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Dec 03, 2014rab1953 rated this title 3 out of 5 stars
Eco here creates one of the most repellant protagonists that I have read, and puts him on display for examination. The thing that is worse is that, while his character, Simonini, is a fictional creation, the rest of the characters in the book are historical figures who share the hatreds that make Simonini so appalling. Briefly, the novel is the story of the forger who created the so-called Protocols of the Elders of Zion for the Czarist secret service. A thorough-going anti-Semite who also hates women and just about everyone else, he is an amoral sociopath who grew up with his anti-Semitic grandfather in Turin, may have had some nationalistic ideals in the Italian Risorgimento, but found any ideals he might have had undermined by corrupt employers, secret service agents and politicians. In addition to creating several of the major forgeries of the nineteenth century (one reviewer cleverly calls him the Forest Gump of anti-Semitism), he commits several murders and mass-murders and has many people imprisoned in Devil’s Island. In all of this, he inhabits a historical world of duplicity, betrayal, opportunism and genuine nastiness. Eco shows all of this to illustrate the vile circumstances that produced the Protocols and other historical fictions. He warns the reader that this is a nasty character by introducing him with a long rant in chapter one against Jews, Germans, French, Italians, Jesuits, and women. And he ends the book with Simonini smirking that he has succeeded in setting in motion a campaign to exterminate Jews. The book points to important themes about the use of false stories to justify nationalist and ethnic campaigns, which are highly relevant today. The portrait of the underworld of nineteenth-century politics is as vivid and memorable as Dickens’ portraits of industrial England. Eco lightens things up with some black humour and cynical observations that have a crystal clarity about what people will believe. But the novel fails on some key points. First, the story doesn’t really hold together as a novel. The characters are grotesque caricatures, never humans with depth. I think that readers will feel nothing for them but revulsion. The story flits about briefly touching on many incidents but they remain sketchy. What details Eco presents are atmospheric, but only a background while the foreground remains vague. And I’m not sure how to interpret Simonini’s split personality. Clearly he has a diseased mind, which allows him to forget one part of himself and occupy another personality. When he realizes that this is happening, he writes his journals – the novel itself – and fills in details in his other personality. He finally sees what he is doing in a psychological crisis bringing together his fear of sex, his misogyny and his anti-Semitism. But this seems to let him off too easily. Are the horrors of history to be reduced to some shady operators taking advantage of one man’s psychological illness? Or does his internal antagonism somehow represent the opposing forces in historical fact and fiction? I think Eco wants to point to the difficulty of understanding history unless you recognize that historical documents are produced in circumstances where not even their creators really know what they are doing. All are suspect, and history must be seen as a matter of interpretation and point of view. The meaning of a document or a message lies not only on its surface, but also on its context. The Protocols (and who knows what other historical stories) are the product of a mentally ill forger working for secret agents with an agenda based on specific tactical objectives, often opposed to each other. So while the book creates a memorable picture of a historical past that is relevant today, it is weak as a novel. I don’t mind having to spend some time in this repugnant milieu, but I want it to work better as an engaging story.