The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Review
TRAVEL BOOKS
could change a story or revise history with astonishing audacity, and seemed to instantly believe the new version.” Like This Is Pleasure, it is about one person’s power over others. Yet Quin’s desire to know the secrets of the women he surrounds himself with, to understand “the strange, small, things that can sit oddly close to a person’s heart, and press against it painfully”, is driven in no small part by kindness. Dilly’s mother also likes to rummage around in other people’s emotional lives, but her motives are decidedly less altruistic. She’s “like a truffle pig”, her daughter thinks, “rooting around and unearthing ugly, tangled thoughts in people”.
Hall’s is a slim collection; each of the seven stories feels like a fragment of something larger, a shard of glass, sharp enough to cut to the bone. The virtuosity of Deborah Eisenberg’s collection Your Duck Is My Duck (Europa, £12.99), meanwhile, lies in the exact opposite. These stories are rich, round pearls, made smooth over time, six masterpieces in miniature, each with the depth of a novel. Eisenberg also deals in power. Who has it, and who doesn’t. A struggling artist accepts an invitation to stay with a wealthy married couple, where she has a front-row seat watching their marital drama play out against the backdrop of a rural community being destroyed by drought and fire. A group of ageing actors rant about how they’ve been portrayed in a memoir by the grandson of one of their departed peers. “Whoever he is, it’s not his story. He’s inserted himself into it,” one fumes. A young woman with an uncanny ability to experience words – “heating up, expanding, exploding into pictures of things, shooting off in all directions, then flaming out, leaving behind cinders and husks, a litter of tiny, empty, winged corpses, like scorched gnats or angels” – is sent to a hospital for dystopian reprogramming.
Eisenberg’s prose has a similar volatility. Her sentences mutate on the page. Take the opening line of the first story: “Way back – oh, not all that long ago, actually, just a couple of years, but back before I’d gotten a glimpse of the gears and levers and pulleys that dredge the future up from the earth’s core to its surface – I was going to lots of parties.” Reading Eisenberg is a blast. “I’m hurtling through time, strapped to an explosive device, my life,” thinks one of her narrators, and I felt the same. This is some of the best fiction I’ve read all year.
When Umberto Eco died in February 2016, he left no shortage of published works behind him. Aside from the seven novels written between
1980 and 2015, he was a prolific essayist and lecturer specialising in aesthetics and semiology (the study of signs and meaning, in all their guises), whose tastes ran from the obscurest corners of medieval theology right up to hard-boiled crime fiction and classic pin-ups. From the first publication of his thesis on aesthetics in Thomas Aquinas in 1956 up to the articles collected in 2016’s Chronicles of a Liquid Society, his non-fiction output amounted to more than 40 books – among them a classic technical work on the philosophy of language (A Theory of Semiotics) and a modest manual called How to Write a Thesis that, at the last count, has seen 23 editions in
Italy and been translated into 17 languages. Even if they do not quite scratch the same itch as The Name of the Rose or The Prague Cemetery, there is plenty for fans to dig into.
None of this, though, is to say that more is not welcome. On the Shoulders of Giants – collecting 12 lectures given at Milan’s Milanesiana festival between 2001 and 2015 – captures Eco on some of his most generous and scintillating form as a lecturer, breezing along with a lifetime’s material at his fingertips. Despite disclaimers about the daunting nature of the topics handed to him by the festival’s organisers – “Don’t blame me,” Eco remarks, “if the Milanesiana returns a little obsessively to intractable subjects” – the themes are all classic
Eco: progress, tradition and novelty; conspiracies, secrets, and secret societies; the absolute and the relative; the sacred and the invisible; beauty and ugliness.
Late-career public talks are not really the place to expect someone of Eco’s stature to break new ground, and he does not.
But a little like the comedy pro’s trick of making rehearsed gags seem off the cuff, Eco can make his most habitual linkages and familiar leaps seem newfound. It remains a delight to watch him connect the “wondrous but perverse delight” that St Bernard of Clairvaux complained his 12th-century contemporaries were taking in representations of monsters and devils to our own pleasure in “portrayals of likeable aliens” in sci-fi, even if it reprises a similar point in On Beauty
(2004). And while the two essays on conspiracy and secrecy here are no match for the baroquely conspiratorial plots of Foucault’s Pendulum (1988) and Numero Zero (2015), they do make you wish
Eco was still around to have his say on QAnon or Flat Earthers.
There is also, as ever, much here that represents the condensation of many years thinking about the same habitual concerns, formulated with a directness and clarity almost offhand in its brilliance. Despite the occasional sense that Eco was performing some of his “greatest hits”, there is the odd insight here that made me think about things entirely afresh.
At one point, almost by way of an aside, he notes that “the first half of the 20th century was the stage for a dramatic struggle between the beauty of provocation or the arts of the avant-garde and the beauty of consumption” – nonchalantly encapsulating how “art for art’s sake” is, in its way, battling for the same aesthetic territory as materialistic glamour, a rivalry that would eventually be incarnated in Andy Warhol.
As ever, too, Eco’s range is startling. On the Shoulders of Giants delivers on the promise of its title, with Eco acting as a literary curator par excellence and letting writers from across history make his points for him. There are not many people around who could illustrate a point from Schiller’s On the Tragic Art (1792) by juxtaposing a 13th-century account of mob tortures inflicted on a deposed Byzantine king and a scene of extravagant gore inflicted on Commie spies in Mickey Spillane’s pulp thriller One Lonely Night (1951), but Eco does. And if such leaps occasionally seem showy – which they doubtless are – Eco’s eye for a wellchosen quotation tends to make them worth it. Finally, though, it is Eco’s own gift for a wellturned phrase that makes On the Shoulders of Giants such a welcome addition to his published works. Elegantly carried over into English by
Alastair McEwen, the essays here fizz with quotable moments.
The arbiters of contemporary taste dwell in “the gerontocratic centres of the international fashion business”; the “sublime” is “happily disproportionate” and “prospers in the shadows”; Oscar Wilde has “furor sententialis (which is an agreeable rhetorical incontinence)”. Eco can be quotably funny even on specialist ground, too. On the socalled Sapir-Whorf hypothesis in linguistics (the theory that our languages impose a “determined world view” on us), he points out that, at the least, “the Frenchman who uses glace to describe ice, ice lollies, ice cream, mirrors and window glass […] is not such a prisoner of his own language as to shave while looking at himself in an ice cream”.
The essays here are not uniformly brilliant – “Representations of the Sacred” fizzles, and “Paradoxes and Aphorisms” devolves into a definitional slog – but they show Eco for exactly what he was: an intellectual who was, above all else, good company. Posthumous collections often seem like a gathering of scraps; this one makes us feel how lucky we are to spend a little more time in his company.
‘She’s like a truffle pig, rooting around and unearthing ugly, tangled thoughts’
He leaps from Schiller to the pulp novels of Micky Spillane, then to the Byzantines
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