2 Notes
The Prague Cemetery
Umberto Eco’s new novel The Prague Cemetery is a fascinating fictional throughline applied to a fastidiously researched historical context. Amazingly, its protagonist, the venomous Simone Simonini, is its only major character who is a fictional creation.
(I consulted Wikipedia countless times over the course of the novel and was surprised time and time again to see the unlikely events of the story corroborated.)
Simonini, a man full of hatred and an inveterate opportunist, navigates with ease throughout 19th century Europe, offering his skills as a forger and a pseudo-spy to nearly any group with an agenda—the Freemasons and the Jesuits, monarchists and republicans of pre-unification Italy—often expertly pitting these factions against one another for considerable personal gain.
The one ideal that Simonini maintains is his lifelong hatred of the Jews, first introduced early in the novel by way of a litany of pan-European racial bile that is the continental equivalent of Edward Norton’s famous monologue from 25th Hour. Eco uses his fictional character as a guide to the foundations of modern anti-Semitism and the creation of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. The Protocols, ostensibly evidence of a Jewish conspiracy to enslave the world, have been demonstrated time and time again as utterly illegitimate, but have wielded considerable influence nonetheless.
The Prague Cemetery explores why this is. As Eco said in a recent talk in Cambridge, Massachusetts, while his novel Baudolino used nonfiction to tell a fictional story, his latest work uses fiction to tell a true story.
The Prague Cemetery is told in a series of duelling diary entries between two men who might share a body, refereed by a nameless narrator attempting to make sense of the journal he has found. The story thus deals with questions of memory and self-identity that Eco has been increasingly exploring in his novels, most notably The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana. With these themes spanning numerous works, it’s hard not to see a bit of Eco himself in his protagonists—even one as repulsive as Simonini. One gets the feeling someone as staggeringly literate as Eco, especially with his esoteric repertoire, must struggle to keep his enormous volume of thoughts in his head.
Like several previous Eco novels, the dedication to historical recounting can detract from the pace of the work as fiction, but it also makes the subject matter all the more remarkable, since many of its entirely real events and characters would be completely believable as fictional creations. It reminds us that conspiracy theories themselves can be cynical conspiracies—approaching territory covered by Eco’s earlier Foucault’s Pendulum from a different, and darker, angle. And also like Foucault’s Pendulum, The Prague Cemetery picks up steam slowly, climaxes in breathless delirium, and falls gracefully.
