Umberto Eco

A top-selling international work by the author of The Name of the Rose follows the controversial 19th-century story of a European world where violence and occult practices shaping key historical events are commonly linked by a solitary evil genius.

The Prague Cemetery

Maurice FitzGerald

so much great stuff but then in the end I didn't transcend anything so....

Danny Engström

Never got into it. Tried for a long time. Gave up.

Der Italiener Simon Simonini lebt in Paris, und er erlebt aus nächster Nähe eine dunkle Geschichte: geheime Militärpapiere, die der jüdische Hauptmann Dreyfus angeblich an die deutsche Botschaft verkauft, piemontesische, französische und preußische Geheimdienste, die noch geheimere Pläne schmieden, Freimaurer, Jesuiten und Revolutionäre - und am Ende tauchen zum ersten Mal die Protokolle der Weisen von Zion auf, ein gefälschtes "Dokument" für die "jüdische Weltverschwörung", das dann fatale Folgen haben wird. Umberto Eco, der Meister des historischen Romans, erzählt die Geschichte des neunzehnten Jahrhunderts, in der wir jedoch unser eigenes wiedererkennen können.

Roman

Der Friedhof in Prag

Kaya

Ich habe dieses Buch völlig unvorbereitet angefangen und lange gerungen. Zuerst wegen der Thematik und dann dauert es eine lange Weile, bis man im Roman drin ist. 
Deswegen 3 Sterne.
Aber hey, das ist Eco +1Stern

Liebste und wahrste Feststellung findet man mitten auf Seite 410

Mary Rose Luksha

I am a huge Eco fan. Just thought I would lead with that fact. 

The amazing thing about this book, as it mentions in the acknowledgements, is that everything that happened in the book actually happened, and all the people in the book are real people (with the exception of Simonini and a few minor characters). I am in constant awe of Eco's brilliance. He took seemingly unrelated true facts, and created a conspiracy around them. It's sad that he didn't have to make up any of the anti-Semitic statements, and at times I found the hatred and ignorance spouted off by the characters to be a little overwhelming. But the fact that he took all these dangling threads and united them into one string of a story is an amazing feat and I am insanely jealous.

I gave this book 4 stars, which is a low Eco rating for me; I think I've rated all his other books 5 and I'd rate them higher if I could. I gave The Prague Cemetery 4 stars because I think Eco used the narration device in the story to either make it easier for him to tell them story, or make it easier for the reader to understand. But this is an Eco book. He's probably one of the smartest people living, and I would be insulted if he didn't make his readers work for his book. The Name of the Rose? The first 100 pages were work. But if you stick with it you're rewarded with an amazing story.

Without giving too much away about the plot, what I mean by the narration device is there are essentially three voices. First is Simonini whose diary we are reading, and is the protagonist of the story. Then sporadically we read the diary of Abbe Dalla Piccola who is connected to Simonini in a bizarre way. Finally we have the voice of the narrator who takes over sometimes and writes things like "Simonini's writing became errant and disjointed, so the narrator will fill in the holes his memory has left." I get why Eco did it. Psychotic breaks are hard to write and maybe he wanted a more concise story. Sometimes I just got tired of it.

In short, 4 stars because Eco is a ROCKSTAR but the narrator business seemed (at times) like a cop out.

"The Prague Cemetery" is the latest international bestseller from Umberto Eco, author of "The Name of the Rose." Nineteenth-century Europe abounds with political and religious conspiracies from Turin to Prague to Paris. What if, behind it all, lay one lone man determining the fate of the Continent?

Emmett

It was fairly eye-opening at first, as The Prague Cemetery opened with a Jekyll and Hyde scenario involving a priest and a criminal document forger who are either the same person or two people with selectively complementary amnesia (each remembers what the other does not). Having them converse in the space of the forger's diary, picking up where the other had left off, was amusing, as was the bewildered framing narrator attempting to piece their memories together, a task not without frustrations given the premise. Of mention is the staggeringly vast library that Eco is fond of immersing his readers in, so deeply that one is helplessly impressed at how in the space of his genius mind he manages to put together discrete nuggets of fact and fantasy, while weaving questions of truth, interpretative relativity and the solidness of reality in and out of his narratives, creating a story so impermeably solid but also the novel itself deconstructs as of almost thin air (as most stories are, of bits and pieces shifted around to turn into new things, a prominent idea resurfacing around The Name of the Rose). Yet somewhere along the line it did become rather tiresome to read constantly of conspiracy after conspiracy and the ceaseless mud-slinging between various loosely Judeo-Christian religious groups and their secret society spin-offs which form the main thread of this novel. It would've been thrilling if it were less laboured over, or it just could be the case that it wasn't the sort of thing I would be extremely excited over. Knowing Eco and his writing history however, he undoubtedly had fun writing this, as he did Foucault's Pendulum, and a respectful salute is well-deserved there. Conspiracies steeped in labyrinthine historical detail (none of which this reader is knowledgeable enough to verify the truth of) is his prime area of interest. His thing, but not mine.

Josh Clement

A very unusual book. Confusing to start with, but quickly transforms into a page turner. I guess you could draw a comparison to Dan Brown type books, but this is smart, and the coolest thing is most of it actually happened. So a great way to learn about 19th century europe.

Fasiha🌺🐧

Beka Demuradze

Kahli Scott

Cena

Vilandra

Simone Simonini è un falsario. Si sposta nell'Europa ottocentesca offrendo i propri servigi a governanti, poliziotti e servizi segreti. Messe nere e attentati dinamitardi, gesuiti, massoni, camicie rosse e carbonari, il suo genio bilioso plasma in silenzio la storia, seminando dietro di sé una scia di rovine e dolore. Dal naufragio in cui muore Ippolito Nievo, all'affaire Dreyfus, alla spettacolare invenzione dei Protocolli dei Savi Anziani di Sion.

Il cimitero di Praga

Andrea Bruno

Nuno Ramos

"Nineteenth-century Europe from Turin to Prague to Paris abounds with the ghastly and the mysterious. Conspiracies rule history. Jesuits plot against Freemasons. Italian republicans strangle priests with their own intestines. French criminals plan bombings by day and celebrate black masses at night. Every nation has its own secret service, perpetrating forgeries, plots, and massacres. From the unification of Italy to the Paris Commune to the Dreyfus Affair to notorious forgery The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, Europe is in tumult and everyone needs a scapegoat. ut what if, behind all of these conspiracies both real and imagined, lay one lone man? What if that evil genius created the most infamous document of all? Eco takes his readers on an unforgettable journey through the underbelly of world-shattering events. The Prague Cemeteryis Umberto Eco at his most exciting, a novel immediately hailed as his masterpiece."

Cerys

Alfredo santos

Phileas Fogg

O cemitério de Praga

Pedro Pinheiro 

Sabine Delorme

Denise La Greca

Jane McCullough

Gwen Chodur

El cementerio de Praga es eso; una novela folletinesca donde todos los personajes, excepto el protagonista, existieron realmente, incluso su abuelo, autor de una misteriosa carta al abad Barruel, que desencadenó el antisemitismo moderno. La novela lleva ilustraciones, como los folletines de aquel tiempo; las ilustraciones son las mismas que las de entonces, un detalle grato a quienes recuerdan con nostalgia los libros leídos en la adolescencia.

The Prague Cemetery

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