For all its difficulties, The Prague Cemetery is an important novel. The book’s implicit question is terrifying: are the same social frustrations at work today to revive The Protocols's anti-Semitism?

"The Prague Cemetery" is a similarly ambitious interpretation of the collective dreams of a century, and it serves a similar purpose: dissecting neuroses, which, left untreated, ensure a continual, increasingly virulent return of the repressed.

“The Prague Cemetery” is certainly engrossing and cautionary, but it mainly offers, to adopt Joseph Conrad’s biblical-sounding phrase, the appalling fascination of the abomination. Be aware, then, that Umberto Eco hasn’t produced anything close to what one might call a fun read or a light entertainment. “The Prague Cemetery” is, in fact, an all-out horror story.

Det verkliga problemet är att boken är sövande tråkig [...] Berättelsen saknar driv och tyngs ner av tusen onödiga detaljer. Språket är platt, gestaltningen obefintlig, den fåniga ramhistorien förutsägbar och poänglös.

I ”Begravningsplatsen i Prag” får omoralen tala fritt, och den kväljande bismak som romanen lämnar efter sig är infogad i texten.

Begravningsplatsen i Prag är ett väldigt panorama över ett århundrade och dess olika andliga och kvasiandliga miljöer.

What does it all add up to? An indictment of the old Europe, for one thing, and a perplexing, multilayered, attention-holding mystery.

Voor de liefhebbers van Eco is De begraafplaats van Praag onweerstaanbaar – door de plot (wie is toch die onbekende perverseling die de Protocollen schreef?), door de literair-historische verwijzingen (onder meer naar Joseph Conrads terroristenroman The Secret Agent) en door de humor (‘dysenterie verzekerd, voor een schappelijke prijs,’ schrijft Simonini over een slecht restaurant). Maar bij de lezer met minder geduld zal deze moderne versie van De geheimen van Parijs al snel half gelezen op de salontafel stranden. Commercieel gezien hoeft Dan Brown zich voorlopig geen zorgen te maken.

In this rambling, ramshackle picaresque novel, the bilious Captain Simone Simoni slithers across Europe in the pay of one secret service after another, claiming personal responsibility for the calumnies that provoked most of the political crises of the 19th century... Simonini's customers and victims are all actual historical characters, which enables Eco to suggest that history is a tissue of fictions, not a tale told by an idiot but a text slickly pieced together by self-appointed authorities who should never be trusted...

Despite the venom, The Prague Cemetery is a literary exercise, a novel that contains a critique of its own artifice. Eco awards himself the capitalised status of Narrator, and tries to elucidate the maunderings of two less reliable narrators, Simonini and a priest who is his alter ego. Wittily self-conscious, Eco discourses on the difference between plot and story, and supplies a diagram of their parallel development to help us through the labyrinth. This is a book made from a garbling of other books, with Victor Hugo, Proust and Zola, among its mob of subsidiary characters.