The Prague Cemetery
By Umberto Eco
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, $27, 444 pages
A review by David Madden
Far more than most novels ever, Umberto Eco’s “The Prague Cemetery” raises a plethora of questions, the primary one being, What moved Eco to construct this particular meshing of imagination and history?
A bestseller in Europe, the novel has earned a mixed response in the U. S.—praise and repugnance. Author of the world-famous medieval mystery thriller “The Name of the Rose,” Eco is known for his obsession, in popular fiction and in academic exercises, with language, puzzles, and conundrums that cause him to be labeled “playful.” Some forms of playfulness are inappropriate in public. Setting aside any wonder whether he himself is in any way anti-Semitic, is Eco having at least half as much fun, on the lowest level of his very being–spewing hatred of the Jews throughout his 444 pages–as his main character is?
Let us leap over such questions to a charitable interpretation teachable in graduate history seminars that dabble in fiction and in literature seminars that dabble in history, and come up with this high-minded answer in the form of another question: By involving his sinister main character in most of Europe’s major political events of the 19th century, does Eco, intentionally or unintentionally, make of him an embodiment of many of the evil forces behind those events?
The terrible people involved in the terrible events into which Eco immerses his readers, almost to the point of drowning, were real; but the main character, arch anti-anti-hero, is a creature of Eco’s fervid imagination. We know from experience and hearsay that taking a history course often does not take, so fine details of the wars of Italian unification and the terrors of the Paris Commune may prove quite repetitive and tedious for forgetful readers, but especially for those who know little or nothing beyond perhaps recognizing the name Garibaldi.
Tedious indeed are the seemingly endless details of the gluttonous experiences of the main narrator. A little less tiresome are the details of the conspiracies involving the narrator (who is or is not, or maybe may be two people, with a third narrator who probably is Eco, but not necessarily). He is a liar, fake, forger, murderer, betrayer, double-crosser, Jesuit hater, Mason hater, and, above all, a paranoid Jew hater whose rants might have tired even Hitler, but will assuredly nauseate a good many readers, while validating the firmly rooted prejudices of bigots who might, implausibly, read this quasi-novel.
Historically, Jew hatred was aroused and virulently sustained beyond the usual by the circulation in the 19th century of “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion,” supposedly written by a cabal of rabbis who met in a cemetery in Prague to plan an eventual take-over of the world. It was actually a pastiche of passages from popular novels by Eugene Sue and Alexander Dumas. Our repulsive narrator participated with agents of the Secret Services of France, Germany, and Italy in circulating of that plan in crisscrossing contexts during threats of war and war itself.
Surely Eco knows that most citizens of the world in our time very well know that governments good and bad can be duplicitous, hypocritical, conniving, deceitful—the list is long, seldom balanced by a list of good attributes—and that anti-Semitism often serves their nefarious purposes. So in this novel, preachy by implication, what lessons, insights, visions is Eco offering us?
Damned if I know, damned if I don’t.
One faintly redeeming insight he may have prepared us to achieve on our own is that the schizoid narrator (writing his story at the suggestion of Doctor Freud) has over the years so submerged his ego and superego in false identities that he is now in anxiety over his lack of memory of the past and of self-awareness in the present.
But am I bending over backwards?
Founder of the US Civil War Center at LSU and Robert Penn Warren Professor Emeritus, David Madden has just finished his eleventh work of fiction, “London Bridge in Plague and Fire,” forthcoming in the fall.