The Prague Cemetery

Not for nothing, this historical novel by Umberto Eco is 444 pages of unadulterated hatred! It spans approximately 40 years in the late 1800s in Europe. It mostly involves Italy, France, Germany, and Russia, and their infighting and subversive attacks against each other. Most of these assaults are based on forged documents meant to cause perplexities amongst the Catholics, Jews, Freemasons, Jesuits, and the common populist. However, the main focus is to eliminate the Jews from the face of the Earth. The counterfeit papers of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion became ammunition for Adolph Hitler to attempt the unimaginable elimination of an entire race of people. The idea was also aided by the Ottoman Empire's try at genocide on Turkey's Armenian residents during and after World War I.

The narrator of this story, Captain Simonini, is the only character that Eco says is fictitious. All of the rest are historic figures with a few minor exceptions. It seems our Captain Simonini is also Abbe Dalla Piccola! So what we have here is a main character with a multiple personality disorder that is an acquaintance of Dr. Sigmund Froide (Freud). Captain Simonini is also chief forger and spy for many governments receiving and issuing false accusations against each other and the "devilish" masonic Jews. He also, on page six, says "I have known Germans, and even worked for them: the lowest conceivable level of humanity. A German produces on average twice the feces of a Frenchman".

This is a very difficult book to read; it offers no respite or reprieves to catch your breath. The many years of false attacks against the Jews resulted in latter year writings such as Hitler's Mein Kampf, which highlighted the supposed Jewish conspiracy to control the world, and Karl Marx's The Communist Manifesto, which displays the disharmony between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. Although this is the second "eye-opening" book I've read recently, I find it difficult to believe wholly, only because this slant was not taught during my school years.

This is the first Eco work that I've read, and I did like his writing style with most of the story summarized from a diary. Eco is known as a medievalist and semiotician writing some books about the Knights Templar. I did like the book, but wouldn't recommend it to everyone. If this is truly historical fiction, then it shouldn't be so ambiguous without any author notes to back up his findings. The charges against the real characters are too harsh not to be backed up by documentation from other studies, even though this is a novel.

RATING: 4 out of 5 stars

Comment: Umberto Eco states that his writing has been influenced by James Joyce and Jorge Luis Borges. Eco's best seller, The Name of the Rose, had a symbologist friar/investigator, William of Baskerville, who might be the forerunner for Dan Brown's character, Robert Langdon.