launching of new developments in Simonini's tortuous career. Even so, the repetitions are finally counterproductive, and they account for the 4 (rather than 5) star ranking I have offered here. Everything I have read by Eco has been rewarding in many ways, and
The Name of the Rose remains one of the very finest modern novels, in my view; in this case, I wish Eco had been more sparing of repetition, as the novel would have had a more powerful impact, I believe, if it had moved more efficiently from event to event. Even so, Eco's fans will want to read this and will enjoy it, repulsive as much of its subject matter must be.
The Name of the Rose remains one of the very finest modern novels, in my view; in this case, I wish Eco had been more sparing of repetition, as the novel would have had a more powerful impact, I believe, if it had moved more efficiently from event to event. Even so, Eco's fans will want to read this and will enjoy it, repulsive as much of its subject matter must be.
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