“The Prague Cemetery” by Umberto Eco (post 3): You can’t tell book by its cover or reviews, but you can by protagonist and structure, reflecting author

“I have been told that the great storytellers always portray themselves in their characters” (1, p. 275). The protagonist is a forger (fiction writer) with multiple personality.

Main Issue

Anti-semitism is a cover story. The main issue of this novel, multiple personality, is featured and highlighted by the novel’s very format and structure: a diary which is kept by the protagonist and his alternate personality; until, at the end, he finally realizes that they are “one and the same” (1, p. 398) and learns what had caused his split personality:

“The carnal contact with Diana, the revelation of her vile origins and her necessary, almost ritual death had been too much for him, and that same night he had lost his memory, or rather Dalla Piccola and Simonini had both lost their memory, and the two personalities had alternated over the course of that month” (1, p. 399). (And Diana, herself, had had severe, explicit, multiple personality.)

Author’s Mistake

There is one glaring mistake that the author makes about multiple personality. The protagonist is sixty-seven years old when he gets it, but real-life multiple personality begins in childhood. People don’t get it for the first time as adults. Why would the author make this mistake?

Adult fiction writers, like most people who have had multiple personality trait since childhood, usually have no conspicuous symptoms. They become aware of it mostly when writing a novel, when their creative alternate personalities (narrative voice, muse, characters, etc.) come alive to them and make their contributions to the “diary” (novel). If the writer equates multiple personality with conspicuous manifestations, then it appears to him as something you get in temporary episodes as an adult.

Reviewer Blind Spot

One of the main lessons of this novel is the inability of most book reviewers to deal with the issue of multiple personality, even when it is explicit and pervasive, as it is in this novel. Most reviews barely mentioned the protagonist’s multiple personality. Kirkus Reviews, which gave the novel its highest rating, made no mention at all of the protagonist’s multiple personality (2).

1. Umberto Eco. The Prague Cemetery. English Translation by Richard Dixon. New York, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2010.

2. Kirkus Reviews. “The Prague Cemetery.” https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/umberto-eco/prague-cemetary/