The name of the rose author7/8/2023 ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() Italian Vogue had just claimed that Eco was writing a novel based on the life of Mozart. He was wearing a tweed deerstalker and a large digital wristwatch-cum-calculator. Shuffling grumpily round his office, he lifted up and slammed down books. In late 1986, when I visited Eco at Bologna University, where he taught as professor of semiotics, an abstruse branch of literary theory, he appeared unsettled, and confessed that he felt “trapped” by his fame. Subsequently translated into 30 languages, it sold more than 10m copies worldwide, and was made into a film starring Sean Connery as the monk-detective, William of Baskerville. In some ways, as Eco was the first to admit, his medieval whodunnit was upmarket Arthur Hailey with ingenious modernist fripperies. An artful reworking of Conan Doyle, with Sherlock Holmes transplanted to 14th-century Italy, the book’s baggage of arcane erudition was designed to flatter the average reader’s intelligence. For relaxation, Eco played Renaissance airs on the recorder, and read dictionaries (he was a master of several foreign languages).Įco’s first, watershed novel, The Name of the Rose, was published in 1980. Linguistically technical, they were at once impishly humorous and robustly intellectual. His novels, which occasionally had the look and feel of encyclopedias, combined cultural influences ranging from TS Eliot to the Charlie Brown comic-strips. Umberto Eco, who has died aged 84, was a polymath of towering cleverness. ![]()
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