Umberto Eco: Exploring Imaginary Lands With One of Italy’s Masters of Fiction | Hacker News Reader

Umberto Eco: Exploring Imaginary Lands With One of Italy’s Masters of Fiction

nytimes.com

97 pointsespeed27 comments

A terrific author whose philosophical work informs his fiction, but not in a heavy handed or didactic way. I only wish there were more novels.

If you haven't read anything by him, I'd start with In the Name of the Rose. The beginning is a little tough to get into, but if you persevere you are amply rewarded (in the afterwords it is disclosed that this was a deliberate literary choice, I won't spoil it by explaining the rationale, but it does make sense). Foucault's Pendulum is the magnum opus.

Edit: after In the Name of the Rose I'd probably go with Baudolino, but FP is a valid choice as well.

I've read _The Name of the Rose_ and really enjoyed it. What should I read next?

definitely Foucaults Pendulum. it's like the DaVinci Code but for medieval history buffs plus the plot is wickedly clever

I disagree - I found reading it was like being hit over the head repeatedly by the same point. The point isn't very profound either. It's more like a database dump of what Eco researched over the last few years on conspiracy theories. Huge sections could have been skipped without affecting the plot or anything else. I think he missed the point of writing a novel, which is telling a story. It came across more of an exercise in style, rather than a novel. It's one of the few books where I wish I'd never started reading it. I enjoyed the Name of the Rose, but not the other two books I read of his.

I rather agree with you, though I did enjoy the book. But, as I've had occasion to say about other books, I felt I "enjoyed it under false pretences," i.e. that I was enjoying it because I thought these flights of fancy, various subgroups, characters, etc, would be wrapped together tidily like The Name of the Rose (although it too was something of an, admittedly purposeful, anticlimax).

> Huge sections could have been skipped without affecting the plot or anything else.

The same could be said of Dostoyevsky. Those long, drawn out passages are often there to make a psychological impression upon the reader rather than adding anything to the plot line per se.

I rather think the point is startlingly profound.

Though at times it did read like a database dump (albeit a fascinating one), the intricacy of the background of theories and history is all in service to the ridiculousness of the plot. Without it, the profound stupidity of the formulation of the meta-conspiracy would not have been believable.

I really liked the The Island of the Day Before. Truly fascinating. Foucault's Pendulum is good too, but like all his work, it's not an easy read. If you want something more intellectually rewarding than Dan Brown (The Da Vinci Code), Eco is your guy.

If you want something more intellectually rewarding than Brown you have many, many options.

You are of course right that Eco pushes a number of the same buttons that Brown does, yet without being ridiculous.

Arturo Pérez-Reverte is the poor man's Umberto Eco. Dan Brown is the very poor man's Arturo Pérez-Reverte.

Not a novel but the _Postscript to The Name of the Rose_ is really interesting. It has been written a few years after the novel and published at the same time as the english translation. It's a short book published independently. Eco writes there about the writing of the novel but also other topics.

http://umbertoecoreaders.blogspot.de/2007/11/postscript-to-n...

Foucault's Pendulum gets my vote too if you want to read something that is as straight forward as Eco can get.

The Island of the Day Before, Baudolino and The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana felt more like he was trying to test you, in each of those books, to see if you are worthy of consuming the entire book. Every time you feel you have a reasonable grasp of what is going on, he'll descend into a phase where you'll be lost again.

The Prague Cemetery, on the other hand, was utterly fascinating. Really enjoyed it.

I read the Prague Cemetery after everything else and found it incredibly boring.

Perhaps not even Mr. Eco is immune from repeating clichés.

His works, after The Name of the Rose and Foucault's Pendulum, had become significantly mode self-indulgent. TPC is no exception to that, except that it is considerably less indulgent than the books between FP and TPC.

Your reading list for Eco is perfect, I can recommend his essays as well, his intellectual range is amazing. BUT, as you said, above all of this stand Foucoults pendulum. A book about being human and fearing, history, human believe system and and and. A masterpiece.

Absolutely correct reading list.

For those who's giving Name of the Rose a try, just bear with the first 100 pages. It gets extremely better. I liked the first 100 pages anyways.

Much of Eco's work was translated by the great William Weaver who passed away earlier this month. I came to appreciate Weaver's translations through another Italian legend, Italo Calvino. Calvino had a way of incorporating scientific and philosophical concepts within passionate human drama. HN readers might enjoy his work as well.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/17/arts/william-weaver-influe...

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Weaver

> He had a stroke several years ago that severely hampered his ability to speak — an especially difficult hardship, friends and relatives said, for a loquacious man who had built his life communicating in words.

That is sad to hear, but as Renoir supposedly said when asked why he spent three decades painting with painful arthritis: “The pain passes, but the beauty remains.”

Thank you for your translations, William Weaver.

http://www.openculture.com/2012/07/astonishing_film_of_arthr...

"The fact is that the world is divided between users of the Macintosh computer and users of MS-DOS compatible computers. I am firmly of the opinion that the Macintosh is Catholic and that DOS is Protestant."

You need to read the whole column to get the joke[1]. I like to imagine that fully Libre Gnu/Linux would be Jain, and Android would be Baptist.

Eco's routine journalism can be really funny.

[1] http://www.themodernword.com/eco/eco_mac_vs_pc.html

Why are there so many links towards this paywalled site? It's the only paywalled site that I see on HN, why is that?

Because it's the most prominent newspaper in the United States?

answer> delete your cookies and the paywall is porous

I use private browsing.

Non-paywalled link:

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/28/arts/international/umberto...

This is just a rather superficial interview with Mr. Eco. He does touch on the medieval belief in a spherical world but they don't go into detail about such things. Interesting, but brief and not what the title promised.

But it does show some hints as to why Eco is so unbelievably great.

"Every writer, every artist, every musician, scientist is profoundly interested in the survival of his or her work after their death. Otherwise they would be idiots."

And, of course,

"In the States, they publish an enormous collection of books called 'The Library of Living Philosophers.' It started with John Dewey and Bertrand Russell and the last book was about Richard Rorty. For mysterious reasons — probably because there is nobody else is around — they chose me for the next one. These are books of 1,500 pages. I am supposed to write 100 pages of philosophical autobiography. And there are 25 people, working at this moment, each writing a paper on my philosophical activity. And I am supposed to read all of them and to respond to each of them with at least three or four pages each. I think I have two years to work on it, and I am hoping to die before I have to do it."

if you like eco, check out 'Q' by luther blissett, which is given away for free on his website[1] along with all of his other works.

1: http://www.wumingfoundation.com/english/biography.html

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