#the prague cemetery
Review: The Prague Cemetery, by Umberto Eco
★ ★ ★ ★ ☆
“There’s a lot to be unpacked here” would be the understatement of the century. In a 19th-Century Europe packed with xenophobia, burgeoning nationalist movements and flourishing conspiracy theories, Umberto Eco uses the life, work, and struggle with amnesia of a misanthropic, xenophobic spy, traitor, and expert forger to draw a light on everything going wrong in politics today (and everything that went wrong in the 1920s and 30s). The only fictional characters and aliases are the protagonist/s and his/their own false identities.
The Prague Cemetery opens with 14 pages of the narrator describing just how much he hates pretty much everyone. If that’s not to your taste you can pretty much put the book down there. His vitriolic episodes are briefer from there on, but his hatred of everyone and everything except forgery, good food, and the satisfaction of seeing someone murdered because of false evidence he created is a constant thread throughout the rest of the book.
We definitely aren’t meant to like this guy - although I don’t doubt that, in today’s political climate, many readers did. Hopefully that’s enough to string them along until the book’s message hits; hopefully they actually understand what Eco is getting at and go away and think about it.
Simonini makes his living largely on forgeries and fraud. After he creates false evidence that sees his employer imprisoned, the government realises just how useful he could be in doing away with enemies of the state - whether it’s by creating false evidence to put in the hands of the courts, or publishing false news. As he hones his skill, the reach of his false news grows from from the occasional publication in pre-existing broadsheets and newsletters to a whole range of newspapers and magazines wholly devoted to entirely fabricated stories intended to drum up xenophobia and antisemitism. Sound familiar?
Maybe some of the book is a little ambiguous when it comes to Eco’s politics. His protagonist is a key figure in the fake news that government and shadow-government groups are using to twist the population’s emotions and opinions to serve their needs, after all. But he devotes plenty of the book to tearing down exactly this kind of thing:
Patriotism is the last refuge of cowards; those without moral principles usually wrap a flag around themselves, and the bastards always talk about the purity of the race… The meaning of identity is now based on hatred, on hatred for those who are not the same.
And later, even more reminiscent of Trump (though I don’t doubt that the current situation in Italy weighs even more heavily on Eco’s mind):
The stupidity of these people is such that even today, if I were to say I’ve been fooling them, they wouldn’t believe me.
The Prague Cemetery is no mere period piece. The parallels to the banal horror of today’s media and politics, and the book’s central message, will be as clear as daylight to anyone who already agrees with Eco. I just hope the moral of the story doesn’t fly over the heads of those inevitable readers who’ll be drawn to the book because they see themselves in Simonini, though in reality they’re more like the densest and most credulous of his believers.
My current read: The Prague Cemetery, by Umberto Eco. A straight-up villain and all-round arsehole is the protagonist. I’m pretty sure that on one level it’s an allegory for the current situation in politics and news media (primarily in Italy, but pretty much anywhere), but I’d also find it a bit easier to follow the plot and grasp the setting if I had an intimate understanding of 19th-Century Italian political history.
Includes a bunch of illustrations from the period. Most of them are so good, and so fitting, that I thought they were commissioned especially for the book. Others have visible jpg artifacts.
