Read Ebook {PDF EPUB} The Prague Cemetery by Umberto Eco Umberto Eco on ‘The Prague Cemetery’ Umberto Eco’s novels have been widely admired for their blend of erudite scholarship and satisfying, page-turning plots. His latest book, The Prague Cemetery , continues this tradition by placing a fictional character by the name of Simonini in the midst of a real, historical milieu and giving him a significant, sinister place in nineteenth-century history and beyond. Simonini, an equal-opportunity hater of ethnicities, races, and religions, is a master forger and plays an important role in crafting the “conspiracies” of his time, most importantly the document that becomes The Protocols of the Elders of Zion . I spoke to Eco about the novel, just now being published in the US, on the phone from Italy. The Prague Cemetery is your sixth novel. Do you find it becomes easier to write a new book at this point in your career? Does it become harder to find new subjects to interest you? Every time that I write a novel I am convinced for at least two years that it is the last one, because a novel is like a child. It takes two years after its birth. You have to take care of it. It starts walking, and then speaking. In two months I will be eighty years old. Probably I will not write another novel, and so mankind will be safe. Did you enjoy writing this particular book? Less than the others. For me, the process of writing usually takes six years. In those years I collect material, I write, I rewrite. I am in a sort of a private world of myself with my characters. I don’t know what will happen. I discover it step by step. And I become very sad when the novel is finished because there is no more pleasure, no more surprise. With this novel, the material I was dealing with was so ugly that I felt a lot of embarrassment. I had to create an absolutely ugly character, a repugnant character, which can certainly be a challenge for a writer. Fortunately some of my colleagues had done the same. Shakespeare for instance, with Richard III. You said in your Paris Review interview in 2008, “When you imagine a character, you lend him or her some of your personal memories. You give part of yourself to character number one and another part to character number two.” That made me wonder if it was difficult to write a character like Simonini, who has such despicable and difficult views. Yes, but, you know, every time you are on the highway and another driver does something irritating, you could kill him. So when you have to invent somebody who hates other people, you can find the origin in your belly. In the worst part of you. I also endowed Simonini with a lot of clichés already in existence. You know, I just came back from Germany, and they gave public readings of the novel, and they read the section at the beginning ranting against Germans. And then I was obliged to explain, “Listen, I didn’t invent anything!” The first part, about the defecatory habits of the Germans, was written by a Frenchman at the beginning of the First World War for nationalistic purposes. He wanted to defame Germans. The last part was taken from Nietzsche, who was an anti-German German. We have people around us who are nurturing and sharing these clichés. It’s easy to build up a negative character because our real life is full of negative characters. Your note to the reader in The Prague Cemetery says that the reader 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.” What were you thinking of in terms of contemporary parallels to this plot, if any? It is clear that when you write a story that takes place in the past you try to show what really happened in those times. But you are always moved by the suspicion that you are also showing something about our contemporary world. Take a lot of WikiLeaks papers. I was very amused because I published the novel in Italy one year ago, exactly one month before the WikiLeaks affair blew up. Simonini is a forger, and understands that in order to tell secret information to a secret service you always have to tell what is already known. Otherwise they will not believe you. From what I have seen, all the WikiLeaks communications sent by the American embassies to Hillary Clinton were just saying exactly what was published in Newsweek the week before! So you see that there is a sometimes a slight difference between fiction and reality. What is it about forgery that interests you? It is a running theme throughout so much of your work. I have been interested in it for at least thirty or forty years, in part because I am a scholar of the problems of language and communication. And to lie is a typical human activity, sometimes more important than telling the truth. Because of lies we can produce and invent a possible world. And in order to understand whether something is a language or not, you have to see whether it can be used to lie. If so, it’s a language. A dog steals your food and hides, but he does not tell you it was another dog. I was interested in the Protocols not only because is it an important forgery, but because of the tragedy that it contributed to. It was in 1921 that the Times of London proved that they were fake. And after that they were more and more believed and published everywhere. So I was interested by such a phenomenon. Why were they so successful? The answer is that they were not creating new ideas. They were reinforcing previous prejudices. Alexander Dumas is an important character in the book and the spirit of his books pervades the novel. Is he an important writer to you as a novelist? I first read him in my youth. I was always fascinated by the nineteenth-century popular novels. In the book I created a sort of imitation or parody of these novels by choosing illustrations from novels of that era and by starting the story in the typical style of the nineteenth-century novel. I saw that many of the illustrations came from your personal collection. Did the pictures in any way inspire the writing? No, I collected the illustrations after having written the book, and I went to pains to find the right illustration for the right page. But obviously I had in mind the illustrations of those books. Except for the anti-Semitic material: for that I collected new material. Because the illustrations play a double role. On one side, there are illustrations referring to popular novels, so the reader says, “Ah, this is like a popular novel.” But suddenly there are real documents, anti-Semitic magazines, or a portrait of a real person. It should produce a shock, that this is not a fiction, there is something true about the characters. The illustrations have an oscillatory function, they create a double feeling. I was reading the vivid descriptions of Garibaldi in battle and I was wondering how you composed them—how much of it came from historical sources and how much came from your imagination? I should confess that except for the figure of Simonini, who committed too many crimes to be possible, and to whom I’ve attributed the crimes of different persons, everything is a quotation, or at least a paraphrase of something that was told at that moment. Apropos of Garibaldi, there are, even after all this time, a lot of debates in Italy. There is the pro-risorgimento literature in which Garibaldi is a splendid hero, and the anti- risorgimento literature, which sees the expedition of Garibaldi as a kind of colonial invasion of Sicilia, and Garibaldi as a brigand. My book appeared just when Italy was celebrating the sesquicentennial of its creation as a nation, and everyone was thinking about that, but I wrote those pages five years ago without imagining that it would be published at that moment. There are some beautiful descriptions of food in the book. Do you cook or are you particularly interested in food? No, I am a McDonald’s person. I am joking! But in this case, I gave Simonini food instead of sex. And I gave it in enormous quantities. The names of the dishes are so beautiful, even from a linguistic point of view, that a lot of people fell in love with those foods. You mentioned in your earlier Paris Review interview a number of television shows that you enjoyed. Is there anything recent on television or in the wider popular culture that has caught your eye? Here in Italy trash television is invading the screen. It is very painful to watch. You know, I started to work in television for three or four years, in 1954. There was one channel of television, black and white. But it could be entertaining and educational. During the evening they showed important plays, opera or Shakespeare’s tragedies. Today, especially on the Berlusconi television, you see only porno material. So I am more pessimistic than before. Sometimes after eleven o’clock you can find something interesting. But normal people go to sleep at eleven o’clock. The Prague Cemetery by Umberto Eco – review. I magine Dan Brown adorned with a PhD: that's Umberto Eco, who before he took up fiction 30 years ago in The Name of the Rose was a semiotician and a medieval literary scholar. Like Brown's The Da Vinci Code and The Lost Symbol , Eco's sixth novel, The Prague Cemetery , snakes along an underground trail that twists through the enlightened heresies and bigoted gospels respectively propagated by Freemasons and Illuminati, Jesuits and Jew-baiters, before hinting at an ideological conspiracy that underlines the deceits of contemporary politics. The difference is that Brown devises a puzzle and goes on to solve it, whereas Eco's more highbrow pleasure lies in open-ended mystification. Brown wants us to believe in his cobweb of mystical coincidences and to trust his elucidation of those cryptic codes. Eco, however, is at best whimsically sceptical, at worst deliberately misleading: for him, the purpose of a story is to tell ingenious lies rather than to arrive at a drearily rational truth. Brown's recurrent hero is an academic turned detective, a so-called "symbologist" from Harvard whose special skill is the reassuring decipherment of riddles, while the protagonist of The Prague Cemetery is a professional forger, a malcontent who fakes documents for a living. In this rambling, ramshackle picaresque novel, the bilious Captain Simone Simoni slithers across Europe in the pay of one secret service after another, claiming personal responsibility for the calumnies that provoked most of the political crises of the 19th century. He serves his apprenticeship during Italy's campaign to liberate itself from Austrian rule. Officially he joins the novelist Alexandre Dumas in embellishing the mystique of Garibaldi; secretly he demolishes the patriotic myth, exposing the fabled warrior as a short, bandy-legged mediocrity. Abandoning Sicily for Paris, he stirs up trouble during the Commune, and goes on to concoct the incriminating document that causes Dreyfus to be convicted of treason. Side excursions link him with the Turkish conman Osman Bey and with the Romanovs in their efforts to suppress the bomb-throwing nihilists. Simonini's customers and victims are all actual historical characters, which enables Eco to suggest that history is a tissue of fictions, not a tale told by an idiot but a text slickly pieced together by self-appointed authorities who should never be trusted. Simonini also dabbles in diabolism, and enjoys hoaxing the hoaxer Leo Taxil, who in 1897 staged a perverse and sexually flagrant Black Mass to mock Freemasonry and the Catholic church. His masterpiece is a Gothic fantasy about a nocturnal gathering of rabbis who come together in the cemetery in the Prague ghetto, among upended gravestones that might be the pages of a chaotic, crumbling book, to avenge the humiliations of their race by planning a Jewish coup that will commandeer financial and political power. Elaborating their mad schemes, Simonini the crazed anti- Semite sketches the notorious "Protocols of the Elders of Zion", which Hitler called his "warrant for genocide". Despite the venom, The Prague Cemetery is a literary exercise, a novel that contains a critique of its own artifice. Eco awards himself the capitalised status of Narrator, and tries to elucidate the maunderings of two less reliable narrators, Simonini and a priest who is his alter ego. Wittily self-conscious, Eco discourses on the difference between plot and story, and supplies a diagram of their parallel development to help us through the labyrinth. This is a book made from a garbling of other books, with Victor Hugo, Proust and Zola, among its mob of subsidiary characters. For Eco, the undertaking may be playful, a study of noxious nonsense that is illustrated with some controversially nasty caricatures of greedy Jews. But some of the million copies of The Prague Cemetery already sold in Europe and South America have probably been read by fanatics and fantasists who are eager to be duped by the conspiracy theories that Eco sceptically demolishes. The chief rabbi of Rome has expressed alarm about the violence of Simonini's hatred, and a review in the Vatican newspaper worried about the zest with which the novel revives injurious stereotypes. The world we live in – economically shaky, politically feeble, menaced by zealots, with a fearful populace half-elated by the prospect of catastrophe yet still urgently searching for scapegoats – is only too similar to that described by Eco in his survey of 19th-century Europe. What may have begun as a learned game, a pseudo-historical farrago in the manner of Dumas and Hugo, at times seems dangerously and reprehensibly close to the truth. Eco has said, a little snottily, that he wants to appeal even to those who have the bad taste "to take Don Brown seriously". Would it bother him if these credulous readers missed his postmodern irony and took The Prague Cemetery a little too seriously? History is a nightmare, and Simonini's enfevered babbling won't help us to awaken from it. Andrew Knighton writes. I just finished reading The Prague Cemetery by Umberto Eco, leant to me by everwalker‘s faithful raptor. It’s the story of Simonini, a nineteenth century forger, told largely through diary entries as he pieces together his broken memories. It examines some of the darker aspects of Europe at that time – crime and inequality, the emergence of professional espionage and the rising tide of anti-semitism. As with much of Eco’s work, it’s also concerned with the uncertain nature of human experience, the subjective and unreliable way we bear witness to our world. There was a lot to enjoy here, but there was some stuff I found disappointing too. First the good bits. Eco is a very clever writer. He pulls together the threads of history in a seemless and convincing fashion. You don’t need to know anything about the real history to understand what’s going on, but if you do then those details become more convincing. He does what Dan Brown fails to do, deftly tying together story and reality, making the incredible convincing. Simonini is a fascinating idea for a character. Lurking in the background of great events, he develops from fraudster to conspirator to spy, raising questions about the boundaries between these activities. This is a character designed to make a point, but one who has depths and darkness beyond the nature of his career. But these strengths are tied to the book’s weaknesses. Eco’s writing is clever at the expense of passion, and I never felt much emotional engagement. Simonini was so busy weaving his way through history that he seemed to lack his own sense of drive and purpose, and I didn’t feel for him. Whether things went well or badly, I remained largely indifferent. Trying to break this down as a writer, I think it may come from an obsession with details that doesn’t translate into bringing them to life. For example, Simonini loves his food. He often records what he goes to eat. It’s an interesting character quirk that should make this immoral man more likeable. But these passages just turn into lists of dishes and ingredients, not descriptions of the food, how it tasted, how it made him feel. And maybe that too is meant to show us something about the character, but I soon started skimming those parts. Simonini didn’t really seem to care, and so neither did I. I love that the world contains such a clever writer as Umberto Eco, but in this case I found his writing too dispassionate. He’s tried to do something really admirable, but it didn’t work for me. If the good things I’ve mentioned appeal to you then I’d recommend reading Foucault’s Pendulum or The Name of the Rose first. And then, if you still want more Eco, try The Prague Cemetery. Maybe you’ll enjoy it more than I did. The Prague Cemetery by Umberto Eco – review. A return to form? Detail of an illustration from The Prague Cemetery . From Umberto Eco's collection. A return to form? Detail of an illustration from The Prague Cemetery . From Umberto Eco's collection. "Maybe only cheap fiction gives us the measure of reality," says a character in Umberto Eco's 1988 novel Foucault's Pendulum . "Proust was right," he argues: "life is better represented by bad music than by a Missa Solemnis." The dime novel "shows the world as it actually is – or at least the world as it will become." Eco's new book tells the story of the notorious antisemitic forgery, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion – an episode in which cheap fiction reordered the world in its own image. The Protocols , which emerged in Russia in the early 1900s, purport to describe a meeting in Prague some years earlier, at which Jewish leaders discuss their plans for world domination. In the words of the late, great Norman Cohn, it is a document in which "the remnants of ancient demonological terrors are blended with anxieties and resentments that are typically modern": the elders assemble, creepily, in the Jewish cemetery at night, but then plan to take total control of the banks, the stock markets, the medical profession and the press, while discussing topical issues such as interest rate mechanisms. Thought to have been concocted on the orders of Peter Rachovksy, a tsarist secret agent, it is a clumsy tissue of plagiarisms, and plagiarisms of plagiarisms, filled with stereotypes nicked from sensational fiction ("Ours is an ambition that knows no limits, a voracious greed, a desire for ruthless revenge, an intense hatred," declare the elders). But it was horrifically effective. It was used to incite pogroms during the Russian civil war; afterwards, it was taken westwards by White Russians, and bolstered the view of the revolution as a Jewish plot. When Hitler came to power it was adopted as a standard piece of Nazi propaganda; it became, in the phrase that Cohn used as the title for his excellent book on the subject, "a warrant for genocide". The Judaeo-Masonic conspiracy theory is usually traced back to Abbé Barruel, a French Jesuit who argued that the French revolution was the culmination of a clandestine intrigue dating back centuries, involving the Freemasons, the Bavarian Illuminati, the Templars and so on. In 1806 Barruel received a letter from a certain Captain Simonini, apparently an Italian army officer, who congratulated him on exposing these "hellish sects", but argued that he had left out the most hellish of all: the Jews, who had founded and/or infiltrated all the others. The letter was eventually published, and thereafter the Jews played a starring role in conspiratorial fantasies. The antihero of Eco's new novel is Simone Simonini, the fictional grandson of the letter-writer, who grows up in the shadow of his grandfather's hatreds: "And when I was old enough to understand, he reminded me that the Jew, as well as being as vain as a Spaniard, ignorant as a Croat, greedy as a Levantine, ungrateful as a Maltese, insolent as a gypsy, dirty as an Englishman, unctuous as a Kalmuck, imperious as a Prussian and as slanderous as anyone from Asti, is adulterous through uncontrollable lust …" Simonini is a fraud, an agent provocateur, a murderer, a pervert and a glutton. He grows up in Turin, in an Italy on the verge of unification. Having been disinherited by an unscrupulous notary, he finds work as a forger of legal documents and then as a spy. He is sent to Sicily with Garibaldi's army, then to Paris, working first for the Piedmontese secret service, then the French, then finally the Russians. All the while he collects material for what will be his masterpiece, continuing his grandfather's great work … A scholar of medieval aesthetics turned professor of semiotics, Eco has forged a highly successful career as a novelist by combining esoteric interests with mass-market storylines: detective stories, conspiracy thrillers, tales of castaways and amnesiacs. He made his name with his first novel, The Name of the Rose , about a series of murders in a late-medieval monastery. Later made into an entertaining film with Sean Connery, it is said to have sold 50m copies worldwide. This was followed by Foucault's Pendulum , in which three Milanese publishers amuse themselves by concocting the conspiracy theory to end all conspiracy theories, only to find that people not only start to believe it, but are willing to kill for it. Eco is at least partly responsible for the recent fashion for mysteries featuring arcane knowledge and ritual slaughter: twinkly postmodernist that he is, he likes to claim that Dan Brown is a character that he invented. The Prague Cemetery , which has already sold a million copies in Europe and South America, is billed as a return to form after three rather disappointing novels. It takes place in familiar territory: Eco likes the story of the Protocols so much he has told it at least three times before, in Foucault's Pendulum , and two of his essays. Once again, he includes a great deal of eclectic learning, organised (to a greater or lesser extent) around a potboiler plot. In this case, the presiding spirit is the feuilleton serials of Alexandre Dumas and Eugene Sue, complete with printed illustrations. At the beginning of the novel, set in Paris in 1897, a troubled Simonini is writing a memoir on the advice of a certain Austrian Jew he has met. He has blanks in his memory; he wears a fake moustache and beard, for reasons that are not altogether clear to him; he has found a secret passage at the back of his house, leading to an apartment occupied by a certain Abbé Dalla Piccola, who is never in the same place as he is. Might this mysterious abbé possibly be the same person as Simonini? Could our hero be suffering – in the best traditions of low fiction – from a bad case of dissociative personality disorder? In outline, Simonini's story sounds fun: he cheats, betrays and murders his way through the Risorgimento, the Franco-Prussian war, the Paris Commune and the Dreyfus affair, playing an inglorious behind-the-scenes role in various crucial events, rather like George MacDonald Fraser's Flashman. Almost all the characters are real-life figures, and the historical background is fascinating. On his travels, Simonini meets the rogue's gallery of crooks and fanatics who contributed to the Protocols : the fraudulent Prussian postal worker Hermann Goedsche, the Serb fantasist Osman Bey. He conspires with secret policemen and Jesuits against the Masons, and then with the Masons against the Jesuits; he mixes with Satanists and takes part in an exceptionally lurid black mass. In practice, though, The Prague Cemetery is a tiring plod. Eco is much indebted to Jorge Luis Borges, and this is the sort of exercise – a fictional version of a true story of a fake which had a powerful effect on the real world – that the Argentine writer would have turned into a dizzying, flawlessly executed five-page short story. But over Eco's flaccid 400-plus pages, it is frustrating and unsatisfactory. All the vices of the historical novel are there: the wodges of researched material; the easy, silly ironies (that Austrian Jew turns out to be a certain "Dr Froide"). The characters are little more than vessels for the author's erudition. What John Updike called Eco's "orgy of citation and paraphrase" often becomes unbearable. His desire to cover pages with occult lore is unabated ("Secretary of the Savonarola Lodge in Florence, Venerable of the Giordano Bruno Lodge of Palmi, Sovereign Grand Inspector-General, thirty-third degree of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish rite …", and so on and on). For all the homage paid to Dumas, the plot is stodgy and repetitive. It is hard, at times, to remember which blandly threatening puppetmaster or sinister Jesuit we are dealing with. The novel also leaves a slightly unpleasant taste in the mouth. Eco is basically a playful writer: even his best novels are little more than brilliant mechanical toys. Here, the mood of historical pastiche and learned joke comes up uncomfortably against the history of European antisemitism. The many excerpts of hate literature ("After the crocodile, the Jew is the most musical of all animals") and the reprinted antisemitic caricatures exert a grim fascination, but they leave the reader feeling queasy. The story of the Protocols is, in the end, a sombre one, and Eco's treatment of it feels tactlessly crude and silly: towards the end, the repeated, portentous use of the phrase "the final solution" seems entirely unearned. There are many subjects, after all, which remain well beyond the reach of cheap fiction. The Prague Cemetery by Umberto Eco. Dennis D. McDonald ( [email protected] ) consults from Alexandria Virginia. His services include writing & research, proposal development, and project management. May 17 Umberto Eco's "THE PRAGUE CEMETERY" Book review by Dennis D. McDonald. I am simultaneously entertained and horrified by this book. The plot and story are exceedingly clever. Eco places a fictional multi-personality scofflaw into mid- and late-19th Century European cultural and political upheaval. Through a series of legal and moral misadventures this person rises in the ranks of spies, forgers, murderers, and liars. He interacts with a multitude of real world people (it helps to have Wikipedia online while reading to do name lookups). In the process the main character invents a variety of scandalous and evil letters, documents, and publications, including the notorious “Protocols of the Elders of Zion.” And he commits cold blooded murder — repeatedly. Admittedly I have found myself laughing out loud at some of the exploits recorded here given the author’s obviously exhaustive research and cleverness. At other times the breadth and variety of anti-Jesuit, anti-Catholic, anti-Mason, and anti-Jewish stereotypes and cultural bigotry around which the characters evolve their repugnant political strategies are enough to take one’s breath away. A reasonable question is: why publish a book like this? Wouldn’t it be better to just draw a curtain over the hatreds and prejudices documented so matter-of-factly here and allow them to wither away? A reasonable answer: this week an Administration-supported judicial nominee in the US refused to openly accept the US Supreme Court decision on Brown v. Board of Education. And he is being publicly defended by some for his refusal. What Eco demonstrates as he weaves his character(s) through the ins and outs of European conspiracies, double dealing, and repellant discrimination, is that lies and half-truths are especially effective when they fall on the eyes and ears of those already inclined to believe them. That Eco writes about a time when physical distribution of paper inevitable slowed the spread of hateful lies is almost irrelevant. Communication media and distribution networks back then were as decentralized as they are today. Poison can enter the system almost anywhere and then be spread. It was true then as it is now.