Kestrell

Kes: I'm so excited! Umberto Eco cites _The Betrothed_ as one of the major influences on _The Name of the Rose_, and I have never read it, so now I have a reason to do so, and then I will reread NOTR. The review, which is really more of a description of the author and his motivation in writing the novel, which also illuminates why it is so significant in Eco's work, is worth reading for its own sake.

Italy's Great Historical Novel
Henry James decried the nineteenth century’s “loose baggy monsters,” but a new translation of Alessandro Manzoni’s “The Betrothed” demonstrates the genre’s power.
By Joan Acocella

October 10, 2022
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2022/10/17/italys-great-historical-novel#main-content

The Prague Cemetery by Umberto Eco (2011)

As much as I consider myself to be an Umberto Eco fangirl, and as much as I adore his literary games, I am uncomfortable to admit that I did not enjoy this book.

I say "uncomfortable" because it is an uncomfortable book. Simone Simonini, the protagonist--and the only fictional character out of the many characters in this book--is a misanthrope, a forger, and an anti-Semite. Indeed, Simonini's obsessive desire is to compose a document which will persuade the world that there really is a Jewish conspiracy. Eco's source for the fictional document is the nonfictional The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, and Eco intentionally set out to make Simonini as dislikeable as possible.

In interviews such as the live one which took place recently at the Harvard Bookstore event and online interviews such as that on
GoodReads
http://www.goodreads.com/interviews/show/622.Umberto_Eco
Eco mentions that he wished his protagonist to be as dislikeable as Shakespeare's Macbeth or Richard III.

The problem is that, while Macbeth and Richard III are morally repugnant, they are not entirely unlikeable, as is Eco's Simonini. Richard and Macbeth both have tremendous intelligence, linguistic wit, and immense daring. These characteristics are actually what make them most dangerous, for they are likeable, even charming, when they choose to be. This is one of the reasons wy, generations after their dramatic inceptions, we choose to view or read about these characters again and again: they encompass what is both best and worst in human nature.

Simonini, on the other hand, is only and merely dislikeable. Hatred is his motivation, and it inspires him with only a clockwork single-mindedness, but no passion, no wit, no poetry. Richard III and Iago have a Luciferian grandness to them which makes me wonder if Milton's Luciver could have existed without them as his, so to speak, literary fathers. Simonini is merely squalid--a dreary rat living amongst the sewers and shadows of the City of Lights.

And so the reader is invited to join in the literary game, but what enjoyment is there in playing with such a charmless, humorless shadow, someone who is so colorless that he can only truly demonstrate a personality by taking on a disguise as someone else?

The world is full of such grey shadows and, while I may feel sorry for them, I do not choose to keep company with them. The book is, like all of Eco's works, intellectually brilliant and complex, but ultimately, it was for me a joyless game.