El cementerio de Praga
Umberto Eco
Publicado: 2010 | 366 páginas
Novela Aventuras Histórico Intriga

«Me da vergüenza ponerme a escribir, como si desnudara mi alma.» Así empieza el relato vital del capitán Simonini, un piamontés afincado en París que desde joven se dedica al noble oficio de crear documentos falsos. Estamos en marzo de 1897 pero las memorias de este curioso individuo abarcarán todo el siglo XIX. Es un homenaje a la novela propia de la época, el folletín, son las novelas de Dumas y Sue las que inspiran al falsario en la creación de sus documentos, de lo cual se deduce que es la realidad la que copia a la literatura y no viceversa. En El cementerio de Praga, nada es lo que parece y nadie es quien realmente dice ser: todo es según convenga, pues, bien mirado, la diferencia entre un hada y una bruja es solo una cuestión de edad y encanto…

Estamos en marzo de 1897, en París, espiando desde las primeras páginas de esta magnífica novela a un hombre de sesenta y siete años que escribe sentado a una mesa, en una habitación abarrotada de muebles: he aquí al capitán Simonini, un piamontés afincado en la capital francesa, que desde muy joven se dedica al noble arte de crear documentos falsos.
Hombre de pocas palabras, misógino y glotón impenitente, el capitán se inspira en los folletines de Dumas y Sue para dar fe de complots inexistentes, fomentar intrigas o difamar a las grandes figuras de la política europea. Caballero sin escrúpulos, Simonini trabaja al servicio del mejor postor: si antes fue el gobierno italiano quien pagó por sus imposturas, luego llegaron los encargos de Francia y Prusia, e incluso Hitler acabaría aprovechándose de sus malvados oficios.

Realmente me aburrió al punto q no lo terminé. Quizás es debido a mi ignorancia de política e iglesia en Italia y Francia en el siglo XIX, pero en cualquier caso nunca me "enganchó". ( )

3.5 - I'm not sure, stars.

Anyone who tells you Umberto Eco is an easy read is a) delusional or b) screwing with you. He can weave a story that goes up down and around and ends up where it started with a million revelations in between, and that is what he has done with The Prague Cemetery.

Based on historical figures, with an entirely fictional main character, this is the story of how one man influenced the European progression of anti-Semitism that ended in Germany with the final solution. From a well-spring of hatred, implanted in him as a boy, Simonini sets out to discredit Jews and earn money (earn being a very loose term here), and carries out his plan over decades, from Italy to France to Russia, becoming involved in even some telling events, such as the Dreyfus Affair. That he has no problem finding others who are willing to both accept his false conclusions and bolster them is hardly surprising.

Parts of this novel are intriguing, parts are humorous, parts are mysterious...the solving of the mystery is often what keeps you engaged, and parts are revolting in their vitriol toward the Jewish people, sickening even though it is obviously the mindset of the character involved and not the author.

While written in 2000, and addressing political problems of the 1890s, it often made me think how little has changed over time.

This led me to think, even then, that if I wanted to sell the story of a conspiracy, I didn’t have to offer the buyer anything original, but simply something he already knew or could have found out more easily in other ways. People believe only what they already know, and this is the beauty of the Universal Form of Conspiracy.

The secret service in each country believes only what it has already heard elsewhere and would discount as unreliable any information that is entirely new.

What makes a police informer truly believable? Discovering a conspiracy. He therefore had to organize a conspiracy so he could then uncover it.

If you break a sensational story all at once, after the first impact people forget it. Instead, you have to parcel it out, and each new piece of news brings the whole story back to mind.

Just a few quotations that made me think we are all too ready to believe what we want to believe and seldom willing to do the hard work of approaching things with an open mind. Thus are we easily duped by the controllers, who are always out there, and permeate every aspect of society.

The end result for many:
A time comes when something breaks inside, and there is no more energy or will. They say you must live, but life becomes a burden that inevitably ends in suicide.

I never know what to really think of Eco. His books often seem to mean nothing, or everything; they are complex, but toward what end? It is as if I have a split personality, one of which admires his writing and is a bit in awe of him, and another who thinks I might just as well have wasted two days pounding my silly head against a wall. I did love [b:The Name of the Rose|119073|The Name of the Rose|Umberto Eco|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1415375471l/119073._SY75_.jpg|3138328]. I still don’t know what I thought of [b:Foucault's Pendulum|17841|Foucault's Pendulum|Umberto Eco|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1396645125l/17841._SY75_.jpg|11221066]. Now I will have this one to chew on a while, because there is no way to just forget his books and the attempt to truly understand them might be a lifetime endeavor.
( )

Eco enjoys himself writing a spoof late-nineteenth-century adventure story, complete with ingeniously repurposed period engravings, that sends up all the great conspiracy theories of the period (freemasons, Jesuits, Dreyfus, satanism, Protocols of the elders of Zion, communists, etc.) by ingeniously linking them all to a single fictional character, the professional police-informer and forger of legal documents Simone Simonini, a Piedmontese exile living in Paris. (It's a kind of inversion of the plot of Foucault's pendulum.)

Simone is trying to get to the bottom of a strange memory loss he's been experiencing, which seems to have something to do with the occasional visits to his apartment of the Abbé Dalla Piccola. Maybe he can achieve something by applying techniques he's been told about by a young Austrian doctor he chatted to in a restaurant — what was he called, Froïde or something like that...?

All very silly, and as overcomplicated as only Eco can achieve, but of course it does also have a serious point to make about how the effects of a story in the real world can be entirely unrelated to its truth, or even plausibility, or to the circumstances of its creation. If you write something that sustains and reinforces the prejudices of (some of) the public, there's a good chance they will believe it and act on it, even if it's later exposed as a forgery or a cynical falsification. ( )