[books 2012] The Prague Cemetery

18. The Prague Cemetery by Umberto Eco

I can safely say I enjoyed this more than any of his books since Foucault's Pendulum.  It has a kind of similar theme, being about conspiracy theories.

In this case, though, it's about how all the great "conspiracies" of the 19th century were perpetrated by one man, a despicable Piedmontese called Simonini who hates women, Jesuits, Jews and Masons.  He is apprenticed to a notary who forges legal documents and learns well.  The authorities in the Napoleonic era find out about his creative endeavours and send him as a spy to Sicily to make up stories about what is going on there.

I'm really glad I just read Davies' Vanished Kingdoms.  Otherwise I would have been even more lost in the politics of the Napoleonic era and the making of Italy.  It also made me realise I need to re-read The Charterhouse of Parma, which I read in 1993 and just didn't understand the history the characters were living through.

Eventually Simonini is re-located to Paris, where he makes up propaganda depicting outrageous practices of the Jews (which ultimately becomes The Protocols of the Elders of Zion), the Jesuits and the Masons (which are the most hilarious).

I struggled a bit with the first third of the book - it's been a while since I read any fiction that really demanded any brain cells.  Once I got into it, I realized that a lot of what I was finding annoying was actually hilarious. I'm pretty sure the bits that reminded me of Stendahl were supposed to do so.  Simonini claims to be a great gourmet and writes at length about the "quality" food he eats - which is all peasant food.  And then makes a dig about Proust at the end.  The whole is a satire on the convoluted politics of late 19th century France and Italy.  Secret societies and conspiracy is all a bit funny if your culture is rooted in the Anglosphere; on the other hand, Italy in particular was very much shaped by them.  Their military police force (the Carabinieri) bears the name of a once-secret insurrectionist group.  I think he's also saying something profound about the nature of truth, and propaganda, and lies.

It's not easy, and I'm sure there's loads I missed, but I do highly recommend this book.

Incidentally, it's through this book that I found out that Alexandre Dumas was not white.  In the same week that I found out that Pushkin's grandfather was a black African.  So, two of the great figures 19th century European were not white.  I vaguely recall that some more obscure figures of the French Symbolist movement were non-white as well. Something interesting to think about.

[books 2012] Above the Snowline

19. Above the Snowline by Steph Swainston

This is a prequel to Swainston's Castle trilogy, which I read and loved last year (I think, but with my grasp of time it could be longer).  

It's neither as good as I was hoping, not as bad as I'd heard it was.

It's still about Jant, the immortal who can fly, who is the narrator of the Castle novels.  In this book his narration switches off with other characters.  He is forced to go back to the part of the world where he grew up (and was hounded out of, on account of being of mixed race, for lack of a better description) and ends up siding with the people he has spent his entire existence distancing himself from.  He even falls in love with one of them.

From having read the Castle books, you know that it doesn't end well.  How that plays out is still worth reading.

I did like this book quite a bit.  It's just that she ended the third Castle book with a bunch of big reveals, and we're still left on a cliff about all those.  

[books 2012] Lady Franklin's Revenge

20. Lady Franklin's Revenge by Ken McGoogan

I picked this up in a charity shop a while ago.  The blurb on the back makes it sound like the whole thing is about the efforts of Sir John Franklin's wife to find out what happened to his lost expedition to find the North West Passage.

Actually, it's a biography of her whole life, and the search for Franklin only occupies the last quarter.  

Having said that, it's pretty interesting and non-challenging.  Jane Griffin (later Franklin) did lead a really interesting life and travelled extensively throughout.  She and her husband are important figures in the history of Tasmania as well.

As anyone who knows anything about Arctic exploration knows, Franklin was an idiot and his wife is both a villain and a huge influence on Arctic exploration.  A huge influence because the expeditions she insisted on the Admiralty sending out, or financed herself, charted 1700 miles of the Canadian Arctic coast.  But she's the villain because she ruined John Rae, the man who discovered what happened to the Franklin expedition and who did indeed discover the North West Passage, because he reported that the last survivors resorted to cannibalism (this has since been proved to be true).  She then systematically set about making the myth that Franklin did discover the North West Passage, a lie people still believe to this day.

I'll probably read his other two books - one on John Rae, and the other on Samuel Hearne, whose primary source account of the journey to the Arctic Ocean at the mouth of the Coppermine River I read recently.