Umberto Eco

[Stewart]

I've always enjoyed a spot of creative writing and have enjoyed the way my attempts have developed over the years. Four or five years back I then read Umberto Eco's Foucault's Pendulum and was amazed by it - the story, the complexity, the erudition - that I thought I may as well just set the pen aside and not bother. Seeking further books in a similar vein I happened across The Da Vinci Code which then restored my faith in my own writing. Tossing that trash aside, I went back to Eco, this time The Name Of The Rose and was further excited by this book.

From there it was on to The Island Of The Day Before and Baudolino, then his essays in How To Travel With A Salmon and Travels In Hyper-reality. When The Mysterious Flame Of Queen Loana came out I can remember abandoning Cervantes' Don Quixote in favour of it (I was two hundred pages in) and spent lunch hours at work reading it outside in the sunshine. I can't remember why I ended up abandoning ...Queen Loana but it's still there waiting to be picked up again.


So, a brief bio, courtesy of Wikipedia:

Umberto Eco (born January 5, 1932) is an Italian medievalist, semiotician, philosopher, literary critic and novelist, best known for his novel The Name of the Rose (Il nome della rosa, 1980), an intellectual mystery combining semiotics in fiction, biblical analysis, medieval studies and literary theory. Recently his 1988 novel Foucault's Pendulum has been described as a "thinking person's Da Vinci Code," and was re-issued by Harcourt in March 2007.

Eco was born in the city of Alessandria in the region of Piedmont. His father, Giulio, was an accountant before the government called upon him to serve in three wars. During World War II, Umberto and his mother, Giovanna, moved to a small village in the Piedmontese mountainside. Eco received a Salesian education, and he has made references to the order and its founder in his works and interviews.

His family name is supposedly an acronym of ex caelis oblatus (Latin: a gift from the heavens), which was given to his grandfather (a foundling) by a city official - a background reflected in the character of Diotallevi, in Foucault's Pendulum.

His father was the son of a family with thirteen children, and urged Umberto to become a lawyer, but he entered the University of Turin in order to take up medieval philosophy and literature, writing his thesis on Thomas Aquinas and earning his BA in philosophy in 1954. During this time, Eco left the Roman Catholic Church after a crisis of faith.

After this, Eco worked as a cultural editor for the state broadcasting station Radiotelevisione Italiana (RAI) and also lectured at the University of Turin (1956?64). A group of avant-garde artists?painters, musicians, writers?whom he had befriended at RAI (Gruppo 63) became an important and influential component in Eco's future writing career. This was especially true after the publication of his first book in 1956, Il problema estetico di San Tommaso, which was an extension of his doctoral thesis. This also marked the beginning of his lecturing career at his alma mater.

In September 1962, he married Renate Ramge, a German art teacher with whom he has a son and a daughter. He divides his time between an apartment in Milan and a vacation house near Rimini. He has a 30,000 volume library in the former and a 20,000 volume library in the latter.

Although there are volumes of essays and criticism by Eco, I'll leave them to another day to add to this bibliography below, and will list the novels for now.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

• Il nome della rosa (1980) [Eng: The Name of the Rose)
• Il pendolo di Foucault (1988) [Eng: Foucault's Pendulum]
• L'isola del giorno prima (1994) [Eng: The Island of the Day Before)
• Baudolino (2000) [Eng: Baudolino)
• La misteriosa fiamma della regina Loana (2004) [Eng: The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana)

RELATED LINKS

• Official Website
• Porta Ludovica

[nnyhav]

A dissenting view on Baudolino, erudition & Eco. (Not that I endorse it, I think Eco's cleverness and playfulness serves purposes beyond this poster's ken, but the complaint is interesting nonetheless.)

[Heteronym]

What I gathered is that the blogger is ressentful because Eco is clearly not writing for him; he clearly gets that Baudolino is for people who like obscure references to medieval books and culture, over-the-top erudtion and heavy exposition, but then strangely complains he's not one of those people. Then why read the novel? Didn't he learn who Eco's readers were from The Name of the Rose and Foucault's Pendulum? I've never warmed up to Eco either, but I won't read his work and moan afterwards; I just skip him and move on to something I like instead.

Oh, and by the third post people were already attacking Borges! Anyone who says Borges, one of the most well-read writers of the 20th century, was hardly an erudite man, can go die a violent death, and an infinite number of times if possible.

[Stewart]

Umberto Eco is an Italian medievalist, semiotician, philosopher, literary critic and novelist

I knew that Eco could speak a handful of languages, but I'm quite surprised to find out that he has also translated to Italian. The novel is Raymond Queneau's Exercices de Style. I don't know if there are others - there probably are.

[fausto]

And Queneau is not easy to translate, I would guess.

[Mirabell]

And Queneau is not easy to translate, I would guess.

But this particular bit must be one of the most frequently translated books in the universe, everybody has a try at it. While doing linguistics I mus have read parts of at least twenty different translations into German and English each. That makes translating it somewhat easier...

[titania7]

I had the chance to hear Umberto Eco in person Monday night. He's been giving a lecture series at Emory University as part of the Richard Ellmann Lectures in Modern Literature series, which has featured (in the past) such literary luminaries as Anthony Burgess, A. S. Byatt, and Mario Vargas Llosa. At any rate, the lecture I heard was on Author, Text, and Interpretation. Without rhapsodizing
ad nauseum, I will mention a few choice points Eco made:

"Creative writers should never provide interpretation of their
own work."

There are 3 "intentions" when it comes to reading fiction:
a) "the intention of the reader"
b) "the intention of the writer"
c) "the intention of the text"

"As a reader, you can refuse an interpretation you don't enjoy" (I love the idea of this, actually).

"Happiness lies......in the moment of ecstatic vision."

Eco spoke a great deal about James Joyce, particularly in regard to Finnegan's Wake. I must confess, because I had to sit in the balcony (the auditorium was very crowded, and I was ten minutes late), I wasn't able to hear Eco as distinctly as I would've liked to. To top things off, he has a *very* heavy Italian accent--charming, but not that easy to understand.

After the lecture ended, I had the opportunity to meet Eco. I even got him to sign my program. I know this was silly and schoolgirlish, but I couldn't help myself! And unfortunately, I couldn't take my copy of The Name of the Rose for him to autograph (which would've been my first preference) because it's in such shabby condition!

Eco impressed me as being a pleasant, cultured, strikingly erudite man. Needless to say, hearing him will not be an experience I shall easily forget.

Has anyone else had the chance to hear Eco speak in person?

Best,
Perdita

"A man's most open actions have a secret side to them."
~Joseph Conrad

[nnyhav]

Cool. Have you checked out The Open Work? (or The Role of the Reader?) Sounds as if his remarks were in that territory.

[kpjayan]

I had the chance to hear Umberto Eco in person Monday night. He's been giving a lecture series at Emory University as part of the Richard Ellmann Lectures in Modern Literature series

Will this be published anywhere or is there any press/magazine coverage ? Sounds interesting and worth listening to the whole lecture.

[titania7]

Nnyhav,
No, I haven't checked out The Open Work/The Role of the Reader. Thanks for mentioning it, however. I'll have to include it in my next amazon order.

Kpjayan,
I don't know about press coverage. There were video cameras everywhere; so, I'm assuming maybe so. I did ask whether or not the lecture would be printed online. However, I was told "probably not." My idea is that they want to make some money off of it. I hate to sound like I think everyone is mercenary, but, let's face it, we live in an opportunistic world.

Titania

"But a lifetime of happiness! No man alive could bear it:
it would be hell on Earth."
~George Bernard Shaw, Man and Superman

[Eric]

I've never read any Umberto Eco, except for an essay that I read in in Swedish about James Bond, but someone told me recently that some episode of Ellery Queen had "something to do with Eco". What could it be?

I find the Ellery Queen episodes amusing, but they don't seem to present the plot coherently. So I never guess who the murderer is. (Or maybe I'm a bit thick.)

But Eco. What on Earth could an American detective series have to do with the erudite Italian?

[nnyhav]

I've never read any Umberto Eco, except for an essay that I read in in Swedish about James Bond, but someone told me recently that some episode of Ellery Queen had "something to do with Eco". What could it be?
[...]
But Eco. What on Earth could an American detective series have to do with the erudite Italian?

Start with The Name of the Rose, which borrows tropes from detective fiction. Also note that Borges (cf Jorge of Burgos in TNotR) was first published in English in Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine.

But as to what your interlocutor had in mind I don't know.

[Max Cairnduff]

I've never read any Umberto Eco, except for an essay that I read in in Swedish about James Bond, but someone told me recently that some episode of Ellery Queen had "something to do with Eco". What could it be?

I find the Ellery Queen episodes amusing, but they don't seem to present the plot coherently. So I never guess who the murderer is. (Or maybe I'm a bit thick.)

But Eco. What on Earth could an American detective series have to do with the erudite Italian?

I've no idea if Eco got involved with Ellery Queen, but it's not impossible, he has a deep love of pop culture.

[nnyhav]

Pinakothek: The Poetry of Ellery Queen

[Mirabell]

new novel, called "Il cimitero di Praga" will be published in October!!!!

Eco, un falsario s'aggira nell'Europa dell'Ottocento- LASTAMPA.it


Umberto Eco pubblica il suo sesto romanzo, Il cimitero di Praga uscir? in ottobre - Libri - Panorama.it

Spie e cospiratori nel nuovo romanzo di Umberto Eco, 'Il cimitero di Praga' - Adnkronos Cultura


TG1 - "Il cimitero di Praga"

[Liam]

published in October

Yes. Wonderful news for those of us who... can't read Italian, .

[Mirabell]

Yes. Wonderful news for those of us who... can't read Italian, .

Yep. I wish my Italian was a whole lot better. =(((

[miercuri]

The Romanian translation will be released simultaneously! I'm quite impressed! And thrilled!

[altai]

I think Eco is an interesting essayist, I like his writings on translation and he definitely is a specialist on medieval culture,

But didn't any of you guys think that he is a not a good writer, I mean, to me he doesn't seem a natural writer. When I was reading "the Name of the Rose" it contained like page long straight catalog of things that a monk sees in a church or library. And then after first 100 pages of his 'test for a patient reader', which I survived with minor casulties, you finally get more of the action only to learn in the end that the whole 'crime novel' trick was there just as a semi-clever technique to expose stuff as much medieval references as possible. I mean by the end of the book, I had a feeling that none of the characters mattered in the least, they had no life feeling to them, they were just there feeling the space while professor Eco is showing the depths of his knowledge about the Middle Ages. I did enjoy the book though.

Then, I took Baudolino was so much better written, it's like he had taken a course in writing. It was the same maze of medieval tales, but it was so much more enjoyable and the medieval parables seemed more at place, and I could even care a bit about the protagonist and the world depicted in the novel.

But then, I tried to read "The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana' and I had to drop it after several pages cos again it was just written so badly...

[Amoxcalli]

And then after first 100 pages of his 'test for a patient reader', which I survived with minor casulties, you finally get more of the action only to learn in the end that the whole 'crime novel' trick was there just as a semi-clever technique to expose stuff as much medieval references as possible.

Isn't it a trick to show what exactly the study of semiotics means? Either way, I didn't think The Name of the Rose was poorly written. It's a postmodern novel, of course it has its share of "oddities" (for lack of a better word), such as the detailed analyses of medieval architecture, but I think it enriches the novel as a whole. And if you look at those parts as academic essays, they're very well written indeed.