With the passing of Umberto Eco, the world has lost a literary giant of the same calibre as Jorge Luis Borges, one of Eco’s great influences. By the time Eco, an Italian, burst on to the scene as a globally bestselling novelist with his 1980 novel, The Name of The Rose, he was already famous in Europe for his academic work in the field of linguistics and semiotics.
However, over the past 35 years, he has acquired a reputation as a cultural titan, to the extent that he actually said, “I have lost the freedom of not having an opinion.” His body of work is vast, with seven novels, over 35 non-fiction books, one manual, and three books for children. Here are the seven that matter the most.
The Name of The Rose (1980)
This novel made Eco a household name, first in Italy, where he already was a celebrated philosopher, and when the English translation came out in 1983, all over the world. Dipping into his various personas, from a medievalist to a semiotician, as well as a passionate lover of detective fiction, Eco fashioned a gripping murder mystery set in a Benedictine abbey in the fourteenth century.
An Englishman, Brother William of Baskerville, comes to investigate the crime along with his sidekick, the young novice Adso. Together, they try to unlock a conspiracy that runs the whole gamut of religious heresies, the dangerous allure of books, sexual repression and the logic of labyrinths. While the novel looked back upon a Europe that was on the cusp of the monumental changes to be brought about by the Renaissance, Eco’s narrative style looked forward to the rise of the meta-textual novel. The Name of the Rose was a publishing phenomenon at the time, selling over 10 million copies. Today, it continues to intrigue and inspire.
Foucault’s Pendulum (1989)
Eco once said in an interview that sometimes, when he worked on a novel, he lived the story for years until he was done. That’s what he did with his second novel, Foucault’s Pendulum, which took him eight years to write. It tells the story of three men who work for a vanity publisher. Tired of reading about grand occult conspiracies, they decide to invent their own, the grandest conspiracy yet, about the Knights Templars and their millennium-spanning plan for world domination.
They pool in elements from the Kabbalah, Gnostic cults, Rosicrucian and Freemasonic lore, Roman mysteries and Caribbean spiritualism and feed it into a computer, which they nickname Abulafia, after the famous Jewish mystic. Taking the random text fragments thrown up by the computer programme, they construct The Plan.
However, soon they’re convinced that it’s a real plan, and a secret society, just like the one they’ve invented, starts stalking them. When asked about Dan Brown’s debt to Foucault’s Pendulum for his The Da Vinci Code, Eco quipped, “(He) is a character from Foucault’s Pendulum! I invented him…I suspect Dan Brown might not even exist.”
Misreadings (1993)
Misreadings was first translated in 1993, but the book contains some of Eco’s earliest writings, dating back to 1959, written for a monthly column in the paper Il Verri. Written in a humorous vein – imagine Borges as a parodist – these essays are irreverent and interesting. So one essay reports the discovery of America live, in another an alien scholar imposes imaginative meanings on a body of poetry fragments discovered on a destroyed earth, while in a third he reviews a nineteenth century Italian historical novel as a posthumously discovered James Joyce novel.
How To Travel With a Salmon & Other Essays (1994)
Eco was nothing if not witty, as is evident in these short essays which deal with the vagaries of modern travel and the relentless march of technology. Written over the 1980s and 1990s, the book collects many essays that he’d written for newspaper columns. As a result, they are journalistic in tone, even when he’s describing, say, why he loves football and hates football fans; how an expensive watch no longer tells the time, but is just another ornament; how to make a map that’s on a scale of 1:1 and so on. One essay, titled Editorial Revisions, is about the first draft of many famous works. TS Eliot’s The Waste Land : “April is the cruellest month. And March isn’t all that great, either.”
In Search of the Perfect Language (1995)
Eco was never one to shy away from the big questions, and here he investigates one that has been furiously debated in Europe since, well, the Biblical Tower of Babel. Using that mythic event as his point of departure, Eco investigates the various intellectual attempts made through European history to reconstruct a language that was supposedly lost.
Eco places this attempt in the history of ideas, and takes many interesting detours into the effect these attempts have had in shaping Europe’s intellectual traditions. He writes of languages like Hebrew and Egyptian, long considered by Europeans as perfected mystical languages, reconstructed ones like Indo-European, artificial philosophical languages of the Enlightenment, the algorithms used by computers as well as constructed ones, like Esperanto or Interlingua.
Kant and the Platypus: Essays on Language and Cognition (1999)
Eco was especially loved for his ability to take complex notions of language and meaning and make them intelligible, not just to other specialists like him, but also to the layperson. In this, he was helped by his wide-ranging interests, from pop culture to history, and his use of anecdotes to illustrate his points, and his wit to humanise them.
So he introduced the platypus, which, when first encountered by the west, threw people into a tizzy; they couldn’t classify it – was it a duck or a reptile? An update on his seminal academic work from the 1976, A Theory of Semiotics, this book has Eco exploring questions of meaning and being, and how these notions are constantly negotiated.
Baudolino (2001)
One of Eco’s favourite themes, both in his work as a semiotician and his novels, was that of the unreliable narrator and the capacity of a text to assume a life of its own. In his fourth novel, Baudolino, Eco created the perfect archetype of such a trickster, the eponymous Baudolino.
As the sack of Constantinople is raging, during the Fourth Crusade in 1204, a Byzantine official is saved by a mysterious middle-aged Italian man named Baudolino, who proceeds to tell his story. The adopted son of Emperor Frederick Barbarossa, Baudolino learns of one of the greatest myths of medieval Europe – the kingdom of Prester John.
After Frederick dies mysteriously, the polyglot Baudolino, along with his friends, goes off to search for this kingdom. “Travelling” into a fantastic Asia that existed only in medieval European myths, Baudolino, a self-confessed liar, encounters amazing creatures and learns new secrets, before finally reaching the fabled kingdom.