The challenge of reading Eco's Prague Cemetery

The essence of the plot of Umberto Eco's 2010 novel, The Prague Cemetery, seems to be that the narrator, Simonimi (?), is a despicable character in every sense; yesterday's post noted his racism, anti-Semitism, and misanthropy, and the matter only gets worse as the novel moves along. The narrator, telling us his life story, explains that he became a clerk and notary as he launched his career, but his true aspiration was to become an expert forger, which he did. Recognizing that forgeries, which rob innocent people of their rightful possessions and inheritances, was just another part of a the notary's daily business, S puts his skills as a forger to grander youth: the forges military and political communications that played a key role in ensuring the defeat of insurrectionist nationalist forces (led by Garibaldi) and the maintenance of a corrupt monarchy governing most of Italy. I have to say that the account of Garibaldi's army entering Sicily is to me completely unfamiliar ground and extremely difficult to follow; it's almost as if Eco, known for his erudition and his love of the recondite, is just showing off his knowedge of these battles of 170 years ago. The Garibaldi revolution was no doubt a great moment in history, not just of Italy but of Europe and the world, but Eco is not writing a historical novel - almost the opposite. He's presenting history as the everyday life of his central character, and because the events are so familiar to S (and to Eco I guess, background and context are never necessary, or so he thinks. To me, this remains a novel w/ much potential but with such a profusion of events, schemes, subterfuge, all told in a moral vacuum, that the novel is needlessly inaccessible and unpleasant. I'm curious enough to read further for a day or so, but at some point I'm afraid I'm going to throw up my hands in exasperation.