![]() Since February 19, when the unquestioned giant of contemporary Italian literary and intellectual culture died at 84 after a two-year battle with cancer, Italian newspapers have published scores of articles about Umberto, noting that he was, in the view of many, the most famous intellectual in the world. You had to possess a common touch, an ability to talk and write in the language of the street, which Umberto possessed to a degree I’ve never seen in any other scholar of his stature. You had to be hungry for the latest news and gossip - about anything - and willing to plop it into a narrative composed largely of more sober elements. Wise to the importance of entertaining readers - with puns, plot, playful Latin, lighthearted examples, exotic hypotheticals - while guiding them. Uniquely open to people and culture high, low, and middle. ![]() ![]() ![]() Because to produce a work comparable to that still-singular first novel - not to mention its six successors, Foucault’s Pendulum (1988), The Island of the Day Before (1994), Baudolino,(2000), The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana (2004), The Prague Cemetery (2010), and Numero Zero (2015) - you needed to be Umberto. No, the novel soon to be written that would equal the international acclaim of Eco’s medieval thriller, The Name of the Rose (1980), which eventually sold 30 million copies in more than 40 languages.ĭid any of those books ever get done? Hardly a one. ![]() By the late 1980s, every humanities academic on earth talked of his or her Umberto Eco novel in the drawer. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |