Umberto Eco died in 2016, and this book
was published in Italy under the title Papé Satàn Aleppe in the
same year. The original title (the English one is the subtitle in the
Italian) refers to a very ambiguous line in Dante that no-one really
understands.
Eco’s last novel, Numero Zero, seemed to me to be a
return to the form of The Name Of The Rose and Foucault’s Pendulum,
after a number of works which might charitably be described as
frolics of his own.
His novelistic career had always run in tandem
with his academic, non-fiction and journalistic work. But the reader
can only leave this volume with a sense of disappointment and
frustration. The book announces at the outset that it is a
compilation of various articles which Eco wrote fortnightly for the
magazine L’Espresso, in his column “La bustina di Minerva”.
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Gleefully and shamelessly, he refers to them as “jottings”,
“short notes” and “digressions on ideas come to mind”. Now,
had I been sitting, once every 14 days, with an espresso and
L’Espresso, I would probably have found much of the material
interesting and provocative.
But a column is not the same as a book.
And a lot of columns put together do not make a book. Eco had at
least tried to arrange them in some semblance of order, and included
a rather faint-hearted apology for repetitions.
But take page 147 in
a piece on female philosophers: as well as the well-known Hypatia of
Alexandria he mentions “Diotima the Socratic, Arete of Cyrene,
Nicarete of Megara, Hipparchia the Cynic, Theodora the Peripatetic
(in the philosophical sense of the word), Leontia the Epicurean and
Themistoclea the Pythagorean”.
Skip forward to page 153 and in a
piece called “Husbands of unknown wives” we read about “Diotima
the Socratic, Arete of Cyrene, Nicarete of Megara, Hipparchia the
Cynic, Theodora the Peripatetic (in the philosophical sense of the
word), Leontia the Epicurean and Themistoclea the Pythagorean”. Cut
and paste?
Will this do, Ed? Oh, and a few pages later we have
another piece on Hypatia of Alexandria. While one might laud Eco’s
championing of relatively little-known female philosophers, his
tendency to refer to girls rather than women and make frequent
analogies to prostitution, and a kind of salacious bass note in many
of these thrown-off off-cuts, rather undermine the feminist
credentials.
Eco structured the book around topics – and they are
very Eco concerns. There are five pieces on “cell phones” (how
quaint!) and 13 on the internet. Both make Eco a bit grumpy. There
are five on conspiracy theories in which he says conspiracy theories
are foolish.
There are 17 on mass media, even though some of them
would have been better in the section “On Books, Etc”. Indeed,
one of the best pieces is on the chronology of the Nero Wolfe novels
by Rex Stout, oddly placed in the mass media section.
Yet, at the
same time, it reveals one of the aspects that mar the whole book.
Widely renowned as a “semiotician” and public intellectual, I was
surprised at the intellectual paucity of the article. So Nero and
Archie, as well as Fritz, Theodore, Saul and Purley Stebbins, don’t
seem to age over the 33 novels?
One wonders what poor Eco would make
of Oor Wullie, who must be due his pensioner’s bus pass by now. Eco
knows a lot of things, but few of them deeply. When he turns to
politics, he is blasé and enraged at the same time.
There is a lot
of “on one hand this, on the other that”. What really stirs his
ire is when someone has said something about him with which he
disagrees, and despite maintaining the old Voltaire line about
“defending to the death your right to say it”, he harrumphs and
flusters.
His essays on religion are pretty anodyne stuff; yes, it
would be nice if more young people knew the Biblical stories – it
helps when you are reading Milton – and no, having a new Crusade is
not a good idea.
Well, blow me down with a feather. Terrorism is a
terrible thing, but we have to admit we caused the conditions which
allowed it to thrive. Crikey! Now there’s a new thought. There is
almost an element of comedy in pieces like “No, it’s not
pollution, it’s impurities in the air” – a satire of George W
Bush’s linguistic mishaps – or “Conciliatory oxymorons” on
political sleight-of-hand, since Eco repeatedly says he is not a
prophet, but these fulminations seem almost sweetly naïve given the
current incumbent of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.
Original review on: www.scotsman.com
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