“A mystic is a hysteric who has met her confessor before her doctor.” ― Umberto Eco, The Prague CemeterySo, I dro…“A mystic is a hysteric who has met her confessor before her doctor.” ― Umberto Eco, The Prague CemeterySo, I dropped one star because (first) I was a little disappointed that none of the stars on Goodreads were upside-down pentagrams or hexagrams. Also (second), I left off one star because by about page 400, I was drained of all my anti-Semitic antibodies. The crazy fundamentalism, fractured insanity, and conspiracy rich shadows of anti-Jewish attitudes in Europe during the 100 years from the mid-1800s till Hitler's Final Solution just isn't easy to stomach (for me) after 400 pages. How am I going to ever read The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich? Ugh. OK, so that explains my missing star (relegated to the sewer). Now to what I liked. First, Eco is kinda amazing. This is my second of his novels. I read Foucault's Pendulum years and years ago and love how he folds in the real with his fiction. He makes Dan Brown seem like some half-literate child who can only read travel guides to Europe. Eco is the master of conspiracy, grey history, Jesuits, Freemasons, Carbonari, Garibaldi, Satan and international anarchism to boot. Plus he really knows food.* I disagree with Theo Tate's take on Eco using Updike as a hammer when he says that Eco's "orgy of citation and paraphrase" is unbearable. It wasn't the DETAIL that killed me, but the necessary rantings of Eco's fictional dual narrator(s). The details I quite enjoyed.Anyway, about 100 pages into this novel and I began to see resemblances of the book's protagonist/anti-hero Simone Simonini to Mark Hofman - a famous Mormon forger and bomber. A little creepy how close in someways these two resemble each other (at least to me). It all works with one of my favorite lines of the book and probably one of Eco's main themes: "This led me to think, …