Umberto Eco: The Prague Cemetery

[John F]

Eco's "The Name of the Rose" (and the movie) is compelling; his next novel, "Foucault's Pendulum," was harder going for me; and from this review, "The Prague Cemetery" has its flaws. Still, I'm likely to read it when it appears in paperback. For what it's worth:

November 18, 2011
Umberto Eco and the Elders of Zion
By REBECCA NEWBERGER GOLDSTEIN

THE PRAGUE CEMETERY
By Umberto Eco
Translated by Richard Dixon. 444 pp. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. $27

When I was first learning quantum mechanics, I would occasionally feel compelled to lodge a complaint on behalf of common sense. My physics teacher would fix me with his twinkling gaze and intone, “Truth is stranger than fiction.” He was right, and not only about the behavior of elementary particles. Umberto Eco’s latest fiction, “The Prague Cemetery,” is choreographed by a truth that is itself so strange a novelist need hardly expand on it to produce a wondrous tale. Eco forthrightly explains that all his major characters but one are historical figures; but a reader unaware of how close to the truth Eco is hewing might be inclined to award him more points for inventiveness than he earns. This is not to say that Eco doesn’t earn points for inventiveness, nor that a novel can’t succeed on other grounds. It is just to say that sometimes truth is stranger than fiction.

The truth that directs the plot of “The Prague Cemetery” concerns a famous fiction created in the late 19th century, a fiction plagiarized from earlier fiction, including works by the French novelists Eugène Sue and Alexandre Dumas père. Despite such disreputable beginnings, this famous fiction went on to assume the imprimatur of a truth so galvanizing it played a role in some of the more momentous events of the last hundred years. Fiction and truth thus penetrate each other with a creative abandon suggestive of inspired pornography. What we have here is a situation ready-made for a novelist with a Borgesian fascination with reality’s perverse permeability by falsehoods. What we have here, in other words, is that famous fiction known as “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.”

The “Protocols” are a forgery represented as the genuine minutes from a secret meeting of Jewish leaders conspiring for world domination, motivated by an unnatural will to power and an unappeasable hatred of Gentiles. They are dangerously indefinite on specifics — dangerous because the vagueness allows a great range of events to be thereby “explained” — but in general, tendencies like secularism, internationalism, communism, universal suffrage and universal education are all presented as tools dreamed up by international Jewry to subvert the morals, politics and finances of the Gentile world and deliver it into Semitic clutches. The “Protocols” in their finished form were published in Russia at a time when Nicholas II had his hands full with assorted dissidents, and the dissemination of the forgery was meant to discredit any and all reformers. But the “Protocols” have had an active life far beyond imperial Russia. Henry Ford excerpted them in his Dearborn Independent newspaper, and had 500,000 copies printed between 1920 and 1922. ­Adolf Hitler, of course, gave the fiction a rave review, but then so had Kaiser Wilhelm II, who entertained dinner guests with readings from the “Protocols.” And of course the “Protocols” continue to sell briskly as nonfiction in many Arab countries.

The story of the “Protocols” is rendered even stranger by the labyrinthine history of plagiarisms and hoaxes that went into its making, and it is this astounding back story that Eco fictionalizes. One of the plagiarized sources is an 1864 French political pamphlet, satirizing Napoleon III, entitled “Dialogue in Hell Between Machiavelli and Montesquieu.” The author, Maurice Joly, who spent 15 months in jail for his efforts, attacks the legitimacy of the emperor by showing plotters in hell undermining a rightful regime. Roughly two-fifths of the “Protocols” so closely parrots Joly’s wording that there is little doubt of the borrowing. Joly, in turn, had plagiarized a popular novel by Eugène Sue, “The Mysteries of a People,” which presented the schemers as Jesuits. These sources are predated by a late-18th-­century best seller, “Memoirs Illustrating the History of Jacobinism,” by the French cleric Augustin Barruel, who charged that behind the French Revolution lurked a conspiracy of Freemasons.

Napoleonic imperialists, Jesuits, Freemasons: where are the nefarious Jews? It was Barruel who first introduced them into the mix, a few years after his anti-­Masonic book, when he received a letter from a retired army officer named J. B. Simonini warning of a “Judaic sect” that was the world’s most formidable and demonic power. This irresistible Semitic gloss to the theory of a conspiracy behind all despised social trends was expanded upon by, among others, a novelist named Hermann Goedsche, who was also a Prussian agent provocateur specializing in the forging of documents to incriminate democratic leaders. Goedsche’s 1868 novel ­“Biarritz” had a chapter called “In the Jewish Cemetery of Prague,” which, detached from the novel, was widely circulated, especially after its translation into Russian, and became a source for the “Protocols.” (The chief of the Russian secret service helped advance the fraud.)

It is this farrago of fiction, plagiarism and hoax that “The Prague Cemetery” dramatizes. All the historical players in this deadly farce are portrayed, interacting with the novel’s invented protagonist, Simone Simonini, a professional forger who is the grandson of the original letter writer. Simonini is like a Forrest Gump of evil, always present where the action is. Or, to change the metaphor, he is a conspiratorial cross-pollinating bee, all sting and no honey, spreading any lie that he can sell for hard cash. Simonini, cynic though he is, is not devoid of all genuine feeling: he genuinely hates Jews. The threatening bedtime stories his grandfather tells him feature a Jewish bogeyman, Mordechai, who will “drag me off to his infernal den, to feed me unleavened bread made with the blood of infant martyrs.” Yet another formative fiction.

A  great deal of the action of “The Prague Cemetery” consists of clandestine meetings where people lie to and blackmail one another, the shady dealings punctuated now and then by rants against a hated group, usually the Jews. A reader unaware of the underpinning in hard historical facts might begin to languish beneath the tedium of the scheming and ranting, though Eco has tried to relieve the monotony by superimposing a plot concerning his protagonist. Simonini suffers from a split personality and is writing his life story on the advice of a certain doctor he chanced to meet in a Parisian cafe. He thinks the man, either German or Austrian, is named Froïde. I had rather hoped that the inclusion of Freud, otherwise gratuitous, was Eco intimating the Nabokovian claim that psychoanalysis, too, is a species of hoax, but no such luck.

Indeed, the plot concerning Simonini seemed flimsily unsatisfying compared with the fantastic plot handed over to Eco by the facts of history. Still, 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 to be applauded for bringing this stranger-than-fiction truth vividly to life.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/20/books ... eview.html

[jbuck919]

Eco's "The Name of the Rose" (and the movie) is compelling; his next novel, "Foucault's Pendulum," was harder going for me; and from this review, "The Prague Cemetery" has its flaws. Still, I'm likely to read it when it appears in paperback.

You may recall that the movie was identified as a "palimpsest" of the novel, which sounds like Ecco's shrugging off its flaws, though with a semioticist one can never be certain. At any rate, it was marred for me by a few things, in particular the performance of F. Murray Abraham, who (1) did not live up to his promise from Amadeus (his acting was really mediocre), (2) could not make up his mind whether or not to use a Brooklyn accent. (From what I've read it seems he was drunk on the job.)

I also found Foucault's Pendulum hard going, and frankly this new one sounds like Ecco trying to be an upscale Dan Brown. But I may give it a look.