A review by murinius
El cementerio de Praga by Umberto Eco

2.0

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. :/