I rush ed for Umberto Eco ’s latest novel with more than usual
anticipation. Eco after all is a masterfully inventive storyteller (“The
Name of the Rose,” “Foucault’s Pendulum”) and an essayist- scholar of
breathtaking range and erudition. Beyond that, “The Prague Cemetery” is a
historical novel centered on the origins of that specious but apparently
indestructible anti-Semitic tract, “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.” Oh
boy, I was in for a treat.
As it turned out, not quite a treat. Eco is
always interesting, but I found my interest repeatedly flagging in this long,
repetitious book. Periodic bursts of ingenuity, action and even humor kept me
going. But these were mild compensation for the scores upon scores of flat
characters, the upended file cabinets of historical arcana and the overall
numbing insanity that underlies the narrative.
Observing the insane is
amusing only up to a point. With the exception of the main character, one Simone
Simonini, everyone in this novel is a historical figure and the vast majority of
them is pathologically bent. That Europe has a long history as a collective
madhouse is not news. So just what are we supposed to take away from “The Prague
Cemetery”?
Here’s what I mean: The republicans plot against the monarchists who
plot against the liberals who plot against the Templars who plot against the
Jesuits who plot against the Freemasons who plot against the Roman Catholics who
plot against the communists who plot against the Protestants who plot against
the French who plot against the Germans who plot against the Russians and behind
every plot are the Jews who are plotting to take over the world. It’s enough, if
you’ll forgive me, to make you plotz.
Watching paranoids do their thing
over such a long stretch of pages really isn’t all that fascinating. Precisely
how much time do you wish to spend among folks who maintain that Napoleon was
Jewish? That Jesus was a Celt? That the Alliance Israelite Universelle is the
Elders of Zion in disguise? In addition, Eco covered much of this territory with
much greater energy and creativity in “Foucault’s Pendulum.” Maybe the problem
this time is the author’s decision to hew so closely to historical accuracy
(history is not necessarily the most artful of novelists). Whatever the case,
all those intrigues among the Bourbons, the Garibaldians, the Carbonari, the
royalists, the Piedmontese and the Sicilians that take up the first half of the
book simply failed to resonate with this non-Italian – even if the Jews were
behind all the conflicts. But in fact they weren’t and, accordingly,
virtually no Jews appear in the novel.
Jew-haters do appear throughout
the book, although in my view Jew-haters, being so simple-minded, are a lot less
interesting than Jews. The prime mover in Eco’s daisy-chain of ditzes is the
aforementioned Simone Simonini of Turin. This fictional character is the
grandson of an actual figure, a reactionary Captain Simonini who was paranoid
about a Jewish threat, supposedly cooked up by rabbis in Prague’s old Jewish
cemetery, to his beloved church and monarchy. Various political and religious
forces are interested in the captain’s “documentary evidence” of the Jewish
plot, the details of which will be changed every so often to suit contemporary
pathologies.
Simonini soon enough is fabricating letters and dossiers and
whatnot for whatever cause and for whomever will pay. Eventually he moves to
Paris. There he’s employed by various secret services as a spy, a double agent,
a triple agent, a quadruple agent. Why does he do all this? As noted earlier,
he’s crazy. How crazy? He spends half his life as another person entirely, an
eminently duplicitous priest called Abbe Dalla Piccola. Plots
thicken. Gruesome murders occur. Satanic rituals are observed. A certain
irritation sets in.
Eco does his best to enliven the proceedings with
cameo appearances by such personages as Alexander Dumas and Victor Hugo,
references to Sigmund Freud and Alfred Dreyfus (naturally Eco has Simonini forge
the letter that condemns Dreyfus), course-by-course reports on fabulous meals
(complete with recipes), the inclusion of some 60 line drawings from the
semiotician’s famed collection (quite fascinating), and touches of wry humor,
such as:
“Although he was drunk by this time, Bataille managed to work out that
the total number of devils and she-devils was 44,435,556. We checked his
calculation, admitting with surprise that he was right, and he banged his fist
on the table and shouted, ‘You see then, I’m not drunk!’ He was so pleased with
himself that he slid under the table.”
But the nice touches can’t quite
make up for the perfunctory characterizations, the repetitive actions and, above
all, the mind-numbing and utterly predictable litany of libels against Jews.
Indeed, not long ago I read for the first time (and I trust for the last time)
the actual “Protocols of the Elders of Zion” and found it at once profoundly
stupid and stupefyingly dull. Eco’s anti-Semitic scribes, like their reallife
counterparts, tend to babble. I don’t deny the damage they did (and still do). I
simply state that, unless the reader is already predisposed to paranoia, their
babblings rather quickly become uninteresting.
Eco’s point in detailing
all this blather surely isn’t that anti-Semitic polemicists are a bunch of
wackos – we never doubted that. Was it to alert us to the fact that such
rantings are still with us? Anyone with an Internet connection knows that as
well. Then was his aim – as it was in such novels as “The Name of the Rose” –
chiefly to entertain? Maybe. But “Rose” was written 30 years ago, when its
author’s imagination apparently was springier and his erudition was won more
lightly than it is today. Whatever the case, Eco clearly does not succeed in
engaging the reader this time. •
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