Wisdom and Woe

NOTE: Click on "Read more" to see the entire meetup description and links.

Simone Simonini, the main character of The Prague Cemetery (2010), wakes up with amnesia in 1897. Suspecting that something terrible has happened, he begins a diary in hopes of prompting his memory and begins reconstructing his past out of Europe's most tumultuous events: from the unification of Italy, meeting Alexandre Dumas, the Paris Commune uprising, the Dreyfus Affair--weaving his story and history into a dragnet of conspiratorial theories in search of a scapegoat.

Simonini was conceived by Umberto Eco to be "the most cynical and disagreeable character in all the history of literature": anti-Semitic, misogynistic, misanthropic, who lives by the philosophy "I hate therefore I am." The Prague Cemetery delves into the unsettling reality of the struggle between truth and deception and how misinformation begets belief. But for all its cynicism and disagreeableness, it "has a level of historical detail coupled with a devotion to aesthetics that you won’t find outside of a novel by Thomas Pynchon or James Joyce."

To assist the reader in navigating the twisting plot, Eco has helpfully provided an ironically-titled addendum, "Useless learned explanations."

Week 1 (January 4): Chapters 1-8
Week 2 (January 11): Chapters 9-21
Week 3 (January 18): Chapters 22-27

The Prague Cemetery:

NOTE: Click on "Read more" to see the entire meetup description and links.

Simone Simonini, the main character of The Prague Cemetery (2010), wakes up with amnesia in 1897. Suspecting that something terrible has happened, he begins a diary in hopes of prompting his memory and begins reconstructing his past out of Europe's most tumultuous events: from the unification of Italy, meeting Alexandre Dumas, the Paris Commune uprising, the Dreyfus Affair--weaving his story and history into a dragnet of conspiratorial theories in search of a scapegoat.

Simonini was conceived by Umberto Eco to be "the most cynical and disagreeable character in all the history of literature": anti-Semitic, misogynistic, misanthropic, who lives by the philosophy "I hate therefore I am." The Prague Cemetery delves into the unsettling reality of the struggle between truth and deception and how misinformation begets belief. But for all its cynicism and disagreeableness, it "has a level of historical detail coupled with a devotion to aesthetics that you won’t find outside of a novel by Thomas Pynchon or James Joyce."

To assist the reader in navigating the twisting plot, Eco has helpfully provided an ironically-titled addendum, "Useless learned explanations."

Week 1 (January 4): Chapters 1-8
Week 2 (January 11): Chapters 9-21
Week 3 (January 18): Chapters 22-27

The Prague Cemetery:

NOTE: This page is intended as a thematic overview of the meetups in the series, but is not itself a meetup. To RSVP, please see the individual events as they are announced on the Wisdom and Woe calendar. This page will be updated as necessary to reflect changes to the schedule.

After a millennium of existence (697-1797), the Republic of Venice was torn asunder in the war between Napoleon Bonaparte and the Habsburg monarchy. Following Napoleon's fall in 1815, the opposing dynastic regimes reasserted control of the Italian Peninsula, annulled the constitution, and formed the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies. The new government enacted severe measures of repression and censorship, driving the republican ideals of the French Revolution underground, and fueling decades of clandestine resistance and eventually open war.

The resistance became known as the Risorgimento: the 19th-century revolution that converted "Italy" from a geographic to a political designation, expelling its foreign occupiers and unifying its disparate city-states into a single modern nation.

Its military success was indebted to general Giuseppe Garibaldi (1807-1882). He attained larger-than-life status not only as an Italian general, but as a global icon of freedom and independence. In the words of Albert Bigelow Paine, he was "the military Sir Galahad of modern times, forever seeking the Golden Grail of freedom": "What Joan of Arc had been to France, so Garibaldi became for Italy." He overthrew the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies with his volunteer forces known as "Redshirts" (due to the colors they wore in lieu of a uniform), aweing soldiers and fashionistas worldwide who emulated the look of the "Redshirt Revolution."

Dennis Berthold traces a distinctively American sympathy for the cause to the (somewhat antithetical) analogues of both the American Revolution (for the sake of independence) and the U.S. Civil War (for the sake of unification). Melville was influenced by Italian art and culture generally, but his engagement with the Risorgimento is most direct in the "Burgundy Club Sketches," a historically complex hybrid of poetry and prose that takes the revolution for its subject.

This series will survey Italian history, literature, life, language, and thought--from the Renaissance to the Ottocento revolution that forged a nation.

Series schedule:

NOTE: Click on "Read more" to see the entire meetup description and links.

The Adventures of Pinocchio (1883) is one of the greatest works of Italian literature, translated into over 260 languages with hundreds of adaptations to the stage, page, and screen. But (not surprisingly) the original is much darker than the sanitized Disney version that dominates its modern-day legacy.

The original Pinocchio is a villainous, insolent, weak-willed rogue who is repeatedly punished for his transgressions--including graphic physical torture and psychological abuse. Despite his horrific punishments, Pinocchio never seems to learn his lesson, and the consequences grow increasingly macabre, eventually culminating in his summary execution. (When the serialized story was republished in an extended book form, the ending was amended with a more palatable transformation into a real boy.)

Collodi was a follower of Mazzini--a political activist who advocated duty (to family, country, humanity, and God) as a bulwark against immorality--and Pinocchio is his most enduring contribution to the Risorgimento. Although Italy had been geographically united in 1870, in 1883 it was still divided culturally, and Collodi mobilized children's literature to help instill a "unifying social and national consciousness in the young." The puppet protagonist serves as an allegory for the innate need for parental, educational, moral, and spiritual guidance.

In the words of Colleen Hutt, "The thrill of reading Pinocchio is to realize that our own existential questions are embodied in the puppet... who longs to be real. As is the case for Pinocchio, our trials and temptations unconceal the shallowness of self-indulgence and can serve to introduce us to a fuller sense of freedom, one that is ordered to the good for which we have been created."

The Adventures of Pinocchio: