Status
Available
Call number
Publication
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Trade (2011), Edition: 1st, 464 pages
Description
"19th-century Europe--from Turin to Prague to Paris--abounds with the ghastly and the mysterious. Jesuits plot against Freemasons. In Italy, republicans strangle priests with their own intestines. In France, during the Paris Commune, people eat mice, plan bombings and rebellions in the streets, and celebrate Black Masses. Every nation has its own secret service, perpetrating conspiracies and even massacres. There are false beards, false lawyers, false wills, even false deaths. From the Dreyfus Affair to the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, the Jews are blamed for everything. One man connects each of these threads into a massive crazy-quilt conspiracy within conspiracies. Here, he confesses all, thanks to Umberto Eco's ingenious imagination--a thrill-ride through the underbelly of actual, world-shattering events. "--… (more)
Original publication date
2010 (original Italian)
Media reviews
Eco's mastery of the milieu is evident on every page of "The Prague Cemetery."
If the creation of Simone Simonini is meant to suggest that behind the credibility-straining history lurks a sick spirit compounded of equal parts self-serving cynicism and irrational malice, who can argue? And even if the best parts of “The Prague Cemetery” are those he did not invent, Eco is
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to be applauded for bringing this stranger-than-fiction truth vividly to life. Show Less
The real story, then, is one that “The Prague Cemetery” hints at but does not for all its polymath erudition manage to capture: our impotence in the face of an obvious forgery, an absurd pastiche against which the ramparts of reason afford astonishingly feeble protection.
Eco’s 19th century shocker has an Italian, Captain Simonini, as the man responsible, the only fictional character in the book. The story involves Freemasons against Catholics, Garibaldi against the Bourbons, Russian spies, German double agents, murky murders, plotting prelates, black masses and
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orgies. If all this sounds like a richly sensational read, you couldn’t be more wrong. Show Less
Simonini’s as disgraceful as they come, and those who feel the need to bond with a narrator will be instantly put off by this novel. But “The Prague Cemetery” isn’t trying to make us feel better about ourselves. It’s meant to remind us of the dangers of complacency and credulousness.
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It’s meant to be unsettling. And by that measure, it’s a huge success.
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For all its difficulties, The Prague Cemetery is an important novel. The book’s implicit question is terrifying: are the same social frustrations at work today to revive The Protocols's anti-Semitism?
"The Prague Cemetery" is a similarly ambitious interpretation of the collective dreams of a century, and it serves a similar purpose: dissecting neuroses, which, left untreated, ensure a continual, increasingly virulent return of the repressed.
“The Prague Cemetery” is certainly engrossing and cautionary, but it mainly offers, to adopt Joseph Conrad’s biblical-sounding phrase, the appalling fascination of the abomination. Be aware, then, that Umberto Eco hasn’t produced anything close to what one might call a fun read or a light
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entertainment. “The Prague Cemetery” is, in fact, an all-out horror story. Show Less
Det verkliga problemet är att boken är sövande tråkig [...] Berättelsen saknar driv och tyngs ner av tusen onödiga detaljer. Språket är platt, gestaltningen obefintlig, den fåniga ramhistorien förutsägbar och poänglös.
I ”Begravningsplatsen i Prag” får omoralen tala fritt, och den kväljande bismak som romanen lämnar efter sig är infogad i texten.
Begravningsplatsen i Prag är ett väldigt panorama över ett århundrade och dess olika andliga och kvasiandliga miljöer.
What does it all add up to? An indictment of the old Europe, for one thing, and a perplexing, multilayered, attention-holding mystery.
Voor de liefhebbers van Eco is De begraafplaats van Praag onweerstaanbaar – door de plot (wie is toch die onbekende perverseling die de Protocollen schreef?), door de literair-historische verwijzingen (onder meer naar Joseph Conrads terroristenroman The Secret Agent) en door de humor
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(‘dysenterie verzekerd, voor een schappelijke prijs,’ schrijft Simonini over een slecht restaurant). Maar bij de lezer met minder geduld zal deze moderne versie van De geheimen van Parijs al snel half gelezen op de salontafel stranden. Commercieel gezien hoeft Dan Brown zich voorlopig geen zorgen te maken. Show Less
Guardian
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... Simonini's customers and
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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...
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. Show Less