Like a child on Christmas Eve…

The Prague Cemetery arrives tomorrow, and I can barely contain my excitement.  In all this time, despite my attempts to read it in Italian and later Spanish, I have avoided any all contact with book reviews, blogs that mention the book, and even its wiki page.  I feel like that guy that records the Superbowl to watch later, but then has to avoid all contact with anybody who might somehow give the final score away.  So I’ve avoided and resisted temptation successfully… until today.  Since Amazon sent me the confirmation text that the book was, in fact, on its way, I haven’t been able to stop sorting through page after page of Prague Cemetery information.  I have read from those that have loved it to those that have not, and from the insightful to the superficial, and all that I’ve read has only made me more excited to crack open the book and dive in.

Here is the description from the publisher’s website:

Nineteenth-century Europe – from Turin to Prague to Paris – abounds with the ghastly and the mysterious.  Conspiracies rule history.  Jesuits plot against Freemasons. Italian republicans strangle priests with their own intestines. French criminals plan bombings by day and celebrate Black Masses at night.  Every nation has its own secret service, perpetrating forgeries, plots, and massacres.  From the unification of Italy to the Paris Commune to the Dreyfus Affair to The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, Europe is in tumult and everyone needs a scapegoat.  But what if, behind all of these conspiracies, both real and imagined, lay one lone man? What if that evil genius created its most infamous document?

Plotting Jesuits, forgeries, Italian unification, Dreyfus affair, Paris Commune?  They had me at plotting Jesuits…. And if I know Eco, this book will be written with a care for the beauty of language and with an emphasis on power of words to create and destroy realities. Like all his books, it will be a wonderful story hiding incredibly powerful ideas.

I cannot wait.