Umberto Eco

Dangerous Minds: When Cuckoo‑Bird Conspiracies Become Real Menaces

It would seem that I’m getting paranoid myself with two back-to-back posts about conspiracies. In truth, it’s merely a coincidence, or synchronicity if you’re in a California state of mind: I was already midway through Umberto Eco’s The Prague Cemetery before I saw and reviewed The East.

It was at that midway point that I tweeted, “No historical novelist can touch Umberto Eco. How does he do it?” This was before I got to the end and realized, to my horror, that how he did it was by fictionalizing a true story,