The Irrepressible Lightness of Umberto Eco | Hacker News Reader

The Irrepressible Lightness of Umberto Eco

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86 pointslermontov22 comments

While his novels are great, to know Eco you need to read his essays, columns and dialogues with e.g. the archbishop of Milan. His warmth and love is unforgettable.

The Name of the Rose is the finest novel I have ever read, and that was in translation.

Haters gonna hate on humanities academics. I suggest they go watch some superhero films to cheer up.

Weirdly, I just got a text saying,

"Arriving Today: Your Amazon package with Kant and the Platypus: Essays on Language and Cognition will be delivered by 8pm."

Eco wasn't just a novelist.

An exceptional well-written article ... about pure intellectualism.

Two weeks ago during the announcement of his death I saw a lot of negativity on this site against what you call here "pure intellectualism".

I don't understand that.

I think Eco's writing demonstrates that there is no such thing. Intellectual, sure, but not pure.

Lightness? Foucault’s Pendulum was possibly the meanest, least constructive book I've read.

Why? I was planning on reading it as was recommend to me as one of Eco's better books.

It is a tortuous but great book. I would even say that the obsession of the narrator and his close friends can look a bit like people completely involved in their startup (and their own little world).

Die Blendung (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auto-da-F%C3%A9_(novel)) is also worth reading, if you like that kind of thing.

It's just an extended strawman of conspiracy theory. None of the major characters is sympathetic. It felt very misanthropic. And it's bloated by Stephenson-esque digressions, but they're somehow much less interesting than Stephenson's - partly because the primary plot is too weak to sustain you through them.

The end drags a little, but I thought Belbo was sympathetic. Really, I think it's a book you get a lot more if you're swimming through academia and reading half a dozen jargon laden over interpreting articles a day. It's a very effective pastiche of Dan Brown and Jeffrey Archer, and if there was any justice should have killed their careers.

> It's a very effective pastiche of Dan Brown and Jeffrey Archer, and if there was any justice should have killed their careers.

That's exactly the mean-spiritedness I take the most issue with. Those guys are fun. Why not let people enjoy them? Fundamentally Foucault's Pendulum fails as a pastiche of them because it doesn't capture their positive side.

I have to disagree, I thought Foucault's Pendulum was a lot of fun. Not as funny as some of his other books, but still had some amusing moments. And it did like its characters, even if they were self-destructive (although it didn't mind being a little smarter than them, but that's not mean-spirited).

I personally think it was very clever of Eco to write a pastiche of The Da Vinci Code 15 years or so before it was published.

That aside, Foucault's Pendulum is undeniably quite hard work, but he really does cover a fascinating breadth of material in there.

It's actually a pastiche of Brown's sources, the conspiracy theories that Brown (and others) takes entirely too seriously. That's why I can't take him seriously.

Obviously what I meant was a pastiche of the genre. It should have killed their careers in the crib.

I always assumed Dan Brown was ripping off Foucalt's Pendulum. Since Eco's book was published in 1988, and Dan Brown's first book in 1998 it's definately not a pastiche of him directly.

I'm intrigued by what other novels make your list of "top 3 meanest" or "top 3 least constructive". It's not really a metric I've applied to novels before, so I'm at a loss as to whether it's even a good or a bad thing.

Well I'm not in the habit of reading such books - normally I'd give up on a book I felt was too mean-spirited (I can't immediately think of a book example, but I stopped watching The Thick of It for that reason). The only other novels I've finished that I would say that kind of thing about are Fever Crumb / A Web of Air, with what felt like a crude and gratuitous attack on religion at the very end (it doesn't dominate either book though - part of the issue is that the blurb for Foucault's Pendulum is very misleading).

I'm finding it a rather challenging read, quite unique and often hilarious in it's endless self-referentialisms. In the Name of the Rose was outstanding, very entertaining and informative.

Foucault's Pendulum is hilarious! And it makes it impossible to look at conspiracy theories the same way afterwards.

I've described it before as a very smart, very knowledgeable man pointing out that, if you peel the onion, you don't find anything at the center.

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