Saturday, February 27, 2016

My hero / Umberto Eco by Jonathan Coe



My hero:

Umberto by Jonathan Coe

The author of Name of the Rose was a model European intellectual who anticipated the Da Vinci Code


 Jonathan Coe
Saturday 27 February 2016


 N
ot many reading experiences burn themselves on to your consciousness, but I have the most vivid memory of the first time I read Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose: my father’s winged armchair in which I was sitting; the view from my parents’ living-room window; the very angle of the sunlight as it fell upon their carpet. Few other novels from the last 40 years have given me that fierceness of reading pleasure, a pleasure so intense you never forget it.

I’ve always been something of a philistine reader and nowadays I sympathise more and more with Kingsley Amis’s view that life is too short to read any books that don’t begin with the words “A shot rang out”. Plenty of shots ring out in The Name of the Rose – or plenty of monks are poisoned, which is almost the same thing – but it is also, of course, a dazzling novel of ideas. I prefer it (just) to Foucault’s Pendulum, in which Eco made his love of pop culture and pulp fiction even clearer. Here, indeed, he anticipated The Da Vinci Code by decades: and in fact when asked by journalists for his views on Dan Brown, claimed that he was a fictional character and “I invented him”.
My own surname may be an anagram of Eco’s but sadly our relationship never got any closer than that. For me he remains the model of a European intellectual, making complex ideas accessible, casting the kind of sceptical eye over culture and politics that can only come from having a vast, panoramic historical sense. Many of us have a fantasy of reconciling the magnetic readability of genre fiction with the more ambiguous virtues of great literature: Eco was one of the very few who made it a reality.
• This article was amended on 29 February 2016 to reflect that Umberto Eco was pictured at the Festival della Comunicazione in Camogli in 2015.




2009
001 My hero / Oscar Wilde by Michael Holroyd
002 My hero / Harley Granville-Barker by Richard Eyre
003 My hero / Edward Goldsmith by Zac Goldsmith
004 My hero / Fridtjof Nansen by Sara Wheeler 
005 My hero / Mother Mercedes Lawler IBVM by Antonia Fraser
007 My hero / Ernest Shepard by Richard Holmes
008 My hero / JG Ballard by Will Self
009 My hero / Alan Ross by William Boyd
010 My hero / Ben the labrador by John Banville
011 My hero / Vicent van Gogh by Margaret Drabble
012 My hero / Franz Marek by Eric Hobsbawm

2010

017 My hero / Jack Yeats by Colm Tóibín
018 My hero / Francisco Goya by Diana Athill
019 My hero / Max Stafford-Clark by Sebastian Barry
020 My hero / Arthur Holmes by Richard Fortey

036 My hero / Robert Lowell by Jonathan Raban
037 My hero / Beryl Bainbridge by Michael Holroyd
038 My hero / Charles Schulz by Jenny Colgan
039 My hero / Oliver Knussen by Adam Foulds
040 My hero / Annie Proulx by Alan Warner

041 My hero / David Lynch by Paul Murray
042 My hero / Edwin Morgan by Robert Crawford
043 My hero / Anne Lister by Emma Donoghue
044 My hero / Jane Helen Harrinson by Mary Beard
045 My hero / Edmund Burke by David Marquand
046 My hero / Shelagh Deleaney by Jeanette Winterson
047 My hero / Christopher Marlowe by Val McDermid
048 My hero / Gwen John by Anne Enright
049 My hero / Michael Mayne by Susan Hill
050 My hero / Stanley Spencer by Howard Jacobson

051 My hero / William Beveridge by Will Hutton
052 My hero / Jean McConville by Amanda Foreman
053 My hero / Alexander Pushkin by Elaine Feinstein
058 My hero / Cy Twombly by Edmund de Waal

2011
079 My hero / Gene Wolfe by Neil Gaiman
087 My hero / Alberto Moravia by John Burnside
096 My hero / Isaac Babel by AD Miller
097 Lucian Freud by Esi Edugyan
100 Thomas Tranströmer by Robin Robertson
102 My hero / David Hockney by Susan Hill

2012

190 My hero / Iris Murdoch by Charlotte Mendelson
194 My hero / René Descartes by James Kelman
199 My hero / Albert Camus by Geoff Dyer

2015
2016

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