The writer Umberto Eco belongs to that small class of scholars who are encyclopedic, insightful, and nondull. He is the owner of a large personal library (containing thirty thousand books), and separates visitors into two categories: those who react with “Wow! Signore, professore dottore Eco, what a library you have ! How many of these books have you read?” and the others - a very small minority - who get the point that a private library is not an ego-boosting appendage but a research tool. Read books are far less valuable than unread ones. The library should contain as much of what you don’t know as your financial means, mortgage rates and the currently tight real-estate market allows you to put there. You will accumulate more knowledge and more books as you grow older, and the growing number of unread books on the shelves will look at you menancingly. Indeed, the more you know, the larger the rows of unread books. Let us call this collection of unread books an antilibrary.
Showing posts with label Umberto Eco. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Umberto Eco. Show all posts
Friday, November 13, 2020
Umberto Eco / Books I Didn't Read
Political Language / The Use and Abuse of Rhetoric
POLITICAL LANGUAGE: THE USE AND ABUSE OF RHETORIC
by Umberto Eco
Aristotle divided discourses into judicial, deliberative, and epidictic. The judicial doesn’t need to be explained; epidictic discourse is discourse in praise or blame of someone or something (a typical example being the Encomium of Helen by Gorgias). Today we’d include under the heading of epidictic discourse the advertising message, which effectively consists of a eulogy of a given product.1 Deliberative discourse consists of political, and, one might now add, trade union discourse. In short, it is a matter of convincing the audience of the necessity or risk entailed by doing or not doing something that concerns the economic and political future of the community.
Tuesday, September 22, 2020
Umberto Eco / "Introduction to the Middle Ages"
The Allegory of Good and Bad Government. Ambrogio Lorenzetti
"Introduction to the Middle Ages"
by Umberto Eco
Barbarians, Christians and Muslims
30 September 2012
Tuesday, March 1, 2016
Umberto Eco / God
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| Umberto Eco |
GOD
When men stop believing in God, it isn't that they then believe in nothing: they believe in everything.
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
021 My hero / Patrick Marber by Craig Rainer
022 My hero / John Keats by Helen Dunmore
023 My hero / Edith Wharton by Lionel Shriver
024 My hero / Elizabeth Barrett Browing by Sara Paretsky
025 My hero / Nelson Mandela by Gordon Brown
026 My hero / Billy Wilder by David Nicholls
027 My hero / Samuel Beckett by Nick Clegg
028 My hero / Margaret Atwood by Caroline Lucas
029 My hero / Colette by Helen Simpson
030 My hero / Cyd Charisse by Tony Parsons
031 My hero / Nicolai Medtner by Philip Pullman
032 My hero / Jean Genet by Ahdaf Soueif
033 My hero / Jeri Johnson by Kate Moss
034 My hero / John Maynard Keynes by Joan Bakewell
035 My hero / Patti Smith by Joseph O'Connor
022 My hero / John Keats by Helen Dunmore
023 My hero / Edith Wharton by Lionel Shriver
024 My hero / Elizabeth Barrett Browing by Sara Paretsky
025 My hero / Nelson Mandela by Gordon Brown
026 My hero / Billy Wilder by David Nicholls
027 My hero / Samuel Beckett by Nick Clegg
028 My hero / Margaret Atwood by Caroline Lucas
029 My hero / Colette by Helen Simpson
030 My hero / Cyd Charisse by Tony Parsons
031 My hero / Nicolai Medtner by Philip Pullman
032 My hero / Jean Genet by Ahdaf Soueif
033 My hero / Jeri Johnson by Kate Moss
034 My hero / John Maynard Keynes by Joan Bakewell
035 My hero / Patti Smith by Joseph O'Connor
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
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
102 My hero / David Hockney by Susan Hill
2012
134 My hero / Homer by Madeline Miller
146 My hero / Roald Dahl by Michael Rosen
156 My hero / Barack Obama by Lorrie Moore
146 My hero / Roald Dahl by Michael Rosen
156 My hero / Barack Obama by Lorrie Moore
174 My hero / Alice Munro by Nell Freudenberger
176 My hero / Mae West by Kathy Lette
181 My hero / Lydia Davis by Ali Smith
184 My hero / Louise Bourgeois by Tracey Emin
185 My hero / Albert Camus by David Constantine
176 My hero / Mae West by Kathy Lette
181 My hero / Lydia Davis by Ali Smith
184 My hero / Louise Bourgeois by Tracey Emin
185 My hero / Albert Camus by David Constantine
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
194 My hero / René Descartes by James Kelman
199 My hero / Albert Camus by Geoff Dyer
2015
2016
279 My hero / Truman Capote's In Cold Blood at 50
280 My hero / George Weindelfel by Antonia Fraser
281 My hero / Dmitri Shostakovich by Julian Barnes
282 My hero / Charlotte Brontë by Tracy Chevalier
283 My hero / Margaret Foster by Valerie Grove
284 My hero / David Cesarini by David Herman
285 My hero / Umberto Eco by Jonathan Coe
286 My hero / Louise Rennison by Philip Ardagh 280 My hero / George Weindelfel by Antonia Fraser
281 My hero / Dmitri Shostakovich by Julian Barnes
282 My hero / Charlotte Brontë by Tracy Chevalier
283 My hero / Margaret Foster by Valerie Grove
284 My hero / David Cesarini by David Herman
285 My hero / Umberto Eco by Jonathan Coe
Wednesday, February 24, 2016
Umberto Eco / The Art of Fiction
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| Umberto Eco |
Umberto Eco
The Art of Fiction
No. 197
Summer 2008
The Paris Review
No. 185
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| Manuscript |
The first time I called Umberto Eco, he was sitting at his desk in his seventeenth-century manor in the hills outside Urbino, near the Adriatic coast of Italy. He sang the virtues of his bellissima swimming pool, but suspected I might have trouble negotiating the region’s tortuous mountain passes. So we agreed instead to meet at his apartment in Milan. I arrived there last August on ferragosto, the high point of summer and the day the Catholic Church celebrates the Assumption of the Virgin Mary. Milan’s gray buildings gleamed with heat, and a thin layer of dust had settled on the pavement. Hardly an engine could be heard. As I stepped into Eco’s building, I took a turn-of-the-century lift and heard the creaking of a door on the top floor. Eco’s imposing figure appeared behind the lift’s wrought-iron grating. “Ahhh,” he said with a slight scowl.
The apartment is a labyrinth of corridors lined with bookcases that reach all the way up to extraordinarily high ceilings—thirty thousand volumes, said Eco, with another twenty thousand at his manor. I saw scientific treatises by Ptolemy and novels by Calvino, critical studies of Saussure and Joyce, entire sections devoted to medieval history and arcane manuscripts. The library feels alive, as many of the books seem worn from heavy use; Eco reads at great speed and has a prodigious memory. In his study, a maze of shelves contains Eco’s own complete works in all their translations (Arabic, Finnish, Japanese . . . I lost count after more than thirty languages). Eco pointed at his books with amorous precision, attracting my attention to volume after volume, from his early landmark work of critical theory,The Open Work, to his most recent opus, On Ugliness.
Eco began his career as a scholar of medieval studies and semiotics. Then, in 1980, at the age of forty-eight, he published a novel, The Name of the Rose. It became an international publishing sensation, selling more than ten million copies. The professor metamorphosed into a literary star. Chased by journalists, courted for his cultural commentaries, revered for his expansive erudition, Eco came to be considered the most important Italian writer alive. In the years since, he has continued to write fanciful essays, scholarly works, and four more best-selling novels, including Foucault’s Pendulum (1988) and The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana(2004).
With Eco’s paunch leading the way, his feet shuffling along the floor, we walked into his living room. Through the windows, a medieval castle cut a gigantic silhouette against the Milanese sky. I had expected tapestries and Italian antiques, but instead found modern furnishings, several glass cases displaying seashells and rare comics, a lute, a collection of recorders, a collage of paintbrushes. “This one, you see, by Arman, is dedicated especially to me . . .”
I sat on a large white couch; Eco sank into a low armchair, cigar in hand. He used to smoke up to sixty cigarettes a day, he told me, but now he has only his unlit cigar. As I asked my first questions, Eco’s eyes narrowed to dark slits, suddenly opening up when his turn came to speak. “I developed a passion for the Middle Ages,” he said, “the same way some people develop a passion for coconuts.” In Italy, he is well known for his battute, his comedic sallies, which he drops at nearly every twist of his snaking sentences. His voice seemed to grow louder the longer he spoke. Soon he was outlining a series of points, as if speaking to a rapt classroom: “Number one: when I wrote The Name of the Rose I didn’t know, of course, since no one knows, what was written in the lost volume of Aristotle’s Poetics, the famous volume on comedy. But somehow, in the process of writing my novel, I discovered it. Number two: the detective novel asks the central question of philosophy—who dunnit?” When he deemed his interlocutor clever enough, he was quick to extend professorial appreciations: “Yes, good. But I would also add that . . .”
After our initial two-hour interview session, Mario Andreose, the literary director of Bompiani, Eco’s Italian publisher, arrived to take us to dinner. Renate Ramge, Eco’s wife of forty-five years, sat up front with Andreose, and Eco and I took the backseat. Eco, who just minutes before had brimmed with wit and vitality, now appeared sullen and aloof. But his mood lightened soon after we entered the restaurant and a plate of bread was placed before us. He glanced at the menu, dithered, and as the waiter arrived, hastily ordered a calzone and a glass of Scotch. “Yes, yes, I shouldn’t, I shouldn’t . . .” A beaming reader approached the table, “Are you Umberto Eco?” The professore lifted an eyebrow, grinned, and shook hands. Then, at last, the conversation resumed, as Eco launched into excited riffs about Pope Benedict XVI, the fall of the Persian Empire, and the latest James Bond movie. “Did you know,” he said while planting a fork in his calzone, “that I once published a structural analysis of the archetypal Ian Fleming plot?”
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| Umberto Eco |
INTERVIEWER
Where were you born?
UMBERTO ECO
In the town of Alessandria. It is known for its Borsalino hats.
INTERVIEWER
What kind of family did you come from?
ECO
My father was an accountant and his father was a typographer. My father was the eldest of thirteen children. I am the first son. My son is my first child. And his first child is a son. So if by chance someone discovers that the Eco family is descended from the emperor of Byzantium, my grandson is the dauphin!
My grandfather had a particularly important influence on my life, even though I didn’t visit him often, since he lived about three miles out of town and he died when I was six. He was remarkably curious about the world, and he read lots of books. The marvelous thing was that when he retired, he started to bind books. So he had a lot of unbound books lying here and there around his apartment—old, beautifully illustrated editions of popular nineteenth-century novels by Gautier and Dumas. Those were the first books I ever saw. When he died in 1938, many of the owners of the unbound books did not ask for them to be returned, and the family put them all in a big box. Quite by accident, this box landed in my parents’ cellar. I would be sent to the cellar from time to time, to pick up some coal or a bottle of wine, and one day I opened this box and found a treasure trove of books. From then on I visited the cellar rather frequently. It turned out my grandfather also collected a fabulous magazine, Giornale illustrato dei viaggi e delle avventure di terra e di mare—the illustrated journal of travels and adventures by land and by sea—devoted to strange and cruel stories set in exotic countries. It was my first great foray into the land of stories. Unfortunately, I lost all of these books and magazines, but over the decades I have gradually recovered copies of them from old bookstores and flea markets.
Tuesday, February 23, 2016
Umberto Eco / On Krazy Kat and Penauts
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| Umberto Eco |
On ‘Krazy Kat’ and ‘Peanuts’
George Herriman’s Krazy Kat came into existence around 1910–1911 and ended in 1944 with the death of the author. The dramatis personae were three: a cat of unspecified sex, probably female; a mouse, Ignatz; a dog acting as policeman, Offissa Pupp. The drawing was remarkable, with certain surrealistic inventions, especially in the improbable lunar landscapes, deliberately intended to divorce the events from any verisimilitude. The plot? The cat madly loves the mouse, and the wicked mouse hates and tyrannizes the cat, preferably by hitting him on the head with a brick. The dog constantly tries to protect the cat, but the cat despises this unrestrained love; the cat adores the mouse and is always ready to excuse him. From this absurd situation without particularly comic ingredients, the author drew an infinite series of variations, based on a structural fact that is of fundamental importance in the understanding of comics in general: the brief daily or weekly story, the traditional strip, even if it narrates an episode that concludes in the space of four panels, will not work if considered separately; rather it acquires flavor only in the continuous and obstinate series, which unfolds, strip after strip, day by day.
Monday, February 22, 2016
Umberto Eco / ‘People are tired of simple things’
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| Umberto Eco Illustration by Triunfo Arciniegas |
Umberto Eco
‘People are tired of simple things’
Life, like fiction, was an endlessly absorbing game for an intellectual who wore his great learning lightly
Stephen Moss
Saturday 20 February 2016 13.43 GMT
U
mberto Eco was tired when I met him in 2011. At 80, he was in the middle of an arduous 20-day tour to promote his novel The Prague Cemetery, and he was sagging. I didn’t much like the novel we were there to discuss – it seemed to me that his complex, conspiracy-based fictions had become formulaic – and we had some comic misunderstandings based on his unfamiliarity with idiomatic English. “What is a ‘return to form’?” And yet the meeting was a memorable one, and I knew I’d been fortunate to encounter him, even this late in his career – a hugely successful writer but, more interestingly, a rare example of the public intellectual.
His conversation tended to proceed by bursts of lightning. From the dense clouds – we tried to get to grips with The Prague Cemetery but the will was weak – he would suddenly produce a glorious, shimmering aperçu. “Italy is not an intellectual country,” he told me as we discussed Silvio Berlusconi’s political success. “On the subway in Tokyo everybody reads. In Italy, they don’t. Don’t evaluate Italy from the fact that it produced Raphael and Michelangelo.”
The key to his career was that fame came to him relatively late: his bestseller The Name of the Rose was published in 1980, when he was 48 and established as a professor of semiotics at the University of Bologna. He wrote the book, a murder mystery set in a 14th-century monastery, at the behest of an Italian publisher looking to publish a series of short thrillers. Eco, who always had a fondness for writing literary spoofs, accepted because he said he “felt like poisoning a monk”.
In an echo of Beethoven, who, commissioned to produce a waltz on a rather banal musical theme, conjured up the vast and complex Diabelli Variations, Eco wrote a 500-page behemoth that managed, as publicists might say, to marry Borges with Conan Doyle, a crime procedural encased in all manner of philosophical reflection and literary game-playing. The book proved a phenomenon, selling 10m copies in 30 languages and becoming a successful (though far more linear) film in 1986, with Sean Connery as the Holmesian monk-detective William of Baskerville.
Eco’s later novels, including Foucault’s Pendulum (1988), The Island of the Day Before (1994) and Baudolino (2000), also sold well and he could have given up the day job. But he never did. “I am a philosopher,” he insisted. “I write novels only on the weekends.”
He wrote half a dozen novels, but his works on semiotics, critical theory and aspects of philosophy (his earliest academic training was in medieval philosophy) are close to 10 times that number. He was one of those figures, not unfamiliar in France or Italy, who is hard to imagine in the Anglo-Saxon world: interested in everything; not bothered about demarcations of posh or pop (as a semiotician, he thought everything could be decoded), immersed in Borgesian puzzles and literary jokes, and able to be at the same time both funny and deadly serious about them. Italians are perhaps better than most at understanding that life is a divine comedy: respect the divinity, but never lose sight of the essential comedy.
I asked Eco whether it bothered him that some critics were sniffy about his later novels, and that sales never quite matched his first blockbuster. “You are always shocked by how different critics’ opinions are,” he told me. “I think a book should be judged 10 years later, after reading and rereading it. I was always defined as too erudite and philosophical, too difficult. Then I wrote a novel that is not erudite at all, that is written in plain language, The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana, and among my novels it is the one that has sold the least. So probably I am writing for masochists. It’s only publishers and some journalists who believe that people want simple things. People are tired of simple things. They want to be challenged.”
The key, in taking stock of his 60-year career, will be putting the fictions in context. Do not trust obituaries that emphasise “the author of The Name of the Rose” to the exclusion of his other personae. His novels were a relatively small part of his output, and his contributions as critic, editor, literary theorist and all-round provocateur should not be forgotten. He was fascinated by – and wanted to look afresh at – everything. Nothing was sacrosanct. The society in which he had grown up had been torn apart by the second world war, and he sought to understand why. That was the key to his leftwing politics and to his restless intellectual wanderings. Perhaps the Anglo-Saxon literary and intellectual world is safer and more self-contained because it did not suffer that mid-century catastrophe.
“Sometimes I say I hate The Name of the Rose,” he told me, “because the following books maybe were better. But it happens to many writers. Gabriel García Márquez can write 50 books, but he will be remembered always for Cien Años de Soledad [One Hundred Years of Solitude]. Every time I publish a new novel, sales of The Name of the Rose go up. What is the reaction? ‘Ah, a new book of Eco. But I have never read The Name of the Rose.’ Which, by the way, costs less because it is in paperback.” He laughed, as, despite his fatigue, he did many times in the course of our conversation. Eco was an intellectual who wore his great learning lightly. Life, like fiction, was an endlessly absorbing game.
Sunday, February 21, 2016
Top 10 modern medieval tales
Top 10 modern medieval tales
From George RR Martin to Umberto Eco, many writers have been inspired by stories of the middle ages. Here are some of the best
Carolyne Larrington
Wednesday 30 December 201515.00 GMT
How far do hit television series such as HBO’s Game of Thrones and the BBC’s recent The Last Kingdom reflect the real medieval worlds of early (and late) medieval Europe and Asia, or of Anglo-Saxon England? The answer, as I found when I was researching the parallels between Game of Thrones and the medieval world for my new book, is: to a surprising degree. Both the show and the book sequence on which it’s based, George RR Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire, reflect very closely the cultures, beliefs and practices of this era. From the Mongols to the Vikings, from the Mediterranean trading ports to the Celtic lake-dwelling tribes, Martin’s imagined world brings the medieval vividly to life.
Alain Elkann interviews Umberto Eco
by Alain Elkann
Umberto Eco, many people know where you are, but you prefer not to disclose the location. How will you spend your summer?
Here in my country house as usual, where last year I was finishing writing The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana. All of my books were started and finished in the countryside. Foucault’s Pendulum took eight years. I wrote it on holiday, at Christmas, at Easter, and in the summer. Let me repeat something I’ve said many times. I finished In the Name of the Rose on 5 January, which is my birthday. So, out of superstition, I decided that I needed to finish the second book on 5 January. Actually I was finishing up around 2 January but then I let things drag out a bit and was able to finish on 5 January. The third book went the same way, though the fourth book, Baudolino, was finished at the end of July, and I thought to myself, “Something is not right.” It is known that novels go on autopilot toward the end, and therefore it’s a truly unstoppable process. Honestly, I eventually put my mind at ease because my grandson Emanuele was born a few days later. I finished Loana, my latest book, between the end of August and the beginning of September. This year, my calendar is open in August, and this perhaps worries me a bit. Of course, I have to prepare for some conferences, and in the mornings I go into town with the pharmacist to have an aperitif before lunch.
Saturday, February 20, 2016
Italian author Umberto Eco dies aged 84
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| Umberto Eco Poster by T.A. |
Italian author Umberto Eco dies aged 84
The revered literary critic, author and essayist – most famous for 1980 novel The Name of the Rose – had been suffering from cancer
Muere Umberto Eco, el humanista total (De otros mundos)
Morto lo scrittore Umberto Eco (Dante)
Saturday 20 February 2016 04.18 GMT
The novelist and intellectual Umberto Eco has died aged 84. Eco, who was perhaps best known for his 1980 work The Name of the Rose, was one of the world’s most revered literary names.
The author, who had been suffering from cancer, died on Friday night.
Eco was the 1992-1993 Norton professor at Harvard and taught semiotics at Bologna University. He once suggested that writing novels was a mere part-time occupation, saying: “I am a philosopher; I write novels only on the weekends.”
The Name of the Rose was Eco’s first novel but he had been publishing works for more than 20 years beforehand.
The Italian prime minister, Matteo Renzi, led tributes to Eco. “He was an outstanding example of a European intellectual, a single intelligence with an untiring ability to anticipate the future,” Renzi told local media.
“It’s a huge loss for culture, which will miss his writing and his voice, sharp and vivid thought and his humanity.”
Eco discussed his approach to writing in an interview at a Guardian Live event in London in 2015. “I don’t know what the reader expects,” he said.
“I think that Barbara Cartland writes what the readers expect. I think an author should write what the reader does not expect. The problem is not to ask what they need, but to change them … to produce the kind of reader you want for each story.”
Eco was born in Alessandria, in the northern Italian region of Piedmont and went to a Salesian school. He developed an interest in medieval philosophy and literature and studied the subjects at the University of Turin in the 1950s. It was around that time that the he turned his back on the Catholic church.
He went on to work for the Italian broadcaster Rai and began to lecture at his alma mater. Eco’s first book – an extension of his doctoral thesis - was published in 1956. Six years later, he married the academic Renate Ramge.
FICCIONES
DE OTROS MUNDOS
DRAGON
PESSOA
RIMBAUD
DANTE
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