MY PICKS

摘要

With the publication of The Name of the Rose, Italian semiotics professor Eco proved himself to be a novelist of stature capable of making ideas not just enticing but positively energizing. His latest takes that longtime thriller darling, the conspiracy theory, and turns it into something grander. It's 19th-century Europe, and everyone suspects everyone else of something and plots vengeance accordingly; as one character says, "for my grandfather it was the Jews, for the Jesuits the Masons, for my Garibaldian father the Jesuits, for the kings of half Europe the Carbonari, for my Mazzinian companions the king backed by the priests, for the police throughout half the world the Bavarian Illuminati, and so forth."