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Title: The Prague Cemetery
Author: Umberto Eco
Genre: Historical fiction (19th century Europe)
Thingummies: 2
Synopsis: A split-personality misanthrope turns out to be responsible for most of the disasters of the second half of the 1800s, from the Dreyfus Affair to the Protocols of the Elders of Zion
Thoughts: Eco is a master storyteller, but here his attempt to combine Foucalt's Pendulum with Forrest Gump never gives the reader a reason to care.
I loved Foucalt's Pendulum--it's a difficult but deeply rewarding book in which a trio of friends make up what they think is a forged conspiracy uniting the Masons and the Templars, only to have the conspiracy turn out to real. It's a dreamy, almost phantasmagorical book, a meditation on the nature of truth and intent. Here, Eco revisits his theme of counterfeit conspiracy but in a much more straightforward manner.
Simonini is a deeply hateful man. Raised in a stew of anti-Semiticism and anti-Jesuit fervor by his conflicting father and grandfather, he comes out hating everyone. He rails in great and shocking detail about the horrific nature of Jesuits, Masons, Catholics, Protestants, French, Italians, English, Germans, women (who are particularly physically repulsive), and pretty much everyone else who crosses his path. But he reserves the depths of his hatred for the Jews, with whom he's actually had little to no contact.
Between his virulent misanthropy and his gift for forgery and betrayal, he ends up serving most of the governments of Europe at one time or another beginning with Garibaldi's unification of Italy up to the edge of the century. Eco skillfully links (and blames Simonini for) disaster after disaster, revealing that everything from student riots in Paris to the disappearance of Garibaldi's accountant to the connection between Esterhazy and Dreyfus are each because of variously successful and botched missions that Simonini takes on behalf of different spy services. Simonini is an evil Forrest Gump, connecting otherwise unrelated events into a web of conspiracy. There are two sets, in actuality--there is the actual conspiracy of the various intelligence services to manipulate public opinion, and then there is the conspiracy Simonini invents for the purposes of that manipulation. At his masters' whims, he blames the world's ills on the Masons and on the Templars, but his true goal in life is to lay everything at the feet of the Jews. Despite the fact that he knows he has constructed this conspiracy out of whole cloth, he nonetheless seems to almost believe it himself, justifying his lies by believing that they really are trying to take over the world, despite a total lack of evidence.
Simonini himself is the only fictional character in the book. In effect, Eco traces the real life history of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, which were mostly lifted directly from a German novel, which stole the speeches from a French satire and put them in the mouths of the Jews, which had stolen most of the same speeches from a novel, and so on. The trail of plagiarism, with the conspirators changed each time to suit the times, is real enough.
It's a clever little intellectual exercise, trying to link together so many events. The problem is, there is no narrative thrust here. Simonini is a completely unsympathetic character. He's not an anti-hero, he's not even someone you love to hate. There is not a redeemable bone in his body, not a single particularly interesting motive. He hates the Jews because his grandfather told him to, not because he has any compelling reason on his own. There is no reason to long for his triumph. There's not even a reason to hope for his downfall. My main motivation was a desire to get out of his head, a problematic impulse for a book written half in first person. Since I didn't particularly care about Simonini himself, and his goals consisted mostly of making money along with a vague desire to write a master forgery against the Jews, there was no tension here. We just jump from event to event, often with more telling than showing, simply for the showmanship of connecting yet another esoteric historical event. Nothing particularly builds on itself. There are no stakes. Just endless misdeeds.
The one driving mystery is mostly spoiled near the beginning--Simonini has a split personality. He spends much of the novel trying to figure out what event triggered this. When I finally got to the event, it mostly seemed pointless.
The split personality does make the timeline exceptionally hard to follow, however. It sufficiently worried Eco that he includes a chart in the back of each chapter, who is speaking, what time period it's narrated from, and what time period it flashes back to. For such an accomplished author, I expected better--if you need to provide such a chart, you haven't done a good enough job within the story of anchoring your readers.
On the plus side, there's food porn. The sentences are well crafted, the history somewhat intriguing (although that may just be that I find this particular period of history fascinating and already know a fair bit about it--if you don't know what the Dreyfus Affair was and why Garibaldi is important, don't even bother reading this book). So I guess it's history porn as well. I like food and history, so this had some limited appeal.
It's obvious that the author does not share his protagonist's opinions on Jews or anything else. The extremely heavy-handed Holocaust foreshadowing is clearly meant to evoke dread, not delight. But while I know Eco does not believe in the horrifying prejudice of his characters, that does not make this feel any less toxic to wade through. And there's really no payoff. More than anything, this feels like a chance for Eco to be self-indulgent, picking his way through historical events that caught his fancy and recycling bits of his better books, dragging us through the mud behind him all the while.
Author: Umberto Eco
Genre: Historical fiction (19th century Europe)
Thingummies: 2
Synopsis: A split-personality misanthrope turns out to be responsible for most of the disasters of the second half of the 1800s, from the Dreyfus Affair to the Protocols of the Elders of Zion
Thoughts: Eco is a master storyteller, but here his attempt to combine Foucalt's Pendulum with Forrest Gump never gives the reader a reason to care.
I loved Foucalt's Pendulum--it's a difficult but deeply rewarding book in which a trio of friends make up what they think is a forged conspiracy uniting the Masons and the Templars, only to have the conspiracy turn out to real. It's a dreamy, almost phantasmagorical book, a meditation on the nature of truth and intent. Here, Eco revisits his theme of counterfeit conspiracy but in a much more straightforward manner.
Simonini is a deeply hateful man. Raised in a stew of anti-Semiticism and anti-Jesuit fervor by his conflicting father and grandfather, he comes out hating everyone. He rails in great and shocking detail about the horrific nature of Jesuits, Masons, Catholics, Protestants, French, Italians, English, Germans, women (who are particularly physically repulsive), and pretty much everyone else who crosses his path. But he reserves the depths of his hatred for the Jews, with whom he's actually had little to no contact.
Between his virulent misanthropy and his gift for forgery and betrayal, he ends up serving most of the governments of Europe at one time or another beginning with Garibaldi's unification of Italy up to the edge of the century. Eco skillfully links (and blames Simonini for) disaster after disaster, revealing that everything from student riots in Paris to the disappearance of Garibaldi's accountant to the connection between Esterhazy and Dreyfus are each because of variously successful and botched missions that Simonini takes on behalf of different spy services. Simonini is an evil Forrest Gump, connecting otherwise unrelated events into a web of conspiracy. There are two sets, in actuality--there is the actual conspiracy of the various intelligence services to manipulate public opinion, and then there is the conspiracy Simonini invents for the purposes of that manipulation. At his masters' whims, he blames the world's ills on the Masons and on the Templars, but his true goal in life is to lay everything at the feet of the Jews. Despite the fact that he knows he has constructed this conspiracy out of whole cloth, he nonetheless seems to almost believe it himself, justifying his lies by believing that they really are trying to take over the world, despite a total lack of evidence.
Simonini himself is the only fictional character in the book. In effect, Eco traces the real life history of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, which were mostly lifted directly from a German novel, which stole the speeches from a French satire and put them in the mouths of the Jews, which had stolen most of the same speeches from a novel, and so on. The trail of plagiarism, with the conspirators changed each time to suit the times, is real enough.
It's a clever little intellectual exercise, trying to link together so many events. The problem is, there is no narrative thrust here. Simonini is a completely unsympathetic character. He's not an anti-hero, he's not even someone you love to hate. There is not a redeemable bone in his body, not a single particularly interesting motive. He hates the Jews because his grandfather told him to, not because he has any compelling reason on his own. There is no reason to long for his triumph. There's not even a reason to hope for his downfall. My main motivation was a desire to get out of his head, a problematic impulse for a book written half in first person. Since I didn't particularly care about Simonini himself, and his goals consisted mostly of making money along with a vague desire to write a master forgery against the Jews, there was no tension here. We just jump from event to event, often with more telling than showing, simply for the showmanship of connecting yet another esoteric historical event. Nothing particularly builds on itself. There are no stakes. Just endless misdeeds.
The one driving mystery is mostly spoiled near the beginning--Simonini has a split personality. He spends much of the novel trying to figure out what event triggered this. When I finally got to the event, it mostly seemed pointless.
The split personality does make the timeline exceptionally hard to follow, however. It sufficiently worried Eco that he includes a chart in the back of each chapter, who is speaking, what time period it's narrated from, and what time period it flashes back to. For such an accomplished author, I expected better--if you need to provide such a chart, you haven't done a good enough job within the story of anchoring your readers.
On the plus side, there's food porn. The sentences are well crafted, the history somewhat intriguing (although that may just be that I find this particular period of history fascinating and already know a fair bit about it--if you don't know what the Dreyfus Affair was and why Garibaldi is important, don't even bother reading this book). So I guess it's history porn as well. I like food and history, so this had some limited appeal.
It's obvious that the author does not share his protagonist's opinions on Jews or anything else. The extremely heavy-handed Holocaust foreshadowing is clearly meant to evoke dread, not delight. But while I know Eco does not believe in the horrifying prejudice of his characters, that does not make this feel any less toxic to wade through. And there's really no payoff. More than anything, this feels like a chance for Eco to be self-indulgent, picking his way through historical events that caught his fancy and recycling bits of his better books, dragging us through the mud behind him all the while.
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Date: 2012-06-29 01:32 pm (UTC)From:That is ALWAYS THE WRONG CHOICE for an author. I HATE authors who really on excessive explanatory notes to clarify their narrative. Like if you open a fic and there's a paragraph in the header about how if it's italics, it's telepathy, and if it's *this* it's internal thought, and if it's ~this~ it's mindspeech and if it's in red it's character A's POV, and if it's in blue, it's character B's... That's an immediate back button for me. If you can't clarify those things in the narrative itself, you're doing it wrong.
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Date: 2012-06-30 03:42 am (UTC)From: