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The time: 2000 to 2005, the years of neoconservatism, terrorism, the twenty-four-hour news cycle, the ascension of Bush, Blair, and Berlusconi, and the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. Umberto Eco’s response is a provocative, passionate, and witty series of essays—which originally appeared in the Italian newspapers La Repubblica and L’Espresso—that leaves no slogan unexamined, no innovation unexposed. What led us into this age of hot wars and media populism, and how was it sold to us as progress? Eco discusses such topics as racism, mythology, the European Union, rhetoric, the Middle East, technology, September 11, medieval Latin, television ads, globalization, Harry Potter, anti-Semitism, logic, the Tower of Babel, intelligent design, Italian street demonstrations, fundamentalism, The Da Vinci Code, and magic and magical thinking.
Internationally renowned novelist and philosopher Eco (Foucault's Pendulum; The Name of the Rose) delivers a provocative and enlightening ride in this collection of essays first published in two leading Italian newspapers. He delves deeply into such subjects as Mideastern and European politics, myth, prejudice, globalization, The Da Vinci Code, magical thinking, rhetoric, religion, intelligent design and Harry Potter. The friction between his imagination, interpretation and reflection makes for pyrotechnic prose, springing from abundant facts and carefully constructed theories. He dissects war as a bloody game where "we did everything possible to ensure that our adversaries did not achieve their goals," proclaiming that "neowars" like those in Afghanistan and Iraq cannot be won by the military. While the flow of his reasoning can be serpentine, Eco challenges us to reconsider the power of the media, the right of privacy, the sometimes disturbing manners of foreigners, the poison of anti-Semitism and September 11. The resulting book details fresh approaches to wrestling with some of the most complex issues of our time. (Nov.)
Copyright 2007 Reed Business Information More Reviews and RecommendationsFew cultural critics and novelists carry the scholarly heft of Umberto Eco, who was a noted historian and semiotician before he brought these sensibilites to bear on major novels such as The Name of the Rose and Foucault's Pendulum. Whether he is deconstructing modern wax museums or spinning a 13th-century tale, he is always clever, stately and profound.
More About the AuthorName:
Umberto Eco
Current Home:
Bologna, Italy
Date of Birth:
January 05, 1932
Place of Birth:
Alessandria, Italy
Education:
Ph.D., University of Turin, 1954
Back in the 1970s, long before the cyberpunk era or the Internet boom, an Italian academic was dissecting the elements of codes, information exchange and mass communication. Umberto Eco, chair of semiotics at the University of Bologna, developed a widely influential theory that continues to inform studies in linguistics, philosophy, anthropology, cultural studies and critical theory.
Most readers, however, had never heard of him before the 1980 publication of The Name of the Rose, a mystery novel set in medieval Italy. Dense with historical and literary allusions, the book was a surprise international hit, selling millions of copies in dozens of languages. Its popularity got an additional boost when it was made into a Hollywood movie starring Sean Connery. Eco followed his first bestseller with another, Foucault's Pendulum, an intellectual thriller that interweaves semiotic theory with a twisty tale of occult texts and world conspiracy.
Since then, Eco has shifted topics and genres with protean agility, producing fiction, academic texts, criticism, humor columns and children's books. As a culture critic, his interests encompass everything from comic books to computer operating systems, and he punctures avant-garde elitism and mass-media vacuity with equal glee.
More recently, Eco has ventured into a new field: ethics. Belief or Nonbelief? is a thoughtful exchange of letters on religion and ethics between Eco and Carlo Maria Martini, the Roman Catholic cardinal of Milan; Five Moral Pieces is a timely exploration of the concept of justice in an increasingly borderless world.
Eco also continues to write books on language, literature and semiotics for both popular and academic audiences. His efforts have netted him a pile of honorary degrees, the French Legion of Honor, and a place among the most widely read and discussed thinkers of our time.
Eco is a professor of semiotics at the University of Bologna, though in 2002 he was at Oxford University as a visiting lecturer. He has also taught at several top universities in the U.S., including Columbia, Harvard, Yale, and Northwestern.
Pressured by his father to become a lawyer, Eco studied law at the University of Turn before abandoning that course (against his father's wishes) and pursuing medieval philosophy and literature.
His studies led naturally to the setting of The Name of the Rose in the medieval period. The original tentative title was Murder in the Abbey.
Just after a matinee of Spider-Man at a Times Square cinema, Umberto Eco crosses Broadway, gesturing expansively and paying absolutely no attention to traffic. As he walks, lit cigarette in hand, he is explaining a key difference between comic book superheroes and the heroes of classic literature he tries to evoke in Baudolino, his latest medieval romp that is already on its way to becoming as great a success in Europe as his 1980 novel, The Name of the Rose, which has sold more than 30 million copies worldwide. Serial heroes like Spider-Man and Superman, Eco says as he blithely ambles across the street, are prohibited from changing; they cannot age or reproduce. He calls them "mythical eunuchs." On the other hand, he says, classic adventurers like Homer's Ulysses and Parzival, the title hero of medieval poet Wolfram Von Eschenbach's epic, are different. Unlike Spider-Man, Eco chuckles bawdily, "Parzival can fuck."
It is this ability to marry high culture and pop culture, the sublime and the profane, the arcane and the commonplace that has endeared Eco to both pointy-headed intellectuals -- who pore over his novels and essays on semiotics delighting in his literary, cultural and historical references -- and everyday readers who have bought millions of copies of The Name of the Rose, Foucault's Pendulum and The Island of the Day Before for the author's humor and deft storytelling. Not every semiotics professor writes a book that gets turned into a movie starring Sean Connery and rejects an offer from director Stanley Kubrick to bring a novel (Foucault's Pendulum) to the screen.
Eco may seem an unlikely candidate for international literary superstardom. He is a professor at the University of Bologna, a postmodern theorist and an author of essays on eighteenth-century philosopher Immanuel Kant and French literary theorist Roland Barthes. He is a man whose fiction gleefully references obscure poet and Burgundian knight Robert de Boron and Kyot, a Provençal poet whose works inspired Von Eschenbach.
Meet Umberto Eco, though, and his popularity makes a lot more sense. For, aside from being a brilliant linguist and academic, Eco reveals himself over the course of one long afternoon spent dining, drinking, smoking and going to the movies to be a man of great humor and appetites, a populist in academic's clothing. "I've always said that I learned the English I know through two sources -- Marvel Comics and Finnegans Wake," Eco says.
It turns out Eco is a huge fan and collector of comic books, enamored of the Incredible Hulk and the Fantastic Four. At a diner, he orders a cheeseburger, says he can't eat the whole thing yet still devours most of it while discussing Little Orphan Annie and T.S. Eliot's "The Wasteland." Then it's off to see Spider-Man. On a street corner near the theater, he smokes a cigarette as he proclaims his love for musicals -- he says the last good one he saw was Cats -- and his disdain for Liza Minnelli. In the lobby just before the previews, he holds court near the snack counter and expounds upon his friendship with Roberto Benigni ("a great reader of Dante," Eco says of the Italian director and star of Life Is Beautiful). He waxes nostalgic for American movies, particularly Stagecoach, Sergeant York and Yankee Doodle Dandy, all of which he discovered as a boy in Italy. Late in the afternoon after Spider-Man, which he enjoyed immensely for its enthusiastic and picturesque depiction of New York City, he takes a seat in the lobby of his hotel, consults his watch and determines that it's time to order a scotch on the rocks. He lights up another smoke and discusses the Phantom and Mandrake the Magician -- whose stories he first discovered through the comics shown to him by American servicemen during the liberation of Italy after World War II -- and then moves on to Connery, who impressed him more for his acting ability than his intellect when Eco visited his trailer on the set of The Name of the Rose ("All he wanted to discuss was football," Eco says).
Baudolino has already been a No. 1 bestseller in Germany, Canada, Brazil, Argentina and Italy, where Eco was born in 1932 (his hometown is Alessandria, and he currently lives in Milan in a house that boasts a 30,000-volume library). And it, more than any of Eco's works, including The Name of the Rose, is key to understanding his appeal. A dizzying escapade through the foundations of modern European history and literature, it chronicles the adventures of the fictional peasant confidante of Emperor Frederick Barbarossa, Baudolino. The character is named for the patron saint of Alessandria who, the author says, is the only saint who never performed a single miracle.
Baudolino witnesses the sacking of Constantinople in 1204 and narrates his numerous adventures: In Paris, he allegedly authored the legendary love letters of Héloîse and Abélard; he helped invent the myth of the Holy Grail; he journeyed to the East to find the mythical ruler Prester John; and he even took time to pen a small portion of what will later become The Name of the Rose. At the beginning of the novel, Baudolino, writing in a language that Eco himself devised, invents an early form of written Italian. The novel is a grand, literary practical joke, written with both great attention to historical detail and an irreverent and deliciously vulgar sense of humor redolent of Joseph Heller, Monty Python and Woody Allen, whose early works Eco once translated into Italian. It is both a fantastical, easy-to-read adventure and a rigorous historical and literary exercise. It is, agrees the author who likens his novels to club sandwiches, "a double-layered story. But it is not necessary that the first-level reader also catches the second level."
One might think that American audiences might not be ready for a novel so caught up in the particularities of medieval European history and literature, filled with what Eco describes as "inside jokes for three people." But those who have underestimated the ability of the author's humor and irreverence to overcome the obscurity of his subject matter have been proven wrong before.
"It is a myth of publishers that people want to read easy things," Eco says. "The most interesting letters I received about The Name of the Rose were from people in the Midwest that maybe didn't understand exactly, but wanted to understand more and who were excited by this picture of a world which was not their own. Every European goes on the streets and sees medieval churches. Not if you live in Indianapolis. The most exciting letters I received were from people in places like that. There are more people than you think who want to have a challenging experience, in which they are obliged to reflect about the past."
The time: 2000 to 2005, the years of neoconservatism, terrorism, the twenty-four-hour news cycle, the ascension of Bush, Blair, and Berlusconi, and the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. Umberto Eco’s response is a provocative, passionate, and witty series of essays—which originally appeared in the Italian newspapers La Repubblica and L’Espresso—that leaves no slogan unexamined, no innovation unexposed. What led us into this age of hot wars and media populism, and how was it sold to us as progress? Eco discusses such topics as racism, mythology, the European Union, rhetoric, the Middle East, technology, September 11, medieval Latin, television ads, globalization, Harry Potter, anti-Semitism, logic, the Tower of Babel, intelligent design, Italian street demonstrations, fundamentalism, The Da Vinci Code, and magic and magical thinking.
Internationally renowned novelist and philosopher Eco (Foucault's Pendulum; The Name of the Rose) delivers a provocative and enlightening ride in this collection of essays first published in two leading Italian newspapers. He delves deeply into such subjects as Mideastern and European politics, myth, prejudice, globalization, The Da Vinci Code, magical thinking, rhetoric, religion, intelligent design and Harry Potter. The friction between his imagination, interpretation and reflection makes for pyrotechnic prose, springing from abundant facts and carefully constructed theories. He dissects war as a bloody game where "we did everything possible to ensure that our adversaries did not achieve their goals," proclaiming that "neowars" like those in Afghanistan and Iraq cannot be won by the military. While the flow of his reasoning can be serpentine, Eco challenges us to reconsider the power of the media, the right of privacy, the sometimes disturbing manners of foreigners, the poison of anti-Semitism and September 11. The resulting book details fresh approaches to wrestling with some of the most complex issues of our time. (Nov.)
Copyright 2007 Reed Business Information"Sometimes we write articles in order to know what to think," says noted semiologist and fabulist Eco. And what a lively thinker he is! In this collection of recent writings that originally appeared mostly as editorials or op-ed pieces, Eco argues his positions with no holds barred, but he accepts that negotiation is a necessity in our multiethnic society in which neighbors differ on critical values: we must analyze "our own superstitions as well as those of others...reject black-and-white crusades and cultivate . . . the capacity to make distinctions." Like the Enlightenment forebears he admires, Eco preaches that "there is a reasonable way to reason . . . Even in philosophy you have to pay attention to common sense." This means that "man must negotiate goodwill and mutual respect . . . [and] subscribe to a social contract." The subjects of these essays roam widely, but common preoccupations emerge: the unwinnable nature of modern-day war, the corrosive effect of the media on domestic politics, the importance of "cultural thinking" in understanding our enemies, and a plea for tolerance across ethnic and religious boundaries. There is also a very funny essay on political correctness. Recommended for all larger collections. [See Prepub Alert, LJ7/07.]
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