Don't like the alternatives?
Choose from the full offer
Prague Cemetery
It's so easy to lie. It's just a little harder to destroy someone. Now it's just a matter of who gives more.
The Dreyfus affair has dominated public opinion in Paris, and a spiteful old man, who contributed greatly to the uproar, is living in the seclusion of an apartment. It is through the diary of Simon Simonini (1837-1898), a liar, deceiver and forger, that we get a glimpse into the backstage political history of the 19th century, rich in intrigue, assassination and conspiracy. With a thorough knowledge of the realities, humour and exaggeration, Umberto Eco portrays the often amusing conspiratorial methods with horrific consequences - especially the birth of the infamous pamphlet The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, which is said to have been written in Prague and later to have inspired Hitler to the Holocaust. Underground sewers full of rats and corpses, fake notaries and scientific charlatans, revolutionaries with cigars, hysterical Satanists and many other figures are deflated in front of the astonished listener, but in the tense atmosphere of the time, they are leading Europe towards a painfully familiar future.
The author of The Name of the Rose, Umberto Eco, has always been interested in the breeding ground of resentment. Based on contemporary sources, he produced a fascinating opus on the roots of evil.
The Czech translation of the novel won the title of Book of the Year 2011 in the Lidové noviny poll.
They wrote about the book:
This literary sensation takes the search for the perpetrator to new heights. The multi-layered mystery of Simonini's personality keeps the audience constantly on their toes as his actions and crimes defy reason.
- Kirkus Reviews
A great work about great hatred, great prejudices based on blind ignorance, and above all about the path to the creation of the anti-Semitic falsity that significantly influenced the history of the 20th century: The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Readers will be given a glimpse of the flip side of reality - the same reality that we successfully learn about in schools. The author's evocation of the century before last is very impressive indeed. (...) Eco seems to have pieced together historical reality to create a white space for his main, this time fictional, hero.
- iliteratura.cz
The author brilliantly builds on the irony of history viewed as a bad dream. And Simonini's feverish chatter hardly helps to wake us up from this terrifying nightmare.
- The Guardian
The Prague Cemetery seems to combine both sides of Eco's novels. Firstly, more fictional historical fiction with a more traditional story framework. And secondly, more analytical contemporary works, which often stop the narrative, leaving the characters to discuss and reflect. (...) In short, lovers of both serious and genre literature of the 19th century can look forward to it.
- aktualne.cz
Umberto Eco
(1932-2016) One of the most influential European intellectuals of the last quarter of the 20th century was a native of Alessandria in the Piedmont region of Italy. He studied philosophy and medieval literature at the University of Turin and joined the avant-garde group Gruppo 63, which reckoned with post-war neorealism in favour of the young postmodernism. At the age of forty-eight, he embodied his intimate knowledge of the medieval mentality and the reading needs of his contemporaries in his first novel, The Name of the Rose (1980, no. 1988), which brilliantly captured the clash between a free mind and an ossified faith. Substance, filmed by J. -J. Annaud, starring Sean Connery as the monk William of Baskerville, launched a bestselling tour of the world and became a model of historical detective fiction. A lifelong preoccupation with the forms of popular prose - especially with regard to the mechanisms of falsification, conspiracy and manipulation - was reflected in Eeco's Foucault's Pendulum (1988, no. 1991), Baudolino (2000, no. 2001) and Prague Cemetery (2010, no. 2011). The winding paths of memory are dealt with in The Island of Yesterday (1994, no. 1995) and The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana (2004, no. 2005). His discoveries in the field of semiotics, which he developed and lectured on as its first professor in Bologna from 1971, earned him dozens of honorary doctorates. His exceptionally accessible combination of literature, aesthetics and mass media theory is demonstrated by his treatises Skeptics and Comforters, The History of Ugliness, The Search for Perfect Language and the satirical novel The Zero Number. Photo © Rob Bogaerts, Anefo, Nationaal Archief (1984)
Specifications
Basic
Format & type of protection
| Code: | EKK0215 |
| Manufacturer information |
ARGO, spol. s r.o., Milíčova 13, Praha 3, Česká republika, 222 782 260, [email protected] 
|