Eco's grave thriller 'The Prague Cemetery'

THE PRAGUE CEMETERY, by Umberto Eco. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. 464 pp. $28.

Mischievous, ghastly, scholarly and facetious, Umberto Eco's "The Prague Cemetery" is a novel befitting the author of "The Name of the Rose" and "Foucault's Pendulum" -- a work so jammed with historical detail and literary allusions that a reader can barely see the narrative forest for its very erudite trees.

As the publisher's jacket copy puts the question: What if the historical upheavals and catastrophes of the 19th century -- the bombings and murders; the horrors attendant to the Paris Commune and the Dreyfus Affair; that founding document of modern anti-Semitism, "The Protocols of the Elders of Zion" -- were all instigated by a single malodorous character?

Well, what if? For one thing, that character would be a tough one to spend 464 pages with. We meet Captain Simonini, an aging Freemason- and Jew-hating secret agent/master forger, as a venomous old diarist who is, apparently, schizophrenic. Although he retains no memory of inhabiting his alter ego -- that of a priest he murdered some years earlier -- Simonini is nonetheless aware of his other self, and the two personalities correspond by letter, one writing by night, the other by day. It is a highly original concept on Eco's part, and it alleviates the necessity of spending too much time with a character who, for all his highly refined taste and gourmet appetites, is a bottomless well of self-justifying poison.

"The Prague Cemetery" was released last year in Europe and provoked what ought to be called the Huck Finn Response: Readers, many critics warned, are too impressionable -- or perhaps they meant feebleminded -- to understand that Simonini's loathsome musings on Jews, Freemasons, women, Jesuits, etc., are not in fact endorsements of those views by the author.

It seems obvious that Eco's portrait of Simonini is meant as a satirical mirror for our own times. Various powers-that-be use Simonini's talents to foment upheaval within the Italian nation-building campaign of Garibaldi and the clandestine opposition to Louis-Napoleon in France; he is influenced by "Dr. Froide," influences the Dreyfus Affair, works for the Prussians against France and undermines the Commune of Paris. He is a malignant Zelig who reflects not only the complacencies of our supposedly post-racial world but the contradictions inherent in the current global political climate.

"The Prague Cemetery" is a Eurocentric novel; as such it is a rather useful survey for Americans whose historical view of the 19th century is dominated by our own nation building and civil war. But the moral that Eco is imparting is pan-national: Throughout his adventures, Simonini consistently tortures facts to fit his biases. His career as a chameleonic secret agent in the employ of this nation, or that cabal, reflects his soul, as he convinces himself of the validity of his hatreds, despite any and all evidence. "Apart from the pleasures of coffee and chocolate," he says at one point, "what I most enjoyed was appearing to be someone else." Or everyone else, as per his creator's subtly caustic point of view.