Just Finished Reading The Prague Cemetary by Umberto Eco

Saturday I discussed a mystery novel I just read and remarked that I liked its two lead characters.  But I wouldn't want to imply by this that a sympathetic protagonist is indispensable to a good story.  After all, my favorite Russian novel, Fyodor Dostoyevski's Crime and Punishment, features that rascal Rodion Romanovich Raskolnikov whose self-rationalizing, amoral behavior opens a window, albeit unpleasant, into aspects of personality that each of us...if we're honest with ourselves...share with him to a hopefully much lesser extent.  But Raskolnikov comes across as a saint compared to the character of Captain Simone Simonini of Italian writer Umberto Eco's 2010 novel The Prague Cemetery, which I just read translated from the original Italian...

You might have watched the movie Forrest Gump starring Tom Hanks, whose character travels through the late twentieth century under the world's radar screen while being an integral part of events, be they playing football at Alabama for Bear Bryant, fighting in Vietnam and visiting President Johnson at the White House, playing ping-pong against China, calling the cops on the Watergate burglary, inventing that "What" Happens bumper sticker slogan, and appearing with John Lennon and Yoko Ono on TV, to name just a few.  But while Forrest Gump was a benevolent force for goodness, this Simonini is the opposite, plying his lucrative forgery trade in Italy and France while, like Gump, taking part in real historical events, in this book during the late nineteenth century.  He violently hates both Jews and women and goes off on long rants about both groups. Secret agencies from France, Italy, and Russia approach him at different times whenever they want a document forged (like in the Dreyfus affair) or a bomb to conveniently go off somewhere. He is responsible for a few "false flag" events, as well as the infamous Protocols of the Elders of Zion forgery that anti-Semites like Adolf Hitler, those responsible for the Russian pogroms, and even Henry Ford later used to promote their hateful ideas.  I understand that Simonini is the only fictional character in The Prague Cemetery: everyone else was a real historical figure, but I have to plead ignorance about the background for this story as I don't know much about the history of western Europe around that time...

The Prague Cemetery can be difficult to read if for no other reason than the "protagonist" Simonini's relentless hatefulness and self-justification throughout the story.  But if you can get past that...and it's a pretty big hurdle to surmount...this story is an interesting introduction to some real history.  The most interesting part to me was the Franco-Prussian War of 1870 and the short-lived Paris Commune at its conclusion.  Umberto Eco also examines the minds of people engrossed with conspiracy theories and how their thinking gets twisted...a good lesson about what's going on today in front of our own eyes with the "fake news" and the variety of far-flung movements promoted out there in the media...