Eco’s life novel ends at (p) age 84
Italian author of The Name of the Rose was known for his fascination with semiotics
rome — Italian author Umberto Eco, a philosopher who wrote best-selling novels including The
Name of the Rose, has died at 84, Italian media said on Saturday, quoting his family.
Eco, who had been suffering from cancer, passed away at his home late on Friday, La Repubblica said on its website.
“The world has lost one of the most important men in contemporary culture,” the daily said, while the Corriere della Sera said: “Umberto Eco, one of Italy’s most celebrated intellectuals, is dead.”
Eco was born on January 5, 1932, at Alessandria in the northern Italian region of Piedmont.
He leaves a wife, Renate Ramge Eco, a German art teacher whom he married in 1962 and with whom he had a son and a daughter. His family name was reportedly an acronym of the Latin ex caelis oblatus, “a gift from the heavens”, which was given to his grandfather, a founding father, by a city official.
The young Umberto had a Roman Catholic upbringing, being educated at one of the Salesian institution’s schools.
His father was very keen for him to read law, but instead he took up medieval philosophy and literature at the University of Turin. —
rome — Italian author Umberto Eco, who intrigued, puzzled and delighted readers worldwide with his best-selling historical novel The
Name of the Rose, has died. Spokeswoman Lori Glazer of Eco’s American publisher, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, said that Eco died on Friday at age 84. She could not immediately confirm the cause of death or where he died.
Author of a wide range of books, Eco was fascinated with the obscure and the mundane, and his books were both engaging narratives and philosophical and intellectual exercises. The bearded, heavy-set scholar, critic and novelist took on the esoteric theory of semiotics, the study of signs and symbols in language; on popular culture icons like James Bond; and on the technical languages of the Internet.
The Name of the Rose transformed him from academic to international celebrity, especially after the medieval thriller set in a monastery was made into a film starring Sean Connery in 1986.
The Name of the Rose sold millions of copies, a feat for a narrative filled with partially translated Latin quotes and puzzling musings on the nature of symbols. But Eco talked about his inspiration with characteristic irony: “I began writing ... prodded by a seminal idea: I felt like poisoning a monk.” His second novel, the 1988
“Foucault’s Pendulum,” a byzantine tale of plotting publishers and secret sects also styled as a thriller, was successful, too —though it was so complicated that an annotated guide accompanied it to help the reader follow the plot.
In 2000, when awarding Eco Spain’s prestigious Prince of Asturias Prize for communications, the jury praised his works “of universal distribution and profound effect that are already classics in contemporary thought”.
Eco was born on January 5, 1932 in Alessandria, a town east of Turin; he said the reserved culture
I was a perfectionist and wanted to make them look as though they had been printed, so I wrote them in capital letters and made up title pages, summaries, illustrations
Umberto Eco
He was an extraordinary example of European intellectualism, uniting a unique intelligence of the past with an inexhaustible capacity to anticipate the future
Matteo Renzi, Italian PM
there was a source for his “world vision: a scepticism and an aversion to rhetoric”. He received a university degree in philosophy from the University of Turin in 1954, beginning his fascination with the Middle Ages and the aesthetics of text. He later defined semiotics as “a philosophy of language”.
He had always loved storytelling and as a teenager wrote comic books and fantasy novels.
“I was a perfectionist and wanted to make them look as though they had been printed, so I wrote them in capital letters and made up title pages, summaries, illustrations,” he told The Paris Review in 1988. “It was so tiring that I never finished any of them. I was at that time a great writer of unaccomplished masterpieces.”
Eco remained involved with academia, becoming the first professor of semiotics at the University of Bologna in 1971. He also lectured at institutions worldwide and was a fellow at elite colleges like Oxford University and Columbia University. Twenty-three institutions had awarded him honorary degrees by 2000.
But Eco was also able to bridge the gap between popular and intellectual
culture, publishing his musings in daily newspapers and Italy’s leading weekly magazine
L’Espresso.
Eco started in journalism in the 1950s, working for the Italian state-owned television RAI. From the 1960s onwards, he wrote columns for several Italian dailies. He also wrote children’s books, including The Bomb and the General (La
Bomba e il Generale).
In 2003, Eco published a collection of lectures on translations, Mouse or Rat? Translation as Negotiation, and a year later he wrote the novel The Mysterious Flame of
Queen Loana, a story about an antiquarian book dealer who loses his memory. Recent works include From the
Tree to the Labyrinth, an essay on semiology and language published in 2007 and Turning Back the Clock, a collection of essays on various subjects, ranging from the recent wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, antiSemitism and his staunch criticism of Silvio Berlusconi’s conservative government. His most recent novel, Numero Zero, came out last year and recalled a political scandal from the 1990s that helped lead to Berlusconi’s rise. —
Books are not made to be believed, but to be subjected to inquiry. When we consider a book, we mustn’t ask ourselves what it says but what it means
The Name of the Rose