Able to leap multidisciplinary subjects in a single bound, Umberto Eco is the college professor you always wanted to have.  His first novel, 1980’s international bestseller The Name of the Rose placed such seemingly inaccessible topics as semiotics and biblical hermeneutics inside the irresistible candy wrapper of a medieval monastery murder mystery.  Eco’s second novel, Foucault’s Pendulum, also came with a tasty hook, despite causing mild reader indigestion by the end: A group of professors use a computer to unlock the ultimate conspiracy theory. Unfortunately, Eco’s next three fictional efforts, The Island of the Day Before, Baudolino and The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana, were bloated, meandering tales of ephemera and arcana, written by a brilliant professor without a syllabus. Already a literary sensation throughout much of the rest of the world, his newest novel The Prague Cemetery, seems blessed with a premise tailor-made for a return to form: The memoirs of master document forger Captain Simone Simonini, the fictional “evil genius” behind many the 19th Century’s most infamous events. Unlike Foucault’s Pendulum, where the professorial protagonists were on hand to explain the bevy of conspiracy theories and secret societies, the historical exposition of The Prague Cemetery is about as inviting as the Korean DMZ. (A word of caution:  if you’re not up to speed on such topics as the Unification of Italy, the Paris Commune or the Dreyfus affair, don’t stray too far from a device with internet capacity.) The morass of names, dates and battles wouldn’t have been so exhausting an endurance test if Eco had allowed the reader to enjoy his evil genius’s machinations. After all, the book jacket promises of a plot filled with “forgeries, plots, and massacres.” There’s a good reason, however, why one can’t playfully bathe in Simonini’s...