The Prague Cemetery

Can’t even bring my self to finish the book. The writing is so dense and there are too many characters I can’t keep up. I know it’s on purpose but it’s hard to read so much racist stuff the people say

Abandoned after 200 pages. Loads of conspiracies sounds fun, but when the narrator/protagonist is so vile the stakes become curiously low, and the sheer amount of conspiracies end up being a slog. If I wanted to read misanthropic conspiracies without any sort of human understanding, I could just browse the worst parts of the internet.

The Prague Cemetery by Umberto Eco

https://medium.com/@peterseanEsq/book-review-the-occult-truth-of-history-de9bcfff2d65

Umberto Eco loved the occult. His second book, Foucault's Pendulum, was about secret societies. His famous first book, The Name of the Rose, was about Aristotle's lost book on Comedy being hidden in a labyrinth. Even without a supernatural element, these stories about hidden things are “occult.”[1] Anyone who thinks that the world is run by a secret cabal of Jesuits or Jews is an “occultist.”

This interest fits naturally into Eco's career as an expert in semiotics. Semiotics is defined as:

A general philosophical theory of signs and symbols that deals especially with their function in both artificially constructed and natural languages and comprises syntactics, semantics, and pragmatics. 

In semiotics there is a sign and a meaning signified by the sign. Meaning is therefore occulted in some way by the sign. Thus, what is most important is not the surface thing we see and know but the thing hidden beneath the sign.

In The Prague Cemetery, Eco develops the Grand Unified Theory of Occultism. The main character is Simone Simonini, born in Piedmont in the early nineteenth century. Simonini is very quickly defined as an unsympathetic and repulsive character. He is universal in his bigotry. He does not limit himself to antisemitism; he despises Germans, Russians, Jesuits, Masons, and virtually everyone he encounters. He is a thoroughgoing misogynistic, despising women as women and shrinking from contact and association with women. The only thing he does not despise is money and food; he is greedy and fat.

Simonini is a forger and police informant. He learns the dark arts of how to befriend and entrap his friends, beginning with his college friends. He learns how to forge documents so that estates can be claimed. He also forges documents so that the state authorities can have conspiracies to blame things on. Eventually, Simonini's life takes him to Paris, where he creates the “Protocols of the Elders of Zion” and forges the transfer ticket that sends Dreyfus to Devil's Island.

Eco presents his story in an epistolary format. The book is structured as diary entries by Simonini and a correspondent named Abbe Dalla Piccola with whom Simonini had some underhanded dealings. It becomes clear that the response and counter-responses are from the same person. Early in the book, Simonini mentions how he had learned about the “talking cure” from “Froide.” Simonini loses time when Abbe Dalla Piccola writes his entries. In this way, Eco hides the truth from the protagonist. The book is occult on many levels.

Eco is a wonderful writer. His prose is elegant.

The truly amazing thing about The Prague Cemetery is its historical erudition. Apart from Simonini, every character in the book existed. The events described in the book, such as the Taxil Hoax, are historical. Eco adroitly weaves together historical events and historical personages to develop his story. If the reader pays attention, the reader will get an education in obscure, forgotten nineteenth-century European history.

Ultimately, The Prague Cemetery is a satire about secret services and conspiratorial societies. Simonini has connections with the conspiracies that convulsed the nineteenth century, including the Jesuits, the Masons, the Carbonari, the antisemitic, etc., and he is paid by the Piedmont/Italian, German, French, and Russian secret services. Ultimately, the conspiracies are weak affairs that seem to end up in the hands of an old misogynist.

That may be the point Eco is making. At the height of the exposure of the FBI's 2022/2023 efforts to concoct a vast right-wing conspiracy involving planting stories about extremist Catholic groups in the Atlantic magazine and using FBI informants to infiltrate radical-traditional Catholic masses, certain observations made by Eco ring true. For example, in this one, Simonini's handler is explaining how secret services handle conspiracies:

“You should know that the only way of controlling a subversive sect is by taking over its command, or at least having its ringleaders in our pay. You don't find out about the plans of enemies of the state by divine inspiration. Someone said, perhaps exaggerating, that out of every ten followers of a secret society, three of them are working for us as mouchards - please excuse the expression, but that is what they're commonly called - while six are fools who completely believe in what they're doing, and one man is dangerous.

Eco, Umberto. The Prague Cemetery (p. 213). HarperCollins. Kindle Edition.

Apply that to the fake Whitmer kidnapping, which resulted in the exoneration of several defendants on the grounds of entrapment, and Eco's satire scores a point.

[1] A core meaning of “occult” is “secret.”

I wanted to love this book, as I love two of Eco's earlier books, but I really struggled with it to such an extent that it was a real chore to finish it.

Most of it is based on history, except for the main character, or so the author says. Although the story is intriguing, it's not an easy read. What stands out for me is the intense anti-semitism that occurs in history. The sheer ridiculousness of the length that people does just because they hate Jews, it's just unbelievable.

Translated from Italian by Richard Dixon

Pros: fascinating look at a period of history largely ignored by modern readers, thought provoking

Cons: lots of politically incorrect and thereby uncomfortable speeches, vivid depiction of a black mass, unlikable protagonist

Simone Simonini's personal motto is, Odi ergo sum. I hate, therefore I am. An Italian living in Paris, Simonini hates: the Germans, the French, the Italians, women, Jesuits, and most importantly, the Jews. Which is why, after years of forging documents and fermenting chaos for various government agencies, he has created his masterpiece - a document that will turn the nations of the world against the Jews.

The novel begins with Simonini having lost his memory. He starts a diary in order to remember who he is, starting with his youth. Abbe Dalla Piccola, living in an adjoining apartment, has also lost his memory, but seems to know what happened during segments of Simonini's past, adding his own notes to Simonini's writings. Are they the same person? Or did Simonini merely confess these actions to the abbot?

Simonini is not a likable protagonist, and the book is an uncomfortable read, both due to Simonini's extremely vitriolic hate speeches (against many groups but there's more anti-semitic sentiment than others) as well as for a detailed description of a black mass (modified Latin and all). The second chapter of the book serves as a litmus test for the rest, shocking the reader and daring you to read on. If you can get past chapter 2 you'll have read the worst - though not the only - hate speeches in the book.

The book takes place during the late 1800s, when racist sentiments were the norm. Based on real people and events, it's a difficult, yet fascinating world to be thrown into. Along the way you encounter Alexander Dumas, Sigmund Freud (spelled Froide in the book), the Satanic cultist Abbot Boullan and more. From the Second Italian War of Independence to the Paris Commune of 1871, you'll be exposed to the bitter realities of the times. A reader would do well to have quick access to wikipedia in order to learn more about some of the strange - and accurate - things mentioned.

The Prague Cemetery is more accessible to the average reader than some of Eco's other novels which, given the sarcasm inherent in his forward and afterward is likely due to pressure from his publisher. Most of the foreign language segments have been translated into English, and he's helpfully provided a timeline at the back of the book for those who couldn't follow the narrative. A dramatis personae list would have been more helpful, as characters pass in and out of the work so frequently it's hard to remember who they are when they return.

In his forward Eco makes it clear that having his meticulously researched work of fiction compared to a popular (and more fanciful) work like The Da Vinci Code is something of an insult, despite how entertaining the latter book may be. He assumes there are two types of readers - The Da Vinci Code thrill seeker who will take all the events depicted in The Prague Cemetery as entertaining fiction, and the more intelligent reader who is interested in history and recognizes the real events and characters depicted and who see the horror inherent in the underlying message that real people did these things.

It seems that Eco is commenting on how far we as humans have come in the past two hundred years, by reminding us of where we've been. If so, it's also a warning of how easy it is to fall prey to visionaries, revolutionaries and fraudsters. And how readily others are willing to exploit us. Caveat lector: Let the reader, beware.