The idea of a set of Mysterious Unknowns who direct the fate of the world without ever identifying themselves, even to each other, has had a very long history. They're a set of reflections and explanatory fictions - "errors" - that people once constructed to provide interpretations of history, mystery, society, the world. Eco calls them "exercises in erudition", and that is exactly what they are. This is the Eco that now reappears in Serendipities, a slim collection of five left-handed essays and lectures, mostly first delivered in the US. And anyone who wishes to understand the magical and learned nature of the novel genre, as a playful modern master of the form has come to understand it, should read his Reflections on The Name of the Rose (1984).īeyond the best-selling novelist, there is (thank goodness) a wise, learned and fascinating academic, a teasing Borgesian joker, a hunter through the great library of ideas that have shaped many of the events of our history and given us our fiction. Anyone wanting to consider how, as serious literary critics, we might set out intelligently to interpret a text can be sent to Interpretation and Overinterpretation (1992), the outcome of a superb and sensible series of lectures delivered in Cambridge.
Anyone who is interested in the decoding of the strange hyper-reality of American culture - which becomes more and more the condition of our own - can be happily directed to the lively essays of his Faith in Fakes (1986).
Umberto Eco, I'd better say, is one of my favourite writers: and not simply for his achievement as a great and best-selling novelist, but as a journalist, social commentator and exceedingly cunning scholar.
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