Smart Energy

Review

Rating: 10

Eco may not be the world’s greatest craftsman, but he knows how to tell a good story and pack a lot of juicy stuff into a few pages. And this novel is *much* shorter than some of his previous ones (most of them, in fact). The back story of how The Protocols of the Elders of Zion came to be written rips to the heart of the Euro-American culture of racism. The main character (or characters, depending on how you read the psychic rift between them) isn’t merely anti-Semitic but fully misanthropic and misogynistic, as well. He is so perfectly everything he disdains in Germans, Jews, the French and in all women that he becomes tragically funny. And he is, at Eco points out in his Useless Notes, still among us: his name is Legion, Santorum, Bachman, Paul and many others. Here is my favorite passage from the novel: “Someone said that patriotism is the last refuge of cowards; those without moral principles usually wrap a flag around themselves, and the bastards always talk about the purity of the race. National identity is the last bastion of the dispossessed. But the meaning of identity is now based on hatred, on hatred for those who are not the same…. You don’t love someone for your whole life…. But you can hate someone for your whole life, provided he’s always there to keep your hatred alive. Hatred warms the heart.”