Where Simonini Crimes Through Life

The Prague Cemetery by Umberto Eco
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Umberto Eco has brilliantly assembled the story of a (mostly-true) series of frauds, deceptions, forgeries, and violent crimes that, together, tell us a lot about European society, about prejudice, about hate, and all of that ugliness comes together to make a tedious and difficult novel. I struggled through it, and I was really trying to like it. It's like a finely crafted symphony so full of intentional dissonance and unpleasant themes that the only pleasures are intellectual--like, why did the composer do that? Where is this going? Will there be any resolution at all? Can I go home now?

IMO: this is 5-level brilliance and maybe 2-level enjoyment. I gave it a 3. That will satisfy no one.

I mean, it is seriously an incredible achievement. That's not irony. The amount of complexity, first of all, in the story itself is pretty impressive, and clearly based on massive amounts of research. Parts of the novel deal with Italy's efforts at unification under a republican government, with our despicable MC working with various partisan groups to achieve certain political/military ends, mostly by forging documents that others use to sway public opinion. Much of the rest is in France, dealing with changing governments and international affairs of the late 19th century, with the MC working with spies and intelligence officers in creating false documents and lurid propaganda of many types--anti-catholic, anti-Masonic (full of demonic and satanic stories invented out of whole cloth and turned into bestsellers), and especially antisemitic material of many types. That includes the famous Dreyfus affair. So many characters, so many social movements, so many details. It's a lot.

And the organization of the story is wild. Most of it is told like two people writing letters, but the two people are living in the same house and never see one another and are actually writing in the same diary. Both have lapses in their memory and are trying to piece together what is happening. Of course, it's just what you think is happening--that's not much of a spoiler. But it makes following the story very tricky, enough that the author put a chart in the back to help you make sense of who is doing what and what part of the character's history is being dealt with. It's more than one can easily absorb in a single read-through, in my opinion. As a reader, you're wondering about the point of the double perspective; what does the author want us to make of all this? What, beyond the themes of hatred and prejudice and deception, does this format tell us? I have ideas; I don't have much confidence in the answers. But it's interesting, I suppose--intellectually, again.

It's just such a drag to read, though. I knew it was about the creation of the blood-libel fake book called "The Protocols of the Elders of Zion," and I was curious about how that happened and how it was exposed. That's in the book, in pieces here and there, but really it's about one man's long career as a forger, along with all his crimes and his racism, his antisemitism and misogyny. Nothing good happens. Nothing fun. Nothing enjoyable. No kindness. No humanity. No love. The reader has nothing to root for or look forward to, nothing to nod over, nothing to applaud except maybe the very last page. (That's not snark. There is one event hinted at at the very end, and that is the only sort of good thing in the book.)

I'm sure it's useful, for most of us, to think deeply about these matters, about intentional acts of social sabotage, looking at the methods by which unscrupulous people sway public opinion, the way they stoke the flames of hate with lies, and how they poison society. But it's like a long soak in a sewer. Maybe it helps to really internalize that smell to learn firsthand how bad it is, but I kinda already knew.

Like I say, this is a brilliant book, in a way, but the amount of enjoyment found in the hours I spent reading this (over many weeks, widely spaced out) was almost nothing. I am glad to have read it, but it's too much like eating your spinach.

People read for different reasons--you may find much more to enjoy than I did.

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