laura_trap 's review for:

The Prague Cemetery by Umberto Eco

2.0

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The only reason this book even gets two stars is due to the fact I was able, after much moaning and groaning, to finish it. I was surprised at how vile this book was sometimes, even knowing it was an odd form of satire. I still found it repugnant and now understand why there were so many poor ratings. I really love Eco's other works so I was a little dismayed at how much I disliked this one. He does have his typical themes in there - they stories are layered, layers upon layers of memories, dialogue, storylines, events. and food. Eco loves his food, and I do like that about his works, his focus on food and how it revolves around the character and how they themselves revolve around it. The utter vileness of the central character, Simonini, just completely ruined this book for me. It's hard to really enjoy a book with a individual such as he as our main protagonist, no matter the amount of clever, dry witticisms that garnish the book throughout. His sole purpose seemed to just cheat and interfere and ruin the lives of others just for the sake of ruining those lives and hating on Masons and Hating on the French and Hating on Women and Hating on Catholics. He even admits to not even liking himself most of the time. And yes, I know, this is satire, the entire point of the novel is that he is unpleasant and we have this guy who saunters around lauding himself as the greatest Anti-Semite, wants to write oodles of pages of semitism literature, extrapolating on how awful they are when he himself is the most vilest of creatures and doing exactly all the terrible things he accuses these other groups of doing. But that still doesn't make this a pleasant reading experience and perhaps the nuance was lost on me and I feel like I wasted a good deal of time reading this book but I had to finish it because it was Eco, okay? Definitely not one of his better works, which is unfortunate.