Novel of the week: The Prague Cemetery by Umberto Eco

last updated 8 January 2015

(Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, $27)

No one knows who wrote The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a fraudulent early-20th-century account of a Jewish cabal’s plan for world domination. But in his “fast and furious” new novel, said Arthur J. Sabatini in The Philadelphia Inquirer, Umberto Eco has imagined what the author of such an awful book might be like. Simone Simonini is, as one might expect, a “vile, misanthropic” man: a spy, pervert, and murderer. Influenced by his grandfather’s anti-Semitic rants, Simonini creeps along the underbelly of history gathering material for his evil masterwork. “Eco certainly doesn’t stint on sensationalism,” said Michael Dirda in The Washington Post. But he doesn’t make up much, either. Simonini excepted, most of the characters he writes about walk right out of history. Simonini in the end comes to represent that part of our nature that would rather believe in “dark forces leagued against us” than take responsibility for our own failures. In that respect, The Prague Cemetery is “an all-out horror story.”