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The Irrepressible Lightness of Umberto Eco
- patkai 11y agoWhile his novels are great, to know Eco you need to read his essays, columns and dialogues with e.g. the archbishop of Milan. His warmth and love is unforgettable.
- teawithcarl 11y agoAn exceptional well-written article ... about pure intellectualism.
- lmm 11y agoLightness? Foucault’s Pendulum was possibly the meanest, least constructive book I've read.
- Bootvis 11y agoWhy? I was planning on reading it as was recommend to me as one of Eco's better books.
- seren 11y agoIt is a tortuous but great book. I would even say that the obsession of the narrator and his close friends can look a bit like people completely involved in their startup (and their own little world).
- eru 11y agoDie Blendung (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auto-da-F%C3%A9_(novel) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auto-da-F%C3%A9_(novel)) is also worth reading, if you like that kind of thing.
- lmm 11y agoIt's just an extended strawman of conspiracy theory. None of the major characters is sympathetic. It felt very misanthropic. And it's bloated by Stephenson-esque digressions, but they're somehow much less interesting than Stephenson's - partly because the primary plot is too weak to sustain you through them.
- selimthegrim 11y agoThe end drags a little, but I thought Belbo was sympathetic. Really, I think it's a book you get a lot more if you're swimming through academia and reading half a dozen jargon laden over interpreting articles a day. It's a very effective pastiche of Dan Brown and Jeffrey Archer, and if there was any justice should have killed their careers.
- lmm 11y ago> It's a very effective pastiche of Dan Brown and Jeffrey Archer, and if there was any justice should have killed their careers. That's exactly the mean-spiritedness I take the most issue with. Those guys are fun. Why not let people enjoy them? Fundamentally Foucault's Pendulum fails as a pastiche of them because it doesn't capture their positive side.
- bshimmin 11y agoI personally think it was very clever of Eco to write a pastiche of The Da Vinci Code 15 years or so before it was published. That aside, Foucault's Pendulum is undeniably quite hard work, but he really does cover a fascinating breadth of material in there.
- mcguire 11y agoIt's actually a pastiche of Brown's sources, the conspiracy theories that Brown (and others) takes entirely too seriously. That's why I can't take him seriously.
- selimthegrim 11y ago
- ZeroGravitas 11y agoI'm intrigued by what other novels make your list of "top 3 meanest" or "top 3 least constructive". It's not really a metric I've applied to novels before, so I'm at a loss as to whether it's even a good or a bad thing.
- lmm 11y agoWell I'm not in the habit of reading such books - normally I'd give up on a book I felt was too mean-spirited (I can't immediately think of a book example, but I stopped watching The Thick of It for that reason). The only other novels I've finished that I would say that kind of thing about are Fever Crumb / A Web of Air, with what felt like a crude and gratuitous attack on religion at the very end (it doesn't dominate either book though - part of the issue is that the blurb for Foucault's Pendulum is very misleading).
- Synaesthesia 11y agoI'm finding it a rather challenging read, quite unique and often hilarious in it's endless self-referentialisms. In the Name of the Rose was outstanding, very entertaining and informative.
- mcguire 11y agoFoucault's Pendulum is hilarious! And it makes it impossible to look at conspiracy theories the same way afterwards. I've described it before as a very smart, very knowledgeable man pointing out that, if you peel the onion, you don't find anything at the center.
- conjectures 11y agoThe Name of the Rose is the finest novel I have ever read, and that was in translation. Haters gonna hate on humanities academics. I suggest they go watch some superhero films to cheer up.
- mcguire 11y agoWeirdly, I just got a text saying, "Arriving Today: Your Amazon package with Kant and the Platypus: Essays on Language and Cognition will be delivered by 8pm." Eco wasn't just a novelist.