Umberto Eco

[galanx]

I loved "Name of the Rose", but "Foucault's Pendulum" was my favorite- didn't care for "The Island of the Day Before".

Of his non-fiction, I've read
"Art and Beauty in the Middle Ages"- a slim early work

"Travels in Hyperreality" -essay collection
"Kant and the Platypus: Essays on Language and Cognition"-essay collection

"History of Beauty" (alt. title "On Beauty: History of a Western Idea" NOT meaning Beauty is a Western Idea; only that he's talking about Western ideas of Beauty.)This review on Goodreads rom a reader named Coyle sums that one up up:
"This book is misnamed, really "dictionary of Beauty" would be a closer title, while "Umberto Eco's Musings on Beauty in a loosely chronological order with occasional quotes about beauty from other thinkers and a boatload of pictures" would probably hit closest to home."

 

[hitmouse]

Name of the Rose was very good, but I remember thinking the Foucault's Pendulum, which I read at the time of it's publication, was some of the most contrived bloated and pretentious Raiders-of-the-Lost Ark-dressed-up-as-lit that I had ever come across. That was 20+ years ago, and I haven't reread it. Maybe it would be different a second time round.
Salman Rushdie wrote a devastating review of the book at the time, concluding:"Anthony Burgess has written that this book is the future of the European novel. If so, we should run screaming in the opposite direction."

 

[galanx]

I know- I was a big fan of Rushdie's too, at the time. (Of his later stuff, speaking of "bloated an pretentious"....)

"Raiders-of-the-Lost Ark-dressed-up-as-lit" - good description. Of course, that's what it was supposed to be.

 

[BAYLOR]

I tried reading Foucault's Pendulum on two occasions and couldn't get into it.

 

[gdoc]

Read Foucault's Pendulum years ago. The Island of the Day Before finished me off though. Abysmal.

 

[GOLLUM]

I actually liked Islan dOf The Day Before..admittedly it can be a bit of a slog.

Very sad about his passing. I think I have all of his fiction and some of his non-fiction as well. Would loved to have met him...

 

[Dan Jones]

I love Foucault's Pendulum, and I know of at least one other Chronner who agrees with me.

pretentious Raiders-of-the-Lost Ark-dressed-up-as-lit

Of course, that's the point! It's a ripping yarn, the biggest piss-take imaginable, playing on the sensationalist conspiracy shtick such as "The Holy Blood And The Holy Blood"* which was all the rage in the 80s (and arguably never went away), and which was subsequently ripped off by Dan Brown, to great commercial success.

His masterpiece will forever be The Name Of The Rose, though. A staggering achievement.

Couldn't get into Queen Leona, and haven't read "Island..."

*Have you read this? It's tosh, but quite entertaining sensationalist tosh.

 

[The Judge]

I also greatly enjoyed The Name of the Rose which I re-read last year.

I managed to get into The Mysterious Flame of Queen Leona, and I thought the first part was well -written and interesting (if frustrating because I knew I was missing so many of his allusions to European literature), and I even found the middle bit when the main character goes back to the ancestral home intermittently of interest, though overlong and full of lists (and it read as very autobiographical, though I've no idea how much it reflected Eco's own life), but I had to give up in the final part where the character appears to be in a coma and it all became a jumbled mess. My final verdict on it: erudite, but self-indulgent.

The Prague Cemetery was very different in tone and style, and I got through it without (much) skimming, but it really wasn't one for me, either. My judgements at the time of reading it in case anyone else is thinking of getting it:

The Prague Cemetery has as its central diary-writing character a forger who is an anti-semite, anti-cleric, misogynist and general misanthropist, and who eventually creates the obscene Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Not quite as wordy as the other books of his I've read, and Eco's penchant for listing everything is more subdued, but the European politics and conflicts of the mid-nineteenth century are terra incognita for me, so I'm having some problems getting to grips with the various conspiracies and revolutionaries.

and

The Prague Cemetery didn't get any easier as it went on, with a bewildering cast of masons, republicans, bomb-makers, forgers, fraudsters, hoaxers, spies and Jesuits all caught up in a ferment of revolutionary ardour, war, satanic rituals, anti-semitism, the Dreyfus Affair and fine French dining. Undoubtedly clever, and not quite as stodgy as it might sound, but with a thoroughly unlikeable protagonist and a strange conceit of an occasional narrator trying to make sense of the protagonist's split personality and diary entries, it was rarely engaging and save as a brisk lesson in Italian and French society and politics of the C19th, not particularly rewarding.