قصة الكتاب :
The Prague Cemetery is a novel by author Umberto Eco. It is his sixth novel and was first published in Italian in 2010 before being released in English in 2011. It is considered his best work in recent times. The novel was short-listed for the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize in 2012.
\r\nThe Prague Cemetery traces the life of its protagonist Simone Simonini, who is half-Italian and half-French. Simone is raised by his grandfather who blames the Jews for everything. His father, a man who sees the influence of the Society of Jesus everywhere, is another influence during his growing years. Both these men cultivate in young Simone an obsession with the notion of conspiracy. As he grows, Simone feeds intellectually on the most lurid works of fiction available. As a young man, he discovers that he has a talent for imitating anybody’s handwriting, a repulsion towards women and sexuality in general and a taste for dressing up in clerical robes. Simone also displays an obsession with exquisite food and has no moral sense to speak of. As the story moves forward, Simone ends up working as a spy and a forger and betraying almost everyone he knows. Simone moves across Europe in the pay of one secret service after another, claiming personal responsibility for most of the political crises of the 19th century. Through this carefully crafted complex tale, Eco reveals what he feels about history. Simonini’s customers and victims are actual historical characters and Eco appears to be suggesting, through the manner in which he weaves and interlinks historical tales, that history is not as clear-cut as people imagine it to be. They are sometimes pieces of fiction stitched together and narrated by self-appointed authorities who cannot always be trusted.
\r\nThe entire narrative is told in a series of diary entries made by the aging Simonini, who has lost his memory due to some traumatic event and is attempting to reconstruct his past. In creating this book, Umberto Eco has not meant to produce a light read or entertaining story. The Prague Cemetery is an engrossing piece of work, filled with strong, suggestive themes that evoke equally strong feelings. Eco manages to create a conspiracy theory of all conspiracy theories. The author has employed his imagination to the fullest in combining all the actual events and characters into one hard-hitting story. The Prague Cemetery can be considered as Eco’s broad attempt to explore the mind of a fanatic from within and explain the hate-filled biases and publications that characterized the 19th century. \r\n