I haven’t read an Umberto Eco book in quite a while, and The Prague Cemetery is the first ebook of his I’ve partaken in. The lack of physicality made a weird mismatch in reading this tale of creating documents. I felt like I should be sifting through papers, not clicking through pages.
The main characters (hard to call them protagonists) are a priest and a forger who makes his living making documents to legitimize shady dealings both financial and political in Piedmont and then Paris.
There’s an interesting triple narration to the book. There’s a narrator plus those two characters who write diary entries to each other trying to determine which of them is Tyler Durden. There are murders and secret meetings and lots of European intrigue and the tracts that would eventually become the Protocols of Elders of Zion (the anti-Semitic tracts that found their way all over Europe influencing at least one failed painter in the twentieth century).