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3.29 AVERAGE
3.29 AVERAGE
challenging
dark
informative
mysterious
tense
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Plot
Strong character development:
Complicated
Loveable characters:
No
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
Not sure whether I want to finish The Prague Cemetery by Umberto Eco. Bought blind, saw it at the store and went, "Oh, It's Umberto Eco! :)" Loved The Name of the Rose and heard good things about his other books so I thought I couldn't lose with it. Well... 1) The antisemitism is a bit too much, even if you know that as an author he condemns it and tries to make his protagonist look ridiculous and pathetic 2) This book might have been interesting at the time that he wrote it because the ideas he referenced would have been relatively obscure, but now every normie fascist has the same views as the protagonist that he specifically designed to be horrible horrible. If in The Name of the Rose I was learning new things, or at least writing down new things to look up, with The Prague Cemetery it's more like, "Yeah, yeah, I've heard of that conspiracy theory." "The guy becomes a misogynist and an even worse antisemite because a Jewish girl told him she didn't need him to carry her bag and called him 'boy' instead of 'man', inadvertently 'unmanning' him? That's just every other incel, though the ethnic group he hates varies." This novel is set in what is now Italy and he famously wrote against fascism, so I know where he's coming from though I disagree with the execution, but the repetition is tiring, and frankly kind of boring, which is the last thing I'd expected from Eco, if only because you can just log on and see some online guy tweeting a paraphrase of its most hateful elements. 150 pages in and from what other people have written about it, it doesn't look like it gets any better. :/
A troubling book. Very well-written and engaging, but about incredibly unappealing protagonist, who does terrible things surrounded by people who do terrible things. It’s frankly hard to read so much antisemitism and remember not only did people actually believe the lies, people today still do. Still, a book to think on.
This one of those books that you read but aren't entirely sure that you understand what you read. Eco's novel is in part about the development and publication of the stupid and racist Protocols of the Elders of Zion. It is like wading though a sewer, a well written sewer. In part, the book seems to be about what would possess someone to write such crap but also why it would be accepted.
It's a good read, but hardly pleasant.
It's a good read, but hardly pleasant.
Interesting plot about the manufacturing of anti-semitic rhetoric in late 1800s France, although reading from the perspective of a bigoted character is always rough. The first 100 pages was a little confusing with the three perspectives and lack of driving plot, but the rest of the book was much better.
This book is not for the casual reader - it is actually quite an assault on ones sensitivities of almost every kind. Is it possible to shock anybody in the age of Lincoln the Vampire Hunter (which I thought was funny BTW)? Yes - in this case not by using the tired, clichéd titillating antics of commercial entertainment fare or by exposing real life horrors the way cause recruitment pieces do.
It is shocking by relentlessly verbalizing (at length... to say the least) the kind of thought processes "civilized" western society now tries to expunge, forget and relegate to the past.
Yet the past is not that distant - or even over really.
Those who attack Eco for being a racist in this book are wrong and probably never read the whole book before pronouncing their "fatwa". Eco's point is always to immerse you in some aspect of western culture, history and heritage until you get a deeper understanding of what forms our world today. This time he immerses you deep in the cesspool of thought that has for centuries been sloshing at Europe's (and western society's) ankles and knees... until you beg for air and for "never again".
It is shocking by relentlessly verbalizing (at length... to say the least) the kind of thought processes "civilized" western society now tries to expunge, forget and relegate to the past.
Yet the past is not that distant - or even over really.
Those who attack Eco for being a racist in this book are wrong and probably never read the whole book before pronouncing their "fatwa". Eco's point is always to immerse you in some aspect of western culture, history and heritage until you get a deeper understanding of what forms our world today. This time he immerses you deep in the cesspool of thought that has for centuries been sloshing at Europe's (and western society's) ankles and knees... until you beg for air and for "never again".
Like Eco's other novels very convoluted and you are never sure when real history ends and the fiction begins. Conspiracy on top of conspiracy as the same source material is used to discredit different groups depending on the time and place.
It's hard to read about a main character that's anti-Semitic and xenophobic, as well as just a twat. Tried very hard to make it to my 100 pages mark but couldn't do it. Overly cerebral for the sake of being overly cerebral.
The Protocols of the Elders of Zion just keep marching on. Barely repackaged, these noisome spirits persist and return with a fury. Danilo Kis composed a story along this thematic trajectory in his collection Encyclopedia of the Dead. Paranoiac pamphlets have always elected not to invent but rather recycle. I would grade Eco's effort a five-plus given the magnificent illustrations throughout. This is a distillation of all that is sublime in Umberto Eco.
It is very hard to enjoy a novel where the main protagonist is so immensely negative.
"Negative" is an understatement here - Eco did everything to make his main character one of the worst people anybody has ever encountered in a literature. His Simonini hates the whole world, is disgusted of women, bursts with prejudices of all sorts and loves himself only. The sheer venom, malice and hatred this man has in his veins initially put me off reading - I had to set a book aside for a good month, before I could continue and than suddenly I got caught up in a story and in fact finished it with a greatest interest. Which still doesn't mean it was enjoyable, pleasurable experience because once I had finished the last page, I felt simultaneous overload of historical informations AND a disgust about what I have just read. There is not a single person, country or government that Simonini does not hiss at, out of some long-standing imaginative phobia or prejudice. If Umberto Eco wanted to explain how 19th century public opinions could have been swayed and various secret plots made trough manipulation of public and media, he had definitely succeeded - the novel is loaded with historical facts and real-life people, author's knowledge of history is almost intimidating, but at the heart of the story there is slow-brewing, dangerous hatred that was strong, powerful force back than and today. I sighed out with relief once I finished the last page.
"Negative" is an understatement here - Eco did everything to make his main character one of the worst people anybody has ever encountered in a literature. His Simonini hates the whole world, is disgusted of women, bursts with prejudices of all sorts and loves himself only. The sheer venom, malice and hatred this man has in his veins initially put me off reading - I had to set a book aside for a good month, before I could continue and than suddenly I got caught up in a story and in fact finished it with a greatest interest. Which still doesn't mean it was enjoyable, pleasurable experience because once I had finished the last page, I felt simultaneous overload of historical informations AND a disgust about what I have just read. There is not a single person, country or government that Simonini does not hiss at, out of some long-standing imaginative phobia or prejudice. If Umberto Eco wanted to explain how 19th century public opinions could have been swayed and various secret plots made trough manipulation of public and media, he had definitely succeeded - the novel is loaded with historical facts and real-life people, author's knowledge of history is almost intimidating, but at the heart of the story there is slow-brewing, dangerous hatred that was strong, powerful force back than and today. I sighed out with relief once I finished the last page.