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(Book Jacket Status: Jacketed)

A spectacular best seller and now a classic, The Name of the Rose catapulted Umberto Eco, an Italian professor of semiotics turned novelist, to international prominence. An erudite murder mystery set in a fourteenth-century monastery, it is not only a gripping story but also a brilliant exploration of medieval philosophy, history, theology, and logic.

In 1327, Brother William of Baskerville is sent to investigate a wealthy Italian abbey whose monks are suspected of heresy. When his mission is overshadowed by seven bizarre deaths patterned on the book of Revelation, Brother William turns detective, following the trail of a conspiracy that brings him face-to-face with the abbey’s labyrinthine secrets, the subversive effects of laughter, and the medieval Inquisition. Caught in a power struggle between the emperor he serves and the pope who rules the Church, Brother William comes to see that what is at stake is larger than any mere political dispute–that his investigation is being blocked by those who fear imagination, curiosity, and the power of ideas.

The Name of the Rose offers the reader not only an ingeniously constructed mystery—complete with secret symbols and coded manuscripts—but also an unparalleled portrait of the medieval world on the brink of profound transformation. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (308)

5 stars is not enough for this extraordinaire book
I don't know what edition some reviewers were reading, but my spanish edition (I'm from México) comes with the translation of latin passages.
Reading this book made me feel more educated, well read and intellectual, because it made me study and investigate more about medieval history and Latin. Besides, I don't think you have to learn latin to understand the book (The latin phrases don't add much to the story or plot). It's full of mistery, and medieval history and that's what I liked about it. Why does it always have to be the Americans who complain about other languages?? It happened with Inglourious Basterds and Pan's Labyrinth... I just don't get it. This is not a complicated book at all, I think Foucault's Pendulum was complicated. This one was a pleasurable reading. I can't wait to read the rest of Eco's books.

What's in a Name?
There's nothing like reading a book by an expert. I don't mean an expert writer, but a book written by a man who breathes the subject he's writing about. An expert writer might have fouled this up, but Eco is a master of medieval history.

The Name of the Rose is narrated by a dying monk, Adso, who wishes to set the facts straight on events he had a small part in back in the early 1300s.

Adso, a Benedictine monk was apprenticed to William of Baskerville, a Franciscan Friar with a gift for observation and a keen wit. Adso plays Watson to William's Sherlock, and serves as an able foil and unassuming witness to the events that transpire.

While travelling, William and Adso stop at a rather unique monastery, where the tale picks up. The monastery itself would probably be ordinary, if it weren't for the library it hosts, which turns out to be a labyrinth, with a secret room. It also happens to be forbidden for anyone but the librarian to enter, much to William's chagrin.

William is asked by the abbot, a man named Abo, to investigate a recent death: a novice has fallen to his death recently. William accepts readily, and focuses his energies on discovering why and how young Adelmo went head over teakettle.

There is a reasonably large cast of characters here, and for a new author (at the time), Eco does a marvelous job of characterization. I can still picture William, Adso, Ubertino, Malachi, Abo, Bernard, and especially Jorge, all in my mind's eye.

The murder mystery, is mostly an aside. William is there for a meeting, between himself and other monks who find themselves out of favor in the Pope's eyes. Here we find monks as men, who commit all kinds of sins, think all kinds of sinful thoughts, and find all sorts of reasons to justify them.

Philosophy and history are thick on these pages, with debates about whether Christ laughed, or whether the Church (and Christians) should or should not live in poverty; all manner of heresies of the time; knowledge, its benefits and dangers; and contests of power between the Pope, the Benedictine, Franciscan, and Dominican orders, and the Holy Roman Emperor. Of all things, laughter brings the house down.

It has been a long time since I've read a novel of such depth, and I enjoyed it thoroughly. It is laced with Latin and symbolism, its love scene is depicted in the language of the Bible's Song of Songs, and Adso even shares an apocalyptic dream worthy of Revelation. The Name of the Rose is truly a remarkable achievement, and I will never question its place on my shelf.

Entralling but needs a second reading to understand parts of it
"The early history of comedy is obscure," Aristotle wrote in his Poetics, "because it was not taken seriously." Whether or not the Greek sage meant to make a joke, this first novel written by Italy's premier intellectual expands on his theme. The Name of the Rose is a deep, brilliant, and remarkably engaging detective story set in fourteenth-century Italy. Brother William of Baskerville is a guest at an abbey where monks are being murdered in the most grotesque fashion. Moreover, behind the murders lurks the "true" story of the missing second volume of the Poetics, in which Aristotle delves into the divine nature of comedy. Employing the logic of Aristotle, the theology of Thomas Aquinas, and maybe the deductive reasoning of Sherlock Holmes (which I admit, I may have been leaning towards due to the combination of 'detective' with 'Baskerville'), he begins to uncover the abbey's darkest secrets. Truly enthralling! A second reading may be enough to push this book up to 5-star status for me.

Could Not Get Into the Novel, Needed Reader's Guide
So, Catholic monks set somewhere in the 13th-14th century middle ages era, with a fantastically (boringly) detailed opening routine.Great description of monastic daily life, especially the in-period misogyny.What made the book not work (for me) was the abundance of obscure (plot relevant) Latin.Plus the narrator tends to be non-specific, meaning the reader is invited to deduce for themselves.The Name of the Rose was more philosopher with symbolism than murder mystery, and I would have enjoyed it more with footnotes or translator's notes.William Weaver's translations (book originally written in Italian) could have used these.

Alas, I did not have a reader's guide, so rather than appreciating the author's use of obscurity, I was left out of the story and put the book down.If my background tended more towards Latin, the priesthood, or historic literature, my opinion would be positive.This is a niche work, not for the general public, who should consider watching the movie.My softcover copy states on the cover it is a major motion picture from Twentieth Century Fox starring Sean Connery and Murray Abraham.

Interesting Murder Mystery
In 1327, in an Italian abbey, a monk has been murdered.The abbot calls on William, another monk and former inquisitor, to travel to the abbey and investigate the murder.William brings with him novice monk Adso, a young man with a thirst for knowledge and a feeling of awe about his mentor.

Upon their arrival at the abbey, William and Adso find that life is focused around the library, a mysterious and possibly dangerous labyrinth of wonders.Nobody is allowed entrance except the librarian, who has the power to decide if a requested book is appropriate for any particular monk to read.

There are stories about strange lights and extraordinary powers wandering the library at night, but William suspects there is a more worldly explanation for the things the monks observe.

Soon after the arrival of William and Adso, another monk is dead and it begins to look as though there might be a pattern to the murders.But with his own movements restricted and many of the monks doing their best to thwart the investigation, will William be able to find the murderer before another victim falls?

Parts of this book were over my head.There was a great deal of description of religious practices and of the history and politics of the time as they affected the different sects of Catholicism.It was worth it to get through those parts, though, as the stories of the investigation, of William's character, and the relationship between William and Adso were so fascinating.These were great characters, inhabiting a really interesting murder mystery. ... Read more

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Customer Reviews (421)

Mystery, Adventure, Mind Twisting Conspiracies, Oh My
I picked this book up more than a decade ago.I started reading it once but couldn't get into it.When The DaVinci Code came out, somebody recommended this book to me as a "thinking man's DaVinci Code."And yet it still took me another 4-5 years to read it.I'm sad that it took me so long to finally get to this book.

The first thing I'll say is that this is an incredibly dense book.I'm generally a pretty fast reader.But with this book, my reading speed was generally cut at least in half either by the writing or by forcing myself to slow it down.There is just so much going on that this book truly requires more time spent on each page.

The high level story is actually fairly simplistic.To an extent I would almost simplify it and say that this is the story of what happens prior to the opening pages of the DaVinci Code novel...the book opens in a museum with our protagonist, Casaubon anxiously awaiting some midnight ritual that could result in death but then the next ~400+ pages are told in flashback to let us know how we got to this point.So where DaVinci Code starts with a ritualistic death in a museum and works to solve the mystery, Foucault starts with the musuem but then backtracks to show how we got there and (eventually) ends with the events in the museum.

The story involves a group of overly educated folks working together at a publishing house.As they receive a number of outlandish books about various conspiracy theories, they finally decide to create their own theory from their own knowledge and information as well as by piecing together bits from all of these other books.They create a very coherent plan that outlines centuries/millenia of plotting by Templars and other Holy Orders.Naturally, their plan comes too close to the truth (or does it?) and gets them all in trouble.

Interestingly, this basic synopsis was outlined on the back cover of the book.However, aside from the first few pages in the museum, it takes a few hundred pages before the group of people get together at the publishing house and start working on their own plan.

Instead of jumping right into the action and giving us an intense action-packed novel, the author provides us a "teaser" of the action to come (the museum) but then takes us back in time many years and allows us to follow the educational pattern that eventually provides the adequate knowledge to develop this intricate plan.

We follow Casaubon from Europe to South America and back again over decades.We relive his interesting experiences with different cults, mystics, and others.We're also taken on flashbacks as he talks with one of the other men, Belbo, about his childhood during World War II and there are numerous segments of psychological analysis of his experiences.Indeed, even though we are living the story through Casaubon's narration, there are a number of segments told from Belbo's point of view either as he spoke to Casaubon or as Casaubon reads some journal-type writing by Belbo.

So, the general story of this book is fairly simple and easy to follow.But the amount of information presented is staggering.It took me a number of chapters to get a feel for the narrative style but once I did, I found a lot of passages to be very humorous and witty.

Naturally I didn't have time or energy to go through and validate each of the various historical commentaries made by the characters. They were all presented with a great sense of authority.Indeed, part of the theme of the novel, at least from my perspective, is that readers SHOULD question what they're presented rather than just accepting it as fact.Furthermore, even if there is plenty of truth in what is presented, that doesn't necessarily mean that the end result is true.

Through the absurdity with which Casaubon and his friends develop "The Plan" and the further absurdity by which it is accepted, Eco seems to be presenting the argument that conspiracy theories and theorists are far to eager to jump at their desired solution rather than appropriately seeking out the true and logical answer.I especially loved a scene near the end of the book where Casaubon's girlfriend Lia reads "The Plan" and gives her own interpretation of their pieced together facts...an interpretation much more mundane and far less dangerous.

While it took me a long time to get into this book and a long time to finish it due to the density of reading....I really enjoyed this book.I loved hearing the various historical stories (true or not) and the interesting analysis of the motives and ideas of these various cults and groups.The action/adventure of the story was a lot of fun too, though in terms of page volume, that was definitely a very small portion of the overall work.

I certainly can't recommend it to everyone.But if you're a history buff, a conspiracy theory fan, a literary buff or just looking for a deep and thought provoking read (and you have the time and energy to invest in it), then definitely check this out.

****
3.5 out of 5 stars

Why all the hype?
I can't for the life of me, see why people get so starry-eyed about this book. It started out interesting but then degenerated into a meandering morass of pretentious prose. After 240 pages, I completely lost interest. I gave it two stars because the guy clearly can write; it just doesn't seem like he has much to actually say. I realize that I'm supposed to think this is brilliant but this seems like little more than pseudo-intellectual masturbation...

Yawn.

Not recommended.

It's a shopping list
I enjoyed this book all the more because my then girlfriend, now wife of eleven years, couldn't finish it first time round. She was always an even more avid book reader than I was and would gamely plough on through books I gave up on. She didn't get it and I enjoyed that. Eco is a very clever academic who writes for the pleasure of showing his knowledge and erudition. He sets up a much better Da Vinci Code scenario than Dan Brown could produce in a lifetime. There is certainly a case of plagiarism to answer, but if I remember correctly, Eco was gracious about the 'similarity' between the two books. No similarity in the quality of the writing, but Brown should worry given that his book is much better matched to the capacity of his audience. A bit like 'Manhunter' v 'Red Dragon' in anpother context. The story is laid out in other reviews, but the key is that the men allow themselves to be sucked into the very things they set out to expose - the bogus nature of secret societies, protecting arcane knowledge that is too dangerous for the world at large to learn. In truth, it's a shopping list, but it takes a practical female mind to work it out, by which time it's too late...
It's not Holy Writ, it's not dross, but it does take a while to read and it would help if you had some sense of European history. Give it a go.

A Cosmic Mess
I wanted to read this novel for a long, long time.Until I finally got to it.Well, maybe it's not so good to wait so long.As time passes, expectations get higher.You find yourself disappointed. All this to say that I felt Eco and his Foucault's Pendulum let me down.While there are some interesting philosophical and historical effects, there is a pervading self-indulgence and a messiness that kill the charm of Eco's prose.
Possibly it works better in the original Italian.But I doubt it.
The plot?Well, there is no plot per say.Not really. I don't mind this that much.I have, after all, read Beckett's The Unnameable.But there is music and rhythm and something almost mystical in Beckett's writing.Intrinsic to the syntax itself.As if the prose itself were breathing.And it should.
But it never quite picks up with Eco.It jump starts here and there.And there are brilliant moments.The problem is that they get intertwined with useless ones.
The beginning is good.Here is an excerpt from the third page: "The Pendulum told me that, as everything moved --earth, solar system, nebulae and black holes, all the children of the great cosmic expansion --one single point stood still: a pivot, bolt, or hook around which the universe could move.And I was now taking part in that supreme experience."
Here's the irony.This is exactly what happens to the novel.While the world keeps moving, the rest of the plot is like the Pendulum.It stands still.Perhaps that's what Eco wants.But it doesn't work.
And it could have, since the leitmotiv is the history of the Templars.How instead of being destroyed they kept on as secret societies, became along the centuries various branches of freemasonry, might have known the secret the Holy Grail.There are some satanic rituals, the question of the sacred measurements of the Great Pyramid.But it's all disseminated.It could have the structure of a "detective story," as Anthony Burgess' blurb on the back cover suggests, but it fails to captivate the way a good detective story should. Or if it does, it does so intermittently. It navigates between philosophy (Is this all real, or is it all a giant joke?), science (aforementioned measurements) and fiction (friends in the publishing world trying to discover the secret of Templar and freemasonic societies fouled with WWII stories?). The result: a cosmic mess!
Eco writes like a professor (that he is) writing a novel.Seeking effects and cleverness and seldom being respectful of his readership.Is he shying away from entertaining the public?Does he consider entertainment too low a place for his lofty undertakings?I don't know.What I know is that most of the authors who are today in major literary anthologies added a sense of entertainment to their ideas and high creativity ---any good artist seeks the participation of an audience. That's the combo that makes writing interesting.And memorable.

Polished and Witty ;)
IMHO, this is a practically perfect story.yes, it's long and at times tedious, but what a fabulous concept and execution!It stands as one of my all time Top Five Favorite books and perhaps best is listening to it as read by Tim Curry!A true delight!For details on why it's so fab, read the 03 San Diego review or 2000 NY review on this page. I agree!But, give yourself a treat on your next trip and let Curry thrill you.Magnificent! ... Read more

Product Description
Now in paperback, Umberto Eco’s groundbreaking and much-acclaimed first illustrated book has been a critical success since its first publication in 2004. What is beauty? Umberto Eco, among Italy’s finest and most important contemporary thinkers, explores the nature, the meaning, and the very history of the idea of beauty in Western culture. The profound and subtle text is lavishly illustrated with abundant examples of sublime painting and sculpture and lengthy quotations from writers and philosophers. This is the first paperback edition of History of Beauty, making this intellectual and philosophical journey with one of the world’s most acclaimed thinkers available in a more compact and affordable format.Amazon.com Review
Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, but it also has a lot to do with the beholder's cultural standards. In History of Beauty, renowned author Umberto Eco sets out to demonstrate how every historical era has had its own ideas about eye-appeal. Pages of charts that track archetypes of beauty through the ages ("nude Venus," "nude Adonis," and so forth) may suggest that this book is a historical survey of beautiful people portrayed in art. But History of Beauty is really about the history of philosophical and perceptual notions of perfection and how they have been applied to ideas and objects, as well as to the human body. This survey ranges over such themes as the mathematics of ideal proportions, the problem of representing ugliness, the fascination of the exotic and art for art's sake. Along the way, the text examines the intersection of standards of beauty with Christian belief, notions of the Sublime, the philosophies of Kant and Hegel, and bourgeois culture. More than 300 illustrations trace the history of Western art as it relates, in the broadest sense, to the topic of beauty.

Customer Reviews (16)

A Beautiful Reference for All Lovers of Beauty
This book makes a fantastic reference books for any sort of romantic--artists, writers, musicians, nature-lovers, philosophers, and scientists.However, I need to make it clear that this is not an ART book.In this book, Eco's phenomenal critique on the history of Beauty through Western eyes is supported through references not only to painting and sculpture, but also philosophy writings, poetry, and even advertising.The colour plates are lovely and, even though this is a rather hefty book (especially in hardcover), it is a quick and enjoyable read.

Makes a great gift for any artists, poets, or students.

Umberto Eco Explores The Aesthetics of Beauty.
Italian medievalist, philosopher, academic, literary critic and novelist (The Name of the Rose) Umberto Eco is an intellectual (with over thirty Honorary Doctorates from universities throughout the world) who knows a thing or two about aesthetics and semiotics.His highly-acclaimed study on the aesthetics of beauty, History of Beauty (tr. by Alastair McEwen, 2004) (STORIA DELLA BELLEZZA)precedes his equally superb study On Ugliness (tr. by Alastair McEwen, 2007) (STORIA DELLA BRUTTEZZA).Eco maintains in his historical and cultural "review of ideas of Beauty over the centuries" that, although beauty may be "in the eye of the beholder," the concept of beauty must also be defined by the beholder's cultural standards.Eco's inspired survey of beauty reveals that every age has had its own philosophical and cultural notions of beauty, from Greek statues of "Nude Venus" and "Nude Adonis," to Christian standards of beauty in depicting Jesus, to Pollock, to notions of the Sublime, the philosophies of Kant and Hegel, and to popular culture. Eco's eclectic study juxtaposes more than 300 breathtaking images with his own insights on beauty, along with quotations from other writers and philosophers of the day including Boethius, Plotinus, Petrarch, Xenophon, Zola, and Barthes, among others. It should be noted that Eco's treatise focuses primarily on on the human form in Western culture, and ultimately sets the stage for his companion volume, On Ugliness, by demonstrating that without a notion of beauty, the concept of ugliness would not exist. This study will appeal to anyone with an interest in the concepts of beauty, love, the unattainable woman, and the notion of ugliness.Eco's History of Beauty is highly recommended (I find it nearly impossible to put this book down), with the caveat that the History of Beauty and On Ugliness have been published in a single combined set:History of Beauty and On Ugliness Boxed Set: Boxed Set Edition.

G. Merritt

Needs To Be Better Researched
Seems to be a reworking of earlier books like Arthur Marwick's book BEAUTY IN HISTORY.To assume that art is
a representation of beauty of it's time is for future people to think we valued Picasso's notions of ideal form in his abstract depictions of women.Just as people falsely assume Ruben was painting beautiful women, he was doing nothing of the sort.His journals contain amble notes about how he preferred the male form.Sometimes art is just an expression or an exercise in politics, skill and who is paying the bill.

History of Beauty
This is an excellent archive of writing about and images of beauty from Classical Antiquity to the present day. The one thing that the book makes abundantly clear is that what is considered "beautiful" is constantly changing. The concept of that which is beautiful is as old as the human race itself and will continue to be redefined as long as history lasts. Umberto Eco's strength in bringing this collection of texts and images together is his use of little known sources from the Middle Ages as well as Italian Renaissance authors such as Baldassare Castiglione who deserve to be better known. Binding, design and organisation are all first rate and this is a very readable and accessable text. Beauty is all that pleases................

Great
I don't know how to put it, but I found the book to be quite fascinating in terms of giving specific levels of the idea of beauty in culture, society, and especially in history. It adjusts the idea of beauty and how it affects everyone's perception of psychology versus the time periods of different eras and such. It is enlightening and informative, as well as a book that keeps the notion of beauty in a broad perspective so as to not lean to one side more then another. It is fascinating to know how intelligent Eco really is, and that he seems to have moved my artistic passion through notion of looking at beauty through the eyes of a person who has been able to grasp this concept thoroughly well. ... Read more

Product Description
In these “impishly witty and ingeniously irreverent” essays (Atlantic Monthly), “the Andy Rooney of academia” (Los Angeles Times) takes on computer jargon, librarians, bureaucrats, meals on airplanes, bad coffee, taxi drivers, 33-function watches, soccer fans, and more. Translated by William Weaver.A Helen and Kurt Wolff Book ... Read more

Customer Reviews (21)

Great Service and book
I purchased the book and and received it right away.I received an email from seller asking me if it arrived on time.Truly great service. I highly recomend this seller.

One of a kind
Witty, charming, intelectual and one of the kind - Umberto Eco at his best. As it is packed with essay's - nowadays pretty much forgotten writing style, I recommend it to everyone who has to spend long hours in the airports and in flights - helps to relax and stop thinking about what a waste of time these hours are. That's what I did.

Collection of funny essays 1-4 pages long
I read this 8 years or so ago and I bought the book to read them again. They are humorous essays on contemporary life. Though they have been written in the 1980s their charm is lasting and for me offer an interesting illustration of how things stay the same.

For example, Eco speaks of receiving 'unsolicited faxes' that interfere with his ability to read important faxes. This reminded me of the problem we have with email spam.

I find these humorous essays much more entertaining than his novels like Foucault's Pendulum.

fine intellectual entertainment
If you enjoy irony, satire and or parody, you will be entertained by these essays.It may surprise you that a well educated man can write so humorously and so subtly.Though I am not sure why that should come as a surprise.Enjoy.

A book for many journeys
In this collection of wonderfully sardonic essays Umberto Eco demonstrates the qualities that have made his a great novelist: attention to detail, to people, and his erudition.And to the delight of many-he displays yet another (perhaps unexpected) quality: a wicked yet welcoming wit.

For these essays about many different journeys are welcoming because they are so recognizable.There is the journey (without) a watch; the journey of a child eating ice cream; the (very literal) airplane journey with attendant gadget advertising; the journeys of modern communication via a fax machine-and many, many more.

These essays drew me into an incredible world, made me laugh and grimace at the same time.But above all, they forced me to recognize my world--and myself.

This is a good book to take with you on a journey-no matter where you are headed.I recommend it.
... Read more

Product Description
It is April 1204, and Constantinople, the splendid capital of the Byzantine Empire, is being sacked and burned by the knights of the Fourth Crusade. Amid the carnage and confusion, one Baudolino saves a historian and high court official from certain death at the hands of the crusading warriors and proceeds to tell his own fantastical story.

Born a simple peasant in northern Italy, Baudolino has two major gifts-a talent for learning languages and a skill in telling lies. When still a boy he meets a foreign commander in the woods, charming him with his quick wit and lively mind. The commander-who proves to be Emperor Frederick Barbarossa-adopts Baudolino and sends him to the university in Paris, where he makes a number of fearless, adventurous friends.

Spurred on by myths and their own reveries, this merry band sets out in search of Prester John, a legendary priest-king said to rule over a vast kingdom in the East-a phantasmagorical land of strange creatures with eyes on their shoulders and mouths on their stomachs, of eunuchs, unicorns, and lovely maidens.

With dazzling digressions, outrageous tricks, extraordinary feeling, and vicarious reflections on our postmodern age, this is Eco the storyteller at his brilliant best.
Amazon.com Review
The most playful of historical novelists, Umberto Eco has absorbed thereal lesson of history: that there is no such thing as the absolute truth.In Baudolino, he hands his narrative to an Italian peasant who hasmanaged, through good luck and a clever tongue, to become the adopted son ofthe Emperor, Frederick Barbarossa, and a minister of his court in theclosing years of the 12th century.Baudolino's other gift is forspontaneous but convincing lies, and so his unfolding tale--as recounted in1204 to a nobleman of Constantinople, while the fires of the Fourth Crusaderage around them--exemplifies the Cretan Liar's Paradox: He can't bebelieved.Why not, then, make his story as outrageous as possible?In thecourse of his picaresque tale, Baudolino manages to touch on nearly everymajor theme, conflict, and boondoggle of the Middle Ages: the Crusades; thetroubadours; the legend of the Holy Grail; the rise of the cathedral cities;the position of Jews; the market in relics; the local rivalries that madeItaly so vulnerable to outside attack; and the perennial power strugglesbetween the pope and the emperor.With the help of alcohol and a mysteriousMoorish concoction called "green honey," Baudolino and his ragtag friendsengage in typical scholastic debates of the period, trying to determine thedimensions of Solomon's Temple and the location of the Earthly Paradise.And when the Emperor needs support in his claims for saintly lineage, whobut Baudolino can craft the perfect letter of homage from the legendaryPrester John, Holy (and wholly fictitious) Christian King of the East?Agiddy and exasperating romp, Baudolino will draw you into itslabyrinthine inventions and half-truths, even if you know better. --Regina Marler ... Read more

Customer Reviews (104)

Umberto Eco
If you want a historical fiction view of the Middle Ages, this is perfect. While cassette tapes are rarely used, these arrived in perfect condition. The sound is excellent.

Ultimately Unsatisfying
This was the first (and so far only) work of Umberto Eco I have read and it ultimately lost my interest.I am loath to put a book down without finishing it, but this was a rare exception for me.I really enjoyed the story when it focused on the growth of the Italian city-states and when Eco focused our attention on the emergent Alessandria, but as the story continued and Eco left this behind to delve into the quest for the Holy Grail and the Kingdom of Prester John the book just lost my interest.It's well written and the characters are well developed, the plot was just too scattered across theology, mythology, the Sack of Constantinople, and the Italian city-states for my taste.

the fourth, another different UE novel
I swallowed this book as the most delicious dessert - as I did with other Eco's novels. He's getting older and maybe the mind game is not that powerful as in foucault's pendulum but his craft-man-ship-ness just increases.

Baudolino is almost epic. No, it is epic. As any epic novel which imply the hero's travel there and back. But still this epic canvas is underlaid with post-modern historical (in many ways) discussions.

Viva Umberto!

Intellectual AND entertaining
In this delightful and intriguing tale of adventure, Umberto Eco leads us through 12th-century Italy, France, Byzantium and lands much farther east. We move through history and myth, from the Holy and Roman Emperor Frederick to the realm of Prester John.

The protagonist of the story is an Italian peasant boy named Baudolino. He is a born teller of tall tales, but after Frederick adopts him, he puts his creative mind to work in many ingenious ways, often solving otherwise intractable diplomatic problems. Baudolino is educated in Paris. With a group of friends from his student days and some from his hometown, he joins Frederick on the Third Crusade. After Frederick dies in mysterious circumstances, Baudolino and eleven others set out to find Prester John.

With his usual skill with language and his intimate knowledge of medieval history, Eco leads us through wild lands where Baudolino and company encounter all the mythical creatures they have read about in books in Europe. They finally arrive at the city of the deacon who is the designated successor of Prester John. Near this city, Baudolino falls in love with a Hypatia and fathers a child with her. But before the child is born, a war breaks out, Hypatia sends word that she and her people are fleeing, and Baudolino and company head back west.

Back in the west Baudolino tells his tale to a Byzantine official named Niketas. He then learns, to his astonishment, that he may have inadvertently contributed to the death of his adopted father Frederick. Devastated, he becomes a stylite for a while (i.e., he takes up residence in a small hut at the top of a pillar, a form of monasticism). After several months of this, he heads back east again, to fulfill some promises he made along the way and to seek Hypatia and their child.

The story starts out in a very interesting fashion, and ends leaving us wanting more, but reasonably sure that Baudolino will fulfill his dreams.

The picture of a middle ages historian as a liar?
The Holy Roman Empire was a misguided attempt to resurrect a civilization that should have been left dead? In the Umberto Eco romp through semi-ancient history, he lies about Prester John and other topics much as he did in his other novels like the entirely fake Foucault's Pendulum? The Greek -Christian kingdom of Ethiopia is usually thought to be the root of the Priest John kingdom?
I see, here, Umberto Eco talking about himself as being Baudolino like?
A liar who makes up historical myths
when he knows better?
I'm not a big fan of this sort of historical distortion. ... Read more

Product Description
In the mold of his acclaimed History of Beauty, renowned cultural critic Umberto Eco’s On Ugliness is an exploration of the monstrous and the repellant in visual culture and the arts. What is the voyeuristic impulse behind our attraction to the gruesome and the horrible? Where does the magnetic appeal of the sordid and the scandalous come from? Is ugliness also in the eye of the beholder? Eco’s encyclopedic knowledge and captivating storytelling skills combine in this ingenious study of the Ugly, revealing that what we often shield ourselves from and shun in everyday life is what we’re most attracted to subliminally. Topics range from Milton’s Satan to Goethe’s Mephistopheles; from witchcraft and medieval torture tactics to martyrs, hermits, and penitents; from lunar births and disemboweled corpses to mythic monsters and sideshow freaks; and from Decadentism and picturesque ugliness to the tacky, kitsch, and camp, and the aesthetics of excess and vice.With abundant examples of painting and sculpture ranging from ancient Greek amphorae to Bosch, Brueghel, and Goya among others, and with quotations from the most celebrated writers and philosophers of each age, this provocative discussion explores in-depth the concepts of evil, depravity, and darkness in art and literature. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (6)

Umberto Eco Explores the Aesthetics of Ugliness.
"Concepts of beauty and ugliness are relative to various historical periods or various cultures and, to quote Xenophanes of Colophon (according to Clement of Alexandria, Stromata, V, 110), 'But had the oxen or the lions hands, or could with hands depict a work like men, were beasts to draw the semblance of the gods, the horses would them like to horses sketch, to oxen, oxen, and their bodies make of such a shape as to themselves belongs'."

Italian medievalist, philosopher, academic, literary critic and novelist (The Name of the Rose) Umberto Eco is an intellectual (with over thirty Honorary Doctorates from universities throughout the world) who knows a thing or two about aesthetics and semiotics.His study On Ugliness (tr. by Alastair McEwen, 2007) (STORIA DELLA BRUTTEZZA) is the fascinating, visually stunning companion to his earlier, highly-acclaimed History of Beauty (tr. by Alastair McEwen, 2004) (STORIA DELLA BELLEZZA).Eco reasons in his historical and cultural treatise on ugliness that although the concept of ugliness has been defined as the opposite of beauty, it is necessary to first examine the context between the viewer and artist to define ugliness. Eco reveals, using the Eiffel Tower for instance, there is sometimes a fine line between beauty and ugliness. In compelling chapters examining such subjects as industrial ugliness, the tacky and the kitsch, contemporary culture, images of Christ and Satan, witchcraft, torture, martyrs, hermits, African ritual masks, lunar births, disemboweled corpses, monsters, carnival freaks, Decadentism, and vice, Eco's eclectic study juxtaposes more than 300 color images with his own insights on ugliness along with quotations from other writers and philosophers of the day. On Ugliness will appeal to anyone with an interest in the avant-garde or the grotesque as they manifest in art, culture, and literature.On Ugliness is highly recommended (I find it nearly impossible to put this book down), with the caveat that the History of Beauty and On Ugliness have been published in a single combined set:History of Beauty and On Ugliness Boxed Set: Boxed Set Edition.

G. Merritt

ON UGLINESS UMBERTO ECO
THIS BOOK SEES ART FROM ANOTHER POINT OF VIEW TAKING A DISTANCE FROMDECORATION AND BEAUTY
AND HELPING US REACH MORE PROFOUND LEVELS IN THE UNDERSTANDING OF AESTHETICS

easy read
I was a little worried this book might be really dry and difficult to read but it has been enjoyable and interesting so far. I decided to buy Umberto Eco's Beauty book too.

Ugliness Explored Through the Imaginative Eyes of Umberto Eco
'One man's trash is another man's treasure' might be a apt conclusion after spending the significant amount of time required to digest Umberto Eco's semiotic approach to 'ugly'.Eco's brilliance as an author is well accepted, yet his informed academic investigation (upon which many of his own novels are based) is only now being appreciated. It is difficult to read ON UGLINESS as a treatise, so lush and provocative is his prose style.Rizzoli International spared no expense on supplying Eco with images and design of this art treasure, and the result is a volume about art history and our manifold perceptions of the signs and symbols that through time have defined 'ugly' versus 'beauty.'

Eco wisely uses the chronological approach to his discourse on the semiotics of ugliness.After a superb Introduction in which he suggests the response of an alien visiting our planet, trying to determine what our civilization labeled beautiful (!), Eco launches into his presentation with gusto. He presents chapters on ugliness in the Classical World, religious use of ugliness (passion, death, martyrdom, apocalypse, hell), monsters, witchcraft, sadism, 'obscene pornography', the appearance of ugliness in architecture and industrial buildings, and finally the transition of the 'ugly' in the popular kitsch and camp.

Coupled with the fascinating written words by the author are copious reproductions of paintings, details of images (some of the details of Bosch's complex canvases are amazingly clear), by both well known painters and unknown painters, displayed with short excerpts from writers who wrote on the subject of the ugly versus the beautiful.Eco brings us to the absolute present (punk art, Cindy Sherman, current film, etc) and as his images emerge from the book's pages, so does his commentary quicken. And so we are left with a book on the subject of Ugliness, which as an art volume is quite the opposite: this is a very beautiful and informed new art book.Highly recommended reading and viewing. Grady Harp, November 07

A Wonderful Meditation on A Complex Subject...
I've enjoyed Eco's fiction (The Name of the Rose, Baudolino), but was never familiar with his work as a semiotician. This book gives a wonderful taste of his intellect outside of fiction. "On Ugliness" is Eco's companion volume to his excellent History of Beauty, and takes the same style: here you will find descriptions of the Western world's ideas about ugliness, from the classical era through the modern, discussing things such as the devil, monsters, death, age and decay, damnation, camp and kitsch, etc. Eco examines this subject broadly, and provides great insight. This book is essentially a collection of visual art related to the different subjects, juxtaposed with passages from literary works from a number of Western cultures.

What keeps this book from receiving my full 5 stars is the fact that none of the pieces (whether literature or visual art) include any kind of analysis or description. Eco simply writes bookending snippets for each chapter and then basically lets the works speak for themselves, which is largely unsatisfying. However, for anyone interested in conceptions of beauty or ugliness, or who would like a fascinating addition to their library, this book is for you. ... Read more

Product Description
The idea that there once existed a language which perfectly and unambiguously expressed the essence of all possible things and concepts has occupied the minds of philosophers, theologians, mystics, and others for at least two millennia. This book offers an investigation into the history of that idea and of its profound influence on European thought, culture, and history. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (10)

Fascinating Look At One's Of Europe's Hidden Obsessions
Umberto Eco has done a very fine job of cataloguing and elucidating Europe's historical search for the "perfect language".What is interesting is how he embeds the historical stages of the different definitions of "perfect language" into this book.Medieval Europe begins with a notion of a language in perfection spoken by Adam and passed down until the breakup at the Tower of Babel;then when it becomes apparent that no such language can be found, Renaissance philosophers take up attempts at finding a common root to all languages in order to help with religious conversions, missions, economy & trade;and finally, in our global community, efforts are being made to standardize certain linguistic derivatives in order to aid the advance of science and intergovernmental interactions.This book should be read by anyone interested in linguistics or European history in general.

The Perfect Language
The search for the perfect language has it germ in the investigation to what constitutes the expression of totality within the experience, in what is archaic, in the notion of unity and the idea of rupture at the fringes of language. Eco's paths sounds out the detachments of the Confusio Linguarum: Adán, cabbala, Dante, Lllul, analytical, philosophical, oneiric, and mystic languages up to communication in our time. Babel and the sensation of a reading that speaks about something previous to the speak. What is this? What is this dear reader?

Monumental
A scholarly tour de force.Eco demonstrates his famous erudition in a sweeping yet detailed-when-necessary overview of the search for the perfect language - from the monogenetic hypothesis to a priori philosophical languages.The breadth of his reading brings together a bibliographic database that will serve as a starting point for further research for anyone interested in babel, symbolic languages and of course the birth of languages and europe.I only wish he'd pushed his limit to include the non-european world, but that is of course asking for too much.

A Tour de Force
As always, Umberto Eco amazes with his erudition and insight. The only reason I didn't give this book five stars is because I see that as reserved for the near perfect.

The felt need to transcend the frustrations of the world's great multiplicity of languages is clear, even in this age of on-line dictionaries, instant Google translations, etc. How much greater than need must have felt two or three centuries ago!

Eco painstakingly explores the strengths and weaknesses (with the latter usually prevailing) of the many attempts made to devise a much improved, if not perfect, langauge. It is quite amazing to contemplate the enormous efforts put into this project!

Successive attempts progressively elucidated thenature of the problems that had to be overcome, and ultimately the impossibility of the task, at least where one is envisaging a language to be used by the population at large. A major reason for this is the evolutionary and uncontrollable nature of a common language (which the French have sought to control in vain).

A most enjoyable read!

Excellent short review that is true to its title
This is an excellent short review of European quest for a language to unite its disparate nations with each other and the rest of the world. I thought that the book did an excellent job of staying on the subject and illustrating the progression of thought in this area. It does confine itself to Europe and time period as defined in the beginning of the book. That is excellent, there is simply no other way to cover as much ground as the book attempts to do, and I feel that it does suceed admirably. As usual, Eco's erudition and research are amazing. This book is published in the context of a European series of books about Europe and I wish there was a similar book series that would cover this ground for Far East and India as well. I am sure people there worked on the same kind of problems. Some of the problems with languages and methods described seem so obvious that one has to wonder what the authors themselves thought about them. Of course, this is a whole other book series. I wish there was a 4 1/2 rating as I do not think this is truly a masterpiece, but certainly a very very good book from a very very good author of fiction and non-fiction. A bonus for fans of Focault's Pendulum -- a lot of data in that fiction book refers to work discussed in this non-fiction work. Great fun! ... Read more

Product Description
Serendipities is a careful unraveling of the fabulous and the false, a brilliant exposition of how unanticipated truths often spring from false ideas. From Leibniz's belief that the I Ching illustrated the principles of calculus to Marco Polo's mistaking a rhinoceros for a unicorn, Umberto Eco offers a dazzling tour of intellectual history, illuminating the ways in which we project the familiar onto the strange to make sense of the world. Uncovering layers of mistakes that have shaped human history, Eco offers with wit and clarity such instances as Columbus's voyage to the New World, the fictions that grew around the Rosicrucians and Knights Templar, and the linguistic endeavors to recreate the language of Babel, to show how serendipities can evolve out of mistakes. With erudition, anecdotes, and scholarly rigor, this new collection of essays is sure to entertain and enlighten any reader with a passion for the curious history of languages and ideas.Amazon.com Review
The multitalented Umberto Eco--novelist, critic, and literarytheorist--turns his attention to the history of linguistics. Inlinguistics, as in the other sciences, Eco explains, there areserendipities: "Even the most lunatic experiments can produce strangeside effects, stimulating research that proves perhaps less amusingbut scientifically more serious." In his earlier book The Searchfor the Perfect Language, for example, he discussed the project ofdiscovering the language spoken before the collapse of the Tower ofBabel. Although misconceived, the project by chance led to advances inmathematical logic, artificial intelligence, and even world peace--thegoal of artificial languages like Esperanto and the unfortunatelynamed Volapük. In the five essays in Serendipities, Ecoexplores some related serendipitous episodes in the history oflinguistics; as always, his characteristic blend of playfulness anderudition is bound to be irresistible to any lover of language.

The first essay, "The Force of Falsity," discusses false documentswith momentous repercussions, such as the letter of Prester John,which encouraged European explorers and conquerors to seek itssupposed author, the Christian ruler of a distant and fantasticallywealthy land. In the second essay, Eco considers Dante's relation tothe idea of the perfect language. The third essay discusses earlymisinterpretations of Egyptian, Chinese, and Mexican ideograms. TheJesuit savant Athanasius Kircher, for example, devoted page upon pageto mystical interpretations of a hieroglyph that later turned out torepresent nothing more profound than the Greek letterlambda. The remaining two essays are devoted to single authors:"The Language of the Austral Land" concerns Gabriel de Foigny'sinstructive parody of contemporary attempts to devise the perfectlanguage, while "The Linguistics of Joseph de Maistre" endeavors, withindifferent success, to make sense of the counterrevolutionarySavoyard's musings on the nature of language. --Glenn Branch ... Read more

Customer Reviews (12)

Signifying something
If you occasionally savor pushing yourself intellectually, here's a candidate for a cool summer read way out in the deep end. Eco is popularly best known for THE NAME OF THE ROSE and THE ISLAND OF THE DAY BEFORE, and is Professor of Semiotics at the University of Bologna. His forte is exploration of the history of language and ideas and his biologic CPU is running at full throttle in this short collection of lectures originally delivered to the Italian Academy. The theme of SERENDIPITIES is the way in which falsity or misunderstanding has shaped our world for the better. Ptolemy, for example, was wrong about the structure of the solar system but that error fired his passion for observation which later inspired Kepler. Kircher, the founder of Egyptology, was wildly imaginative and wholly innacurate in his decipherment of hieroglyphics (including an effort to explain Chinese ideograms by fitting China into the history of the Egyptian civilization), but his scholarship provided the historical record which Champollion later unscrambled with benefit of the Rosetta Stone -- as well as fueling Europe's Chinaphilia which led, roundabout, to Leibniz getting hold of a table from the I Ching. (Leibniz inadvertently read the chart sideways, found confirmation in that mis-reading of his newly invented binary calculus, and was convinced to publish his own work. That you are reading this on a computer screen owes thanks to Kircher's inability to read King Tut's obituary.) The author notes that we each carry our own books everywhere we go, whether they are the ones we have personally read or the "books" of our culture. Every new experience is always viewed through old lenses. Some of Eco's brainstorming is too erudite and abstruse to amuse this reviewer. Chapter Two wanders around medieval Europe on Dante's heels seeking Adam's original language and the question of whether God spoke in hailstorms and wind or natural language, wonders why Augustine ignored Hebrew and Greek biblical texts in favor of Latin and sidetracks into the early Christian belief that a baby never instructed in speech would automatically speak Hebrew. Whew! Diff'rent strokes, no? (How many pins can dance on the head of an angel?) Woven throughout is a wonderful excitement about the nature of knowing; whether it be the inside joke that became Rosicrucianism, the confusion about who believed in a flat earth, unicorns and rhinosceri in Marco Polo's diary or the search for Adam's tongue which resulted in modern linguistics with its exploration of Indo-European lingual roots. Altogether, a challenging mental weight room which will leave your synapses sweaty and breathless. Plus, "Can I carry your books?" will take on a whole new meaning.

The Misunderstood Search for a Perfect Language
If you like Eco's nonfiction musings on semiotics, history, literature and philosophy you will love this wild ride.

The first chapter details some instances in history when false beliefs have resulted in benefits to society, provided some impetus to discovery or exploration, helped advance our understanding or correct some other misunderstanding. Examples include the Ptolemaic system, the notion of the flat Earth, the Donation of Constantine and the letter of Prester John, the Rosicrucians and the Protocols of Zion.

The second chapter addresses the ideal of a perfect language. Dante's Divine Comedy leads off. The Tower of Babel myth leads to a discussion on why Dante chose to write in vernacular. There is mention of radical Aristotelianism of the 14th century in Paris and the Modistae grammarians, including Boethius of Dacia. Then the Kabbalah, Abraham Abulafia and the Torah, the Tetragrammaton and the yod of YHWH. (Each letter represents a code for a whole name.)

The third chapter extends the idea of a perfect or constructed language and includes the idea presented in the first chapter of serendipitous misunderstandigs or misconceptions. People are said to react to meetings with new cultures in three ways, conquest, pillage or exchange. People base their interpretations on their own background books, their cultural frames.

Marco Polo in the Orient is given as an example of someone interpreting a new culture through the lens of his own. He apparently identified a rhinoceros as a unicorn, because he was firmly convinced that unicorns existed. Egyptian hieroglyphs are another example of how one culture applies its own cultural bias on a new discovery. Athanasius Kircher is cited as an example of another credulous explorer, who, although his conjectures were all false regarding the translations, provided a useful service in reproducing the originals so lovingly, that later scholars were able to discover some true meanings hidden within.Again, serendipitous misunderstanding. Francis Bacon and John Wilkins also appear in the search for a real character. Next we address the early study of the chinese ideograms and then Diego de Landa and the Maya hieroglyphs. The accident that the Maya writing were deemed early to be either heretical, diaboloical, or meaningless lead to their wholesale destruction. Yet Chinese and Egyptian were somehow deemed learned, correct or mysterious and worthy of preservation and study. The unexpected connection between Leibnitz, Boolean algebra and the I Ching was presented. Hermes Trismegistus ends the chapter.

Chapter four is a whirlwind of references; Dante, Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, Ramon Lull, Francis Bacon, Delgarno, Wilkins and Lodgwick, Kircher again, and particularly the Austral language of de Foigny, or rather a novel featuring a consturcted language. The arbitrary nature of assigning catagories, touching on Descartes, Leibnitz, d'Alembert, and Borges.

I would also recommend Six Walks in the Fictional Woods by Eco.

Why we should stay on the Eco high-horse
I have to confess that I haven't read this book as of yet.In fact I pretty much know exactly what his essays are going to conclude with, given the fact that I've read and am well acquainted with both his academic works, as well as his novels, satire etc. andalso those elements he uses in his works which require a polymathic worldview in order to even appreciate some of their subtlety (e.g. Why was William of Baskerville in "The Name of the Rose" a "nominalist" or why is the title of "Foucault Pendulum" a reference to the French Deconstuctionist Michel Foucault and not the physicist, or why is the monk at the end of "The Island of the Day Before" not an illusion at all or ..."
I'm purchasing the book "sight unseen" and given that it's Eco he's getting five stars immediately.
As for my reasons in writing this review it's pretty much revealed by my title.As for answers to to my examples; I've listed them below:

"The Name of the Rose":William of Baskerville is a nominalist because he's a member of that philosophical school best represented by William of Oakham(Occam's Razor).That school of thought, arose as a result of conflicts between certain excesses of the Scholastics.Nominalism is considered to be one of the germinal thoughts which led to the development of the "Scientific Method"

"Foucault's Pendulum":The complete subtext of this book includes the underlying theme of "conspiracy theory."The reason that's important is that Eco believes one of those things which give rise to "conspiracy theories" is "unlimited-semiosis".Eco faults Michel Foucault and his excesses such as is embodied in "deconstructionalism" as an example of one of the dangers of "unlimited semiosis."

"The Island of the Day Before."The mad monk isn't an illusion.It's actually the protaganist whose not just a buffoon, but has actually gone mad(of course he's not an illusion either).The mad monk embraces Tycho Brahe's cosmology of the solar system.Unless one understands the "history of science" in this particular historic milieu, or the reasons why Tycho Brahe came up with his cosmology(which seems truly bizarre to the modern mind) you can't discern whether the monk is real or not. Hint: The monk embraced Aristotelian Physics.Tycho Brahe's cosmology resolved the contradiction which existed between that and Galileo's observations.One must remember this was prior to Isaac Newton's "Principia" and before these issues had been resolved!

Caveat Emptor
Please note:This book is approximately 75% paraphrased from Eco's "The Search for the Perfect Language," which contains a more thorough treatment of the material that the two books share.The material that is new in this book is interesting, making the read worthwhile for the dedicated reader who has already enjoyed "The Search..".For the casual reader, "Serendipities" is much shorter and more accessible than "The Search for the Perfect Language", making it a suitable alternative or possibly an introduction to the longer text.However, if you take offense at paying to read the same information twice, simply do not purchase both books.Enjoy!

Food for thought
Do you know what Christopher Columbus was trying to prove with his historic ocean voyage, and why the church elders insisted it couldn't be done? Eco asks this question in the first essay of this book, "The Force of Falsity", and you may be surprised by the answer. Throughout, Eco gives you that delightful taste of history that he's known for, while asking provocative questions about the philosophy of language and even the nature and value of truth itself.

Language is definitely the focus of this book, but each essay is more of an examination than a thesis, and the material is not as heavy as Eco's essays about language often are. On the other hand it is not as light and playful as, for example, "Misreadings" (also a worthy read). It's a casual, engaging read with some substance to it, and well worth reading if you like to think. ... Read more

Product Description
Eco displays in these essays the same wit, learning, and lively intelligence that delighted readers of The Name of the Rose and FoucaultÂ’s Pendulum. His range is wide, and his insights are acute, frequently ironic, and often downright funny. Translated by William Weaver. A Helen and Kurt Wolff Book ... Read more

Customer Reviews (9)

Very Worthwhile
Caveat:I have not read the entire book, yet; only the titular essay.Eco is one of the great minds of our times, and for that reason alone, any and all of his books and essays make pleasurable and rewarding reading and are commendable.In this instance, his travels in and around America inspired these trenchant reflections on the nature of reality.Because "reality" is as subjectively and culturally constructed as "fantasy," because these concepts have no objective basis but are determined by a frame of reference that is cultural, it is arguably only meta-cultural observations made by meta-cultural observers that have any validity.Eco is Italian, and a scholar and semiotician. For Americans, reading such a text crafted from such a relatively "external" vantage can be enlightening.One may be afforded a meta-cultural perspective on the so-called "reality" that has previously encapsulated one's culturally-determined mind. I understand that minds that are incapable of transcending their own cultural frame of reference are doomed to be confined to its internal dimensions; but I understand, too, that some minds are capable, and it is these latter that will surely benefit from this essay.If none of this is making sense to you, be not bothered by this review or this book.

Interesting collection of essays
Many readers will probably be attracted to books like these after reading and enjoying Eco's novels, especially The Name of the Rose and Foucalt's Pendulum. If so, be warned. As I discovered, the Eco of the essay is NOT the Eco of the novels. Both Ecos are eccentric, clever and witty. However, the Eco of essays is a more radical and postmodern thinker. His topics can be seen by some as mundane. He's interested in pop culture and some of his theories are a tad obscure.

This collection is a series of loosely connected essays by Eco. It's an interesting book to read not cover-to-cover but to read an essay once in a while until the book is finished. That way the attitudes can sink in. The biggest fault I found with the book is certain essays to do with semiotics have arguments that are complex and hard to follow. This is understandable as they're taken from more specialised publications whereas in the novels, he strives to bring his ideas to the general public.

The essays I found to be most likeable are Travels in Hyperreality (about the proliferation of wax museums in the US and the general obsession with replicas in society), Reports from the Global Village (a series of essays on media), an analysis of Casablanca and In Praise of St Thomas (Eco's PhD was on Thomas so his views can be seen as fairly authoritative).

A good read but not brilliant.

Reader from Israel
Well this was my third book by Mr. Eco and dthe continue to get worse. The Rose was excellent and made me hungry for more but after the Pendulum and this Hyper-Realty bit I'm going to have to call it quits. The author has the ability t oput together a great novel such as the Rose, I wish it were mine, but the other stuff is just not happening.

Amorphous Lump o' Eco
Umberto Eco is clearly a genius - his fictional works testify to that.I assume his reputation as a semiologist is well earned (since I know little about the subject beyond what Walker Percy digested).

Unfortunately, I found "Travels in Hyperreality" to be a hastily pasted collection of observations and commentary that is not really worthy of Eco's growing portfolio.The book was sometimes interesting, but dry and tasteless.I thought the whole lot of it could be encapsulated in Eco's strange observations concerning "the wearing of blue jeans."That is, if you're really, really, really into Eco and want to soak up everything he says, then this book will not disappoint.If, on the other hand, you have limited time on your hands, then Eco's fictional works, or "Search for the Perfect Language," are far better temporal investments.

Perhaps I didn't get it, or perhaps it was a mistake reading much of it in a bar in Santa Clara, but I would assert that this is only a book for the Eco purist.

Does Disney Own The Planet?
A deliriously funny trip through the mad places the earth's inhabitants call home. Eco skewers like "kitsch-ka-bob" the artificial pseudo paradises we have created with all our so-called modern conveniences. What have we turned our cities into, by the way? Do we really understand art?

If you've ever driven through rural Arkansas or Texas and wanted to capture with words the seemingly inexplicable, paradoxical sights along the way, it's been done for you and can be enjoyed in these side-splitting pages.

Lots of fun. ... Read more

Product Description
Best-selling author and philosopher Umberto Eco is currently resident at the Louvre, and his chosen theme of study is "the vertigo of lists." Reflecting on this enormous trove of human achievements, in his lyrical intellectual style he has embarked on an investigation of the phenomenon of cataloging and collecting. This book, featuring lavish reproductions of artworks from the Louvre and other world-famous collections, is a philosophical and artistic sequel to Eco’s recent acclaimed books, History of Beauty and On Ugliness, books in which he delved into the psychology, philosophy, history, and art of human forms. Eco is a modern-day Diderot, and here he examines the Western mind’s predilection for list-making and the encyclopedic. His central thesis is that in Western culture a passion for accumulation is recurring: lists of saints, catalogues of plants, collections of art. This impulse has recurred through the ages from music to literature to art. Eco refers to this obsession itself as a "giddiness of lists" but shows how in the right hands it can be a "poetics of catalogues." From medieval reliquaries to Andy Warhol’s compulsive collecting, Umberto Eco reflects in his inimitably inspiring way on how such catalogues mirror the spirit of their times. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (3)

The Infinity of Lists
As a huge fan of everything 'Eco', this book is a joy to read. What more can you say. Written with intelligence, humor, knowledge and wisdom.

A List of Lists, Using Lists as Examples
In a lavishly illustrated collection of art, Umberto Eco (//The Name of the Rose//) uses mostly Classical pieces to explore the concept of lists, catalogs, and those that create them. He moves from the differences between lists and catalogs to the various forms of lists--practical and poetic. The practical list is one with a purpose, a shopping list, a guest list, a inventory of items, whereas a poetic list is one that evokes a feeling, a sense of time, place or mystery--Homer's list of ships in the //Illiad// are less necessary as an accurate list, but more to create the overwhelming feel of unity and strength in the Greek invasion of Troy. //The Infinity of Lists// is a product of Eco's residency at the Louvre, where he organized several conferences and exhibitions on the subject of lists and list makers.

Eco takes a subject and after a brief essay provides reproductions of art and text to illustrate his thesis. In the chapter "Lists of Places" he name drops a number of quick references of authors and artists that used lists to illustrate their subjects--James Joyce in //Finnegans Wake// with lists of rivers--and then excerpts from texts illustrated by multiple full-color illustrations. "Places" includes a list of countries from the Book of Ezekiel, part of Chapter 1 of Dickens' //Bleak House//, and Edgar Allan Poe's description of members of a crowd from "The Man of the Crowd." //Lists// is less a book to be read cover to cover, and more one to sample, moving from illustration to essay. The hundreds of illustrations range from mosaics of antiquity to recent modern art, as does the text. While Eco doesn't adequately survey much of the modern world, "the Mother of all Lists," as he calls the Internet, only gets a single paragraph; his primary focus of Classic to Renaissance art and list-making is meat enough for hours of additional research (probably using the Mother of all Lists) and enjoyment.

Reviewed by Ross Rojek

Eco's Latest Literary Trend
In 2007 Bompiani published a similar non-fiction work by Umberto Eco, "Dall'Albero al Labrinto: Studi Storici sul Segno e l'Interpretazione," that investigated the histories of sign and interpretation alongside the history of encyclopedistics. Its aim was to more fully examine organization as a human phenomenon. "The Infinity of Lists," I believe, continues this examination by identifying the nature of lists across time. In short, Eco appears to be following a particular trend with his recent research - one that explores our immense fascination with the organization of content and its many forms. ... Read more

Product Description
Best-selling author and philosopher Umberto Eco is currently resident at the Louvre, and his chosen theme of study is "the vertigo of lists." Reflecting on this enormous trove of human achievements, in his lyrical intellectual style he has embarked on an investigation of the phenomenon of cataloging and collecting. This book, featuring lavish reproductions of artworks from the Louvre and other world-famous collections, is a philosophical and artistic sequel to Eco’s recent acclaimed books, History of Beauty and On Ugliness, books in which he delved into the psychology, philosophy, history, and art of human forms. Eco is a modern-day Diderot, and here he examines the Western mind’s predilection for list-making and the encyclopedic. His central thesis is that in Western culture a passion for accumulation is recurring: lists of saints, catalogues of plants, collections of art. This impulse has recurred through the ages from music to literature to art. Eco refers to this obsession itself as a "giddiness of lists" but shows how in the right hands it can be a "poetics of catalogues." From medieval reliquaries to Andy Warhol’s compulsive collecting, Umberto Eco reflects in his inimitably inspiring way on how such catalogues mirror the spirit of their times. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (3)

The Infinity of Lists
As a huge fan of everything 'Eco', this book is a joy to read. What more can you say. Written with intelligence, humor, knowledge and wisdom.

A List of Lists, Using Lists as Examples
In a lavishly illustrated collection of art, Umberto Eco (//The Name of the Rose//) uses mostly Classical pieces to explore the concept of lists, catalogs, and those that create them. He moves from the differences between lists and catalogs to the various forms of lists--practical and poetic. The practical list is one with a purpose, a shopping list, a guest list, a inventory of items, whereas a poetic list is one that evokes a feeling, a sense of time, place or mystery--Homer's list of ships in the //Illiad// are less necessary as an accurate list, but more to create the overwhelming feel of unity and strength in the Greek invasion of Troy. //The Infinity of Lists// is a product of Eco's residency at the Louvre, where he organized several conferences and exhibitions on the subject of lists and list makers.

Eco takes a subject and after a brief essay provides reproductions of art and text to illustrate his thesis. In the chapter "Lists of Places" he name drops a number of quick references of authors and artists that used lists to illustrate their subjects--James Joyce in //Finnegans Wake// with lists of rivers--and then excerpts from texts illustrated by multiple full-color illustrations. "Places" includes a list of countries from the Book of Ezekiel, part of Chapter 1 of Dickens' //Bleak House//, and Edgar Allan Poe's description of members of a crowd from "The Man of the Crowd." //Lists// is less a book to be read cover to cover, and more one to sample, moving from illustration to essay. The hundreds of illustrations range from mosaics of antiquity to recent modern art, as does the text. While Eco doesn't adequately survey much of the modern world, "the Mother of all Lists," as he calls the Internet, only gets a single paragraph; his primary focus of Classic to Renaissance art and list-making is meat enough for hours of additional research (probably using the Mother of all Lists) and enjoyment.

Reviewed by Ross Rojek

Eco's Latest Literary Trend
In 2007 Bompiani published a similar non-fiction work by Umberto Eco, "Dall'Albero al Labrinto: Studi Storici sul Segno e l'Interpretazione," that investigated the histories of sign and interpretation alongside the history of encyclopedistics. Its aim was to more fully examine organization as a human phenomenon. "The Infinity of Lists," I believe, continues this examination by identifying the nature of lists across time. In short, Eco appears to be following a particular trend with his recent research - one that explores our immense fascination with the organization of content and its many forms. ... Read more

Product Description
The first illustrated book by one of the world’s most acclaimed authors, History of Beauty presents an intriguing journey into the wonderful realm of aesthetics, exploring the ever-changing concept of the beautiful from ancient Greece to today with abundant examples. Closely examining the development of the visual arts and drawing on literature from each era, the range of Eco’s inquiry includes concepts such as the idea of love, natural inspiration versus numeric formulas, and the unattainable woman. In the mold of History of Beauty, On Ugliness is an exploration of the monstrous and the repellant in visual culture and arts. Eco’s encyclopedic knowledge and captivating storytelling combines in this ingenious study of the ugly, revealing that we often shield ourselves from what we’re most attracted to subliminally. With numerous examples of art, and quotations from the most celebrated writers and philosophers of each age, this provocative book explores in-depth the concepts of evil, depravity, and darkness in art and literature. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (4)

Beautiful!
Great books! Got them as a present and I find these books interesting and beautifully made.

Beauty on Eco but not Ugliness
As a fine art practitioner with little knowledge, it was good resource to begin with. This book is one of those recommended resource for art practitioner. It is not complex writing and has clear structure based on the Art history. I read this in library first, my friends highly recommended it and I also thought it was worth buying.

And for Amazon, never disappoint the delivery procedure. I received it within two weeks in Australia.

A beautiful set, and a real bargain!
There's nothing much I can say about the book that has not been said by G. Merrit. I pretty much agree with everything in Merrit's review.

But I gotta say, this is a bargain, a real one. You get so much more than your money's worth. In my case, for example, it would have been very expensive to buy these books here in Mexico, either together or piece by piece in the "local" edition. Even with the sky-high dollar-peso exchange rate and international shipping and handling I saved almost 30% of what they cost here and they arrived within a week! Amazon was a life saver on this one!

So, really, this is a must-have box set, a real beauty in every sense: it's a high-quality edition, printed on acid-free paper, has bright colored mate illustrations and obviously, it's Umberto Eco's work so you know you can't go wrong with this box set.

And we all love box-sets don't we?

Umberto Eco Explores the Aesthetics of Beauty and Ugliness.
Italian medievalist, philosopher, academic, literary critic and novelist (The Name of the Rose) Umberto Eco is an intellectual (with over thirty Honorary Doctorates from universities throughout the world) who knows a thing or two about aesthetics and semiotics.His highly-acclaimed the companion studies on History of Beauty (tr. by Alastair McEwen, 2004) (STORIA DELLA BELLEZZA) and On Ugliness (tr. by Alastair McEwen, 2007) (STORIA DELLA BRUTTEZZA) have been combined in this fascinating, visually-stunning companion two-volume set.

In his historical and cultural "review of ideas of Beauty over the centuries," Eco maintains that, although beauty may be "in the eye of the beholder," the concept of beauty must also be defined by the beholder's cultural standards. Eco's inspired survey of beauty reveals that every age has had its own philosophical and cultural notions of beauty, from Greek statues of "Nude Venus" and "Nude Adonis," to Christian standards of beauty in depicting Jesus, to Pollock, to notions of the Sublime, the philosophies of Kant and Hegel, and to popular culture. Eco's eclectic study juxtaposes more than 300 breathtaking images with his own insights on beauty, along with quotations from other writers and philosophers of the day including Boethius, Plotinus, Petrarch, Xenophon, Zola, and Barthes, among others. It should be noted that Eco's treatise focuses primarily on on the human form in Western culture, and ultimately sets the stage for his companion volume, On Ugliness, by demonstrating that without a notion of beauty, the concept of ugliness would not exist. This study will appeal to anyone with an interest in the concepts of beauty, love, the unattainable woman, and the notion of ugliness.

In his historical and cultural treatise on Ugliness, Eco reasons that although the concept of ugliness has been defined as the opposite of beauty, it is necessary to first examine the context between the viewer and artist to define ugliness. Eco reveals, using the Eiffel Tower for instance, there is sometimes a fine cultural and historical line between beauty and ugliness. In compelling chapters examining such subjects as industrial ugliness, the tacky and the kitsch, contemporary culture, images of Christ and Satan, witchcraft, torture, martyrs, hermits, African ritual masks, lunar births, disemboweled corpses, monsters, carnival freaks, Decadentism, and vice, Eco's eclectic study juxtaposes more than 300 color images with his own insights on ugliness along with quotations from other writers and philosophers of the day. On Ugliness will appeal to anyone with an interest in the avant-garde or the grotesque as they manifest in art, culture, and literature.This box set on beauty and ugliness is highly recommended. I find it nearly impossible to put these books down.

G. Merritt ... Read more

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Customer Reviews (6)

Interesting but uneven
Although I admire Eco's broad learning and his usual clarity of expression, I did not find this book as revealing as I had hoped. He does have a wonderful definition: "a work of literature is a miracle of invention." I had hoped to get a better understanding of semiotics from the book, since he is a semiotician. He never quite gives it to me, although he includes some insights. For example, in relation to the passage just quoted, he says: "semiotic inquiry is reduced to the discovery of the same constants in every text and thus loses sight of the inventions." On the next page, he adds that "semiotic discourse often fails to distinguish between 'manner' and 'style.'" He then summarizes Hegel's points that manner is "a repetitive obsession of the author" (Eco's words) while style is "the capacity [of a writer] constantly to outdo himself. And yet it is textual semiotics that is the only critique capable of bringing out such differences."

So what is semiotics? He never specifies, but he does say, "In the realm of style (as a way of giving form) belongs not only the use of language (or of colors, or of sounds, according to the semiotic systems or universes used) but also the way of deploying narrative structures, portraying characters, and articulating points of view." Later he observes that "if proper criticism is understanding and making others understand how a text is made, and if the review and the history of literature are unable to do this adequately, the only true form of criticism is a semiotic analysis of the text." Further, "a critical review cannot be exempt, except in cases of exceptional cowardice, from pronouncing a verdict on what the text says," but "textual criticism . . . is always semiotic even when it does not know it is, or even when it denies it is."

Now Webster defines semiotics as "a general philosophical theory of signs and symbols that deals esp. with their function in both artificially constructed and natural languages and comprises syntactics, semantics, and pragmatics." Thus, I thought his essay "On Symbolism" would be helpful. It is to a degree, but though less obscure than Hayden White (for example), Eco is almost equally hard to pin down, intentionally I think. For example: "Sensitivity to the symbolic mode stems from having noticed that there is something in the text that has meaning and yet could easily not have been there, and one wonders why it is there." And: "A symbol is an epiphany with Magi whose origins and destination we do not know, nor whom they have come to adore."--a wonderful metaphor, but it is less than precise about what symbolism really is. A little more helpful, perhaps: "Today it is we who demand that poetry, and often fiction, supply us not just with the expression of emotions, or an account of actions, or morality, but also with symbolic flashes, pale ersatz elements of a truth we no longer seek in religion."

More helpful about deconstruction than symbol, he speaks of "today's deconstructionist heresy, which seems to assume that a divinity or malign subconscious made us talk always and only with a second meaning, and that everything we say is inessential because the essence of our discourse lies elsewhere, in a symbolic realm we are often unaware of. . . . [T]he symbolic diamond, . . . meant to flash in the dark and dazzle us at sudden but very rare moments, has become a neon strip that pervades the texture of every discourse. This is too much of a good thing." A bit further on, he says "the second heresy is to be found in the information world [including coded phrases], which seeks a secret meaning in every event and every expression. This is the curse of the contemporary writer." Since we are incapable of finding a real symbol, "we look for it even where it does not exist as a textual mode." This is hardly reassuring to anyone who feels obliged to identify and interpret what appear to be symbols in a text, although it gives useful hints.

There is much more, and the collection of essays is well worth reading if only for its bon mots and its fruitful ambiguities, but let me conclude with a pronouncement about philosophy, narrative, and truth: "Instead of going to look for truth in the philosophers of the past, much contemporary philosophy has gone to look for it in Proust or Kafka, Joyce or Mann." (I know this to be true from my own readings.) "Thus it is not so much that philosophers have given up pursuing the truth as that art and literature have also taken on that function."

Recommended for anyone interested in understanding literature and criticism who is not expecting every essay to be as insightful as some of them are.

The Kindle Edition is not Umberto Eco
There seems to be a hiccup in the Kindle Store's database. This book is a collection of essays on literature put together by a United States professor of literature. It is not, as implied, a translation of the lectures by Umberto Eco.

Lectures of a True Maestro
What Umberto Eco offers in this collection of essays is a publication of illuminating and useful views and descriptions of various aspects of literature. This is a great tool for a would be writer who enjoys Eco's work(with incites into his own novels you may want to buy a second used copy of the title for taking notes in the margin and highlighting important passages), or just an interesting read for fans of literature.
My only misgivings about this book is that it is too short and deals with only a few choice works and ideas. I was hoping On Literature would be more of a textbook but that was clearly wishful thinking.

A must have for students of literature!
Umberto Eco is most famous in this country for his bestselling novel The Name of the Rose (1980) that was subsequently made into a Hollywood film starring Sean Connery. He is the author of a number other of novels including Foucault's Pendulum (1988), Baudolino (2002), and most recently The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana (2005). First and foremost, however, Eco is a literary theorist and professor of semiotics, the philosophical theory of signs and symbols.

On Literature is a collection of essays and addresses given over the course of his career. More general essays like "On Style" and "On Symbolism" are mixed with those focused on Dante, Wilde, and The Communist Manifesto. Other essays--most notably "Borges and My Anxiety of Influence," "How I Write," and "The Power of Falsehood"-- illuminate Eco's own literary work in different ways.

A quick look at the table of contents is enough to show that despite being a collection of essays, this is a serious work of literary criticism. The book is being billed as "illuminating, accessible, [and] stimulating" (back cover text). It is illuminating and stimulating, but in all honestly it is a bit dense for general consumption. The essays on specific authors and texts are brilliant, but they will be best enjoyed by people who have actually read the texts Eco is discussing.

Because I've spent a lot of time dealing with James Joyce lately, I appreciated "A Portrait of the Artist as Bachelor," an essay in which Eco shows the seeds of Joyce's later literary work in young Jim's undergraduate writings.

"The American Myth in Three Anti-American Generations" is another great find. Originally written as a paper for a conference at Columbia University, it discusses the roots of the Italian image of America beginning with the generation that came to age in the 1930s.

On Literature is not an easy read, but if you have time and interest you will find that Eco's latest collection of essays is full of passion and insight.

Armchair Interviews says: Although not recommended for the casual reader, On Literature is a must-have for students of literature.

A Semiotics Professor on Various Aspects of Literature
This collection of essays and lectures by Umberto Eco and translated by Martin McLaughlin contains Eco's reflections on several aspects of literature, from the (more or less) tangible influence of Borges on the author's own writing to different approaches to literary criticism to how he himself came to write his novels.Though the essays themselves range in subject matter, all contain the underlying currents of Eco's academic forte, semiotics, that difficult-to-define discipline that drives the author's intellect.

The eighteen essays/lectures concentrate on specific authors and works ("A Reading of the Paradiso", "Wilde: Paradox and Aphorism") as well as on more general topics ("On Symbolism", "Intertextual Irony and Levels of Reading").As you might gather from the titles, this book is not light reading and reflects not only the density of Eco's prose but also of his ideas.Some essays succeed better than others."Borges and My Anxiety of Influence" is a fascinating, almost conversational glimpse into the workings of Eco's literary mind while his more direct "How I Write" is deadened by self-analysis."The Power of Falsehood", perhaps more than any of these essays, exposes the obsessions that gave rise to The Name of the Rose, Foucault's Pendulum, and Baudolino; it delves into the marriage of history and false ideas.Unfortunately, the opening piece, "On Some Functions of Literature," seems almost elemental and not deep enough for someone of Eco's academic caliber.Readers of his novels will recognize in many of these essays the driving force behind the fiction.Intellectuals and literary critics especially will want to make their slow, careful way through much of what Eco has to say.

Although I don't agree with some of Eco's premises, I still found this book intriguing, both for its ideas and the way they are presented.Eco knows his material, and his passion for the subject matter can be infectious.Recommended for serious students of literature and semiotics, but not for the casual reader. ... Read more

Product Description
Embracing the web of multiculturalism that has become a fact of contemporary life from New York to New Delhi, Eco argues that we are more connected to people of other traditions and customs than ever before, making tolerance the ultimate value in today's world. What good does war do in a world where the flow of goods, services, and information is unstoppable and the enemy is always behind the lines?
In the most personal of the essays, Eco recalls experiencing liberation from fascism in Italy as a boy, and examines the various historical forms of fascism, always with an eye toward such ugly manifestations today. And finally, in an intensely personal open letter to an Italian cardinal, Eco reflects on a question underlying all the reflections in the book--what does it mean to be moral or ethical when one doesn't believe in God?
Amazon.com Review
This slim book covers a lot of territory in a little over a hundred pages. Its five essays address everything from warfare to faith to the media, and Umberto Eco insists that they are all linked: "Despite the variety of their themes, they are all ethical in nature, that is to say, they treat of what we ought to do, what we ought not to do, and what we must not do at any cost." Several of his views are provocative. In listing the characteristics of what he calls "Ur-Fascism," for instance, Eco describes many of the beliefs held by modern-day conservatives. He also remarks: "Europe will become a multiracial continent--or a 'colored' one, if you prefer. That's how it will be, whether you like it or not. This meeting (or clash) of cultures could lead to bloodshed, and I believe to a certain extent it will." Fans of Eco's bestselling novels won't necessarily be drawn to Five Moral Pieces, though readers who have enjoyed his nonfiction will want to explore this small collection. --John Miller ... Read more

Customer Reviews (4)

Eco's B sides
I am a long time fan of Eco's non-fiction. The pieces were not billed as being related and they certainly aren't. They should have merely lived their short lives as speeches and newspaper articles and not been bound. For the Eco collector, go to original texts, not these translations.

The First is the Best
These are five essays previously written by Eco for various publications. Most of them are of interest to those who study European politics and cultural life. If you are not interested in the Italian press or post WWII Facism in Europe and are not familiar with some of the well known players, parts of these essays will make no sense to you.

However, the first essay, "Reflections on War," is worth the price. This essay was written about the first "gulf" war in Kuwait. Reading in now in a post-Iraq war frame is even more interesting. Eco predicts the neo-conservative view that active imposition of democracy by the developed nations will begin to occur in the middle east and elsewhere and he gives some brillant insight into this thinking.

The other essays have thoughts worth reading even if the topics are not your cup of tea. Like all of Eco's work, this is highly readable and not at all obtuse.

Extremely relevant thought pieces for today's world
While the book is on the pricey side, it contains some extremely relevant thought pieces for our world today.

The essays are meant to provoke further thinking on the subjects rather than provide any pat answers.

The essays on immigration and intolerance and the characteristics of fascism are particularly worth reading.

Eco fans should wait for the paperback version.
My wife gave me this book as a gift. I love Eco's writings, so I immediately began reading these essays. Be forewarned - if you are an Eco fan, you have probably already seen parts of this book. One of the essays was even included in last year's Belief or Nonbelief?

Wait for the paperback or check this out at the library. Unless you're giving it as a gift, Five Moral Pieces isn't worth the price. ... Read more

Product Description

Within the limitations of Yambo's handicap and quest, Eco creates wondrous variety, wringing surprise and delight from such shamelessly hackneyed plot twists as the discovery of a hidden room. Illustrated with the cartoons, sheet music covers, and book jackets that Yambo uncovers in his search, The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana can be read as a love letter to literature, a layered excavation of an Italian boyhood of the 1940s, and a sly meditation on human consciousness.Both playful and reverent, it stands with The Name of the Rose and The Island of the Day Before as among Eco's most successful novels.--Regina Marler ... Read more

Customer Reviews (84)

A story in three parts; one is actually good
This novel is broken into three sections.The first, "The Incident" is funny, irreverent, fast-moving, and satisfying.Read to the end of this section and then go find another book.The remaining 368 pages barely budge; mostly the author shows us his comic book collection under the guise of a novel.

So one section out of three is good, that's 33%, and a two stars out of five would be 40%.That seems fair, if a bit optmistic.

Sumptuous Fare for Lovers of Old Books
This is a book for devoted book lovers. Any bibliophile who dreams of inheriting an attic full of antique books should find The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana to be sumptuous fare. After a medical incident (a stroke) that leaves him in a state of partial amnesia, Yambo caresses book after lovely old book in an attempt to trigger lost memories of his early life. Along the way, readers are treated to reviews of rare books we wish we might be lucky enough to stumble upon along with color graphics of their covers. This book evokes the odor of library dust and printer's ink. I luxuriated in every page. The only shortcoming is a pat ending that didn't do the book justice and cut the book off at its ankles. If you are looking for an adventure story (intellectual or otherwise) this book may disappoint. But if you have a passion for the look, feel, and smell of old books, dive right in and enjoy Eco at his introspective best.

Heavy...
Being an Umberco Eco fan, I was somehow disappointed. The book is quite heavy, even boring at times.

Out of Semiotics and into the heart of Memory
For those who are used to battling through Mr. Eco's usual brainbusting work, or having to take notes to keep things straight, here's a book more from the man's heart, more so than any book he has yet written. Other's give a good synopsis of the story, so I'll simply throw in my two sense on whether or not to read this book. I enjoyed the trip into Mr. Eco's childhood Italy, as this is undoubtedly his most sutobiograpgical work to date and much takes place in the period when he would have been in his youth that the protagonist is journeying into during dreamstates after a stroke. Always an excellent historian, Mr. Eco has created a scrapbook of sorts to show us exactly what the character is describing and goes on to explain how each item or group of items affected his life or effected his life or change in life.
This is NOT a Mystery, nor is is it the type of story we are used to from Eco, although the voice is undoubtedly his, and recognizable to readers of his other works.Yet, it is simultaneously an altogether different story, more a tour of his heart and how a person grows into the adult they are via the collection of experiences they amass in child and young adulthood.
what I found interesting, is not only all the comic book covers, movie posters, political war posters, (and some excellent examples of the visual arts from that WWII period of Italy and Il Duce), and the way he not only brings that period alive for the reader, but how in the end, he ties some of these disparate memories together into a new whole, quite metaphorical for the journey we all take into becoming the person we ultimately become, and how memories morph and change as we age, morph and change ourselves. Yet there are also special memories that are so embedded as to NEVER change and that these can create the strongest base of our personality.
It is a fluid and easier read in comparison to most of his other works. I wasstruck, too, that being an American who grew up in the 60's and 70's, how different and yet how similar the formative years are the world over and throughout time. you can taste and smell the Italian countryside and the food or wine he describes and see the characters from WWII Italy in their tattered, worn clothes as well as the things and activities they used to get themselves through from one day to the next.There is one particular wartime adventure in which he takes part where his childhood activities had been a wonderful preparation for him to "become a man", almost like "an Italian WWII Bar Mitzvah". I won't ruin the experience for people yet to read it by telling it here.But life is here in 3D, the wonderings, (and the wanderings!), the building of an intellect, a view of the world around him, and even comments on his sexual awakenings and how in Europe, while Mistresses are tolerated on so many levels, the actual sexual education and the initial amazing experience of feeling the opposite sex for the first time, dreaming of a first kiss, and then the reality fulfilling, or not, that dream, in all its initial innocence and trepidation are explored.
For a man I'm used to getting intricate historical or philosphical novels from, (if usually tinged with a "wink-wink sense of humour" if you're not too tired to catch it), this book comes straight from the man's heart and it shows in the different style and the ease of the read in comparison to his other books. He's always been adept as describing things and people or setting a scene over which to play some action of a philosophical, or moral, question. But this story seemed to flow more naturally from his pen, perhaps because it is such a personal story. It is simply a different kind of read that you walk into an U Eco book expecting to read. At first, I was a little dissapointed, and then, once I understood what part all the scrapbooked sections played in the story, I fell right into it and went on a little trip to Italy in the time of Il Duce. Definitely an interesting book by and of itself. But if you are a fan, I believe its even more interesting as I felt that some of what I learned here, whether truly autobiographical or not, gave me a little window to better inform me about the author as I read his other books.
That said, I know this book is not for everyone. It is not a Beach Towel summer confection, nor is it a Dan Brown mystery. But its the closest we're probably going to get from Mr. Eco to that easier style of read. I'll take what I can get as I'm already a fan of his other books, even if I've had to start them a few times before I got all the way through. This book I read on three successive nights, and I enjoyed each one.

Worst Book Ever?Quite Possibly...
Let me start this post off with a disclaimer: This review contains a spoiler.There's a warning below before you get to it. Also, I'd like to say that I am easy to please.What I mean by that is this:When it comes to books, I like everything.Seriously.Most likely, if I read it, I'll find SOMETHING good to say about it or some redeeming quality.

Let me tell you something.When I finished reading THE MYSTERIOUS FLAME OF QUEEN LOANA by UMBERTO ECO, I threw the book across the room.No, seriously.Threw it.It was worse than Jurassic Park 3.I treat my books with dignity and respect without fail, but y'all?I threw it across the room.

"Why did you hate it so much?" you might ask.

Well, on its surface, it seemed like a good premise.A guy owns an antique book shop.He has a stroke.He loses his memory.He goes back to his boyhood home to try and jog his memory, sifting through a whole attic of books and comics from his childhood.And the dust jacket said something about those things taking on a life of their own.Uh-huh.

Dusty attic, possibility for adventure, a book about books.It can't fail!

Oh...but it did.

What I got was pages and pages and pages about Italy before and during WWII, about the comics of the day, the newspapers, the music, etc.I kept waiting for it to get better.I kept waiting for SOMETHING TO HAPPEN.He worried about his blood pressure.He made a phone call.He discovered a chapel hidden in his boyhood home that was full of old writings of his.NOT EVEN THAT WAS EXCITING!

No, no.

And then he finds Shakespeare's long lost First Folio."Ah," I thought to myself, "Here's where things get interesting."

Then the section is over, and in the next section of the book he's in a coma or dead or somethingHe doesn't even know.We live through 150 pages of his memories coming back.We get to see where pieces of his findings gain relevance.We get to read over and over again about his obsession with some girl in his life whose face he can't remember.And just when he's about to see her in his dream/coma/whatever?

Spoiler alert.

HE DIES!End of book.

I slammed it shut and threw it across the room.It never got any better.I just kept reading because I thought, "Well, it's going to get interesting here shortly.He's going to find something."And when he does, hundreds and hundreds of pages later, he goes into a coma.And then when he's about to find something there...HE DIES!

Seriously.Worst.Book.Ever.

Has anyone else read it?Did I miss something? ... Read more

Product Description

"Eco's essays read like letters from a friend, trying to share something he loves with someone he likes.... Read this brilliant, enjoyable, and possibly revolutionary book." -- George J. Leonard, San Francisco Review of Books

"... a wealth of insight and instruction." -- J. O. Tate, National Review

"If anyone can make [semiotics] clear, it's Professor Eco.... Professor Eco's theme deserves respect; language should be used to communicate more easily without literary border guards." -- The New York Times

"The limits of interpretation mark the limits of our world. Umberto Eco's new collection of essays touches deftly on such matters." -- Times Literary Supplement

"It is a careful and challenging collection of essays that broach topics rarely considered with any seriousness by literary theorists." -- Diacritics

Umberto Eco focuses here on what he once called "the cancer of uncontrolled interpretation" -- that is, the belief that many interpreters have gone too far in their domination of texts, thereby destroying meaning and the basis for communication.

Customer Reviews (3)

What, there is truth?
Well, not exactly. But Umberto Eco argues forcefully that there are a limited number of reasonable interpretations of any given text in the Limits of Interpretation. The collected essays within examine the problems with many critical philosophers' arguments that meaning is necessarily entirely subjective. The book, overall, makes a good reply.

In it, Eco takes on the alternate worlds view, as well as Derrida and Foucualt. He further describes some ways that signs can be created to constrain interpretations and criticizes the meaninglessness created by total subjectivity in terpretation.

In my opinion, Eco is strongest as a writer when he is an essayist and he is excellent here...

What, there is truth?
Well, not exactly. But Umberto Eco argues forcefully that there are a limited number of reasonable interpretations of any given text in the Limits of Interpretation. The collected essays within examine the problems with many critical philosophers' arguments that meaning is necessarily entirely subjective. The book, overall, makes a good reply.

In it, Eco takes on the alternate worlds view, as well as Derrida and Foucualt. He further describes some ways that signs can be created to constrain interpretations and criticizes the meaninglessness created by total subjectivity in terpretation.

In my opinion, Eco is strongest as a writer when he is an essayist and he is excellent here. However, it is not a large book and the price... is pretty high, especially since these essays have mostly been published elsewhere. Unfortunately, that was mostly in Italian. Look for a used copy if you can find one.

Better art than chaos
Since Luciano Anceschi's lessons at the University of Bologna (a town in Italy, not the American imitation of "mortadella" meat), the questions about "what is art" and "which interpretations of a work of art are acceptable and which are not" has arisen with the power and the consistence of a flood. "Anything" - some scholars and critics claimed - "can be considered art, if it is presented as art: a piece of newspaper glued to a wall can be a poem..." But can it be a good poem? Chaos followed. As open minded as usual - and ever so clear despite the French intellectual franzy fashion of his collegues (say hello do Derrida, Greimas, Bataillle, Kristeva and all the nice company) - Eco tryies a sort of "coming back to the book". A lot of interpretations are possible, but not ANY interpretation. Clever, illuminating, wisely fun in his choice of examples... Bel colpo Umberto! Ci vediamo in via Zamboni! ... Read more

Product Description
How do we know a cat is a cat? And why do we call it a cat? How much of our perception of things is based on cognitive ability, and how much on linguistic resources? Here, in six remarkable essays, Umberto Eco explores in depth questions of reality, perception, and experience. Basing his ideas on common sense, Eco shares a vast wealth of literary and historical knowledge, touching on issues that affect us every day. At once philosophical and amusing, Kant and the Platypus is a tour of the world of our senses, told by a master of knowing what is real and what is not.
Amazon.com Review
Describing Umberto Eco as a writer is like describing the platypus as ananimal. What do readers expect when they see the author's name on a bookjacket? It's a tricky question to answer, given his range and versatility:he has produced studies of semiotics, children's books, medieval history, essays on contemporary culture,and, of course, novels--most notably The Name of the Rose andThe Island of the DayBefore. So first, a word of warning. Anyone familiar with Eco thenovelist or essayist might well be dismayed by Kant and thePlatypus, for this new book returns to his preoccupations of the 1960sand 1970s--to semiotics and cognitive semantics. As such, it can be adaunting volume (the initial chapter, for example, riffs on the numerousphilosophical concepts of being). And second, a word of encouragement:this is a wonderful engagement with the issues of language itself. Even ashe beckons the reader into one linguistic thicket after another, Eco alwayskeeps a commonsensical perspective, using stories to explicate theknottiest concepts.

Why did Marco Polo describe the rhinoceros as a type of unicorn? Whycouldn't 18th-century observers figure out how to classify the duck-billedplatypus? Given a dictionary or encyclopedia definition of a mouse, howeasy would it be to identify one if we had never seen one before? These aresome of the examples that Eco uses to explore the ways in which we see anddescribe the world--the ways, that is, in which cultures developtaxonomies. If you want to know "why we can tell an elephant from anarmadillo," or why mirrors do not in fact reverse images, this bookwill tell you. In fact, it will also tell you why you know what I amtalking about when I say "this book." Got it? No? Then get it. --BurhanTufail ... Read more

Customer Reviews (16)

Emphatically *not* for the lay reader
Why only two stars?I'm fascinated by books about the origins and evolution of language, but this one definitely belongs on the "philosophy", rather than the "linguistics" shelf (I suppose the mention of Kant in the title should have been sufficient warning). And, though I have a decent enough training in logic and mathematics, my philosophical chops are non-existent. So that paragraphs like the following just stick in my craw, like an indigestible platypus-burger:

"First of all, so that these most partial notes may be understood, I must clarify what I mean by the term "referring". I intend to exclude a "broad" use of the term, and I think it would be appropriate to limit the notion of referring to what is perhaps more properly describable as cases of designation, that is to utterances that mention particular individuals, groups of individuals, specific facts or sequences of facts, in specific times and places. From now on I shall also be using the generic notion of "individual" for identifiable spatiotemporal segments, such as 25 April 1945, and I shall hold to the golden decision by which nominantur singularia sed universalia significantur."

So, here's the thing. I actually had five years of Latin in high school, so I can reasonably figure out that that last part means something along the lines of 'although the specific is named, the general is to be understood' (e.g. 'the platypus' can be taken to mean that particular platypus over there, but it can also mean 'platypuses in general').

So I can figure it out. But I RESENT HAVING TO. There seems to be no particular reason to lapse into Latin at the point where he does - it smacks of flaunting one's erudition (and, dear God, Umberto has erudition out the wazoo), at the price of potentially losing a significant fraction of one's readers.

So, only two stars from me. Readers with a stronger background in philosophy and a greater tolerance for gratuitous bursts of Latin may feel differently. But reviews which suggest that this book is accessible to the 'general reader' are severely misguided, in my opinion.

Verbose beyond Cuteness
Dont get me wrong, Im generally big on Eco, not only his novels, but also the other essay books and Travels in Hyperreality really was an eye opener in my intellectual development. But Kant and the Platypus was a real disappointment. First, the reference to Kant is rather misleading, for Kant's work is reviewed rather summerally and reduced to an absurdity. Kant's categories of cognition are not geared towards semiotics as such, but towards formal logical operations, the space time structure of thinking. To say that the Kantian categories fall short of an analysis of meaning is to suggest that the faucet was deficient in putting out the fire at Macy's. Second, to say the perceptual categories of every day meaning are negotiated contracts with a community of parlants, does not require almost 400 pages. The essays are like pastries oversaturated with sacharine. After the initial taste or two, u just feel like putting it down.It was a labor to honor the man by finishing the book.

Philosophy alive
I read the review of Simon Blackburn trashing the book: Eco made a few mistakes concerning the two dogmas of empiricism (he confused Davidson's work with Quine's first dogma). So I am sure many readers hesitated after a review by such a rigorous big gun thinker as Blackburn.
When I started reading the book I was taken aback by the combination of depth and the vividness of the style. Eco is sprightly and alive, something that cannot be said of many philosophers dealing with the subject of categories.
The notion of categories is not trivial: you need a simple conditional prior to identify an object; it is a simple mathematical fact. You need to know what a table is to see it in the background separated from its surroundings. You need to know what a face is so when it rotates you know it is still the same face. Computers have had a hard time with such pattern recognition. A PRIOR category is a necessity. This was Kant's intuition (the so-called "rationalism"). This is also the field of semiotics as initially conceived. Eco took it to greater levels with his notion of what I would call in scientific language a compression, a "simplifation". This leads to the major problem we face today: what if the act of compressing is arbitrary?
Not just very deep but it is a breath of fresh air to see such a philosophical discussion nondull, nondry, alive!

Akin to a TV show; a layman's view of semiotics
This is a layman's introduction to semiotics.These essays make me feel as if I were watching a TV show (probably the Roseanne show) on semiotics.Where is the intellectual substance I ask?When have semioticians given upthe pursuit of semiotic research merely to be branded as "semioticiansfor the masses"?

Well done Alastair McEwen (Translator)
Alastair McEwen (Translator) makes this book the gem that it is.If it weren't for Alastair McEwen (Translator) this book might suffer from a mundane translation.Yet you need not fear, Alastair McEwen (Translator)has done a superior job. ... Read more

Product Description
In this authoritative, lively book, the celebrated Italian novelist and philosopher Umberto Eco presents a learned summary of medieval aesthetic ideas. Juxtaposing theology and science, poetry and mysticism, Eco explores the relationship that existed between the aesthetic theories and the artistic experience and practice of medieval culture. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (3)

The Beauty of God
This is a fascinating and enjoyable survey of the approaches to and embodiments of beauty in the Middle Ages through the 13th century, which is when the Middle Ages gave way to the High Middle Ages (which culminated - or bottomed out, depending on how you look at it - in the Protestant Reformations).Great theologians and mystics such as St. Thomas Aquinas and St. Bernard of Clairvaux are dealt with, as well as lesser figures such as Hugh of St. Victor and Abbot Suger.Theology and mysticism, architecture and music, science, philosophy and even love poetry are brought together as Eco paints (no pun intended) a highly detailed exposition of the ways in which beauty shaped the lives of those in the medieval era.

It is, in many ways, a tour through a land that is as strange as it is wonderful.The entire world - every created thing - was, early on, *seen* as a symbol that was to be read just as the Bible was read: with a sense that it existed not just as it was, but as something beyond itself too, pointing ultimately to God, for God had created it.Nature is understood to be what sociologists and philosophers would now call "enchanted": filled with mystery, depth, existential and metaphysical meaning.The rise of Aristotelian metaphysics (re: science and philosophy as a single entity - they weren't separated back then) is what eventually quashed this such that the world was no longer see as a cosmic spiritual thing so much as a created thing that could be studied as having its own laws.St. Thomas Aquinas, "the Angelic Doctor", did much to push this view and it eventually one out.The medieval era looks curiously modern in this regard.

Although the rise of Aristotelianism may have done much to encourage the development of what is now called "modern science", there were other forces at work, particularly those of stone and glass: the medieval churches.In France, in the 12th century, a priest named Suger designed and oversaw the building of the greatest church of the medieval era: the cathedral of St. Denis.St. Denis is today known as Pseudo-Dionysius, a 5th or 6th century monk whose writings were written under the name of Dionysius the Aeropagite, the first convert of St. Paul.Denis/Dionysius's mystical writings on the light of God were heavily influential on Abbot Suger and as he designed the cathedral, he saw to it that the stained glass and windows allowed the light to filter into the building such that the very experience of the aesthetics would be like an ecstatic experience of God.

This brought him into conflict with St. Bernard of Clairvaux, "the Difficult Saint", who is best known for his four-volume commentary on the Song of Songs.Bernard was unarguably the greatest and most influential figure of the 12th century, and he thought that the great burst of enthusiasm for aesthetics in Abbot Suger's cathedral was perilously close to idolatry.In a certain sense, neither figure won this dispute for the beauty of cathedrals has been with us ever since, without the highly developed sense of theological aesthetics articulated by Abbot Suger being understood by those who marveled in - and at - the cathedrals as "houses for God".

And yet, the vision of beauty permeated theological and mystical writings that dealt with the vision of God and the resurrection of the dead.The very notion of beauty was found throughout much of medieval thought - which was oftentimes theologically rooted, but not always - and it is to Eco's credit that he can so deftly maneuver between theological and philosophical writings on the one hand, and their embodiment in architecture on the other.The vision of God was the summit of the medieval spiritual journey, and this even resulted in the painting of pictures of Jesus as being physically beautiful - a sign of no small level of devotion.

This book is a fascinating read whose short length is by no means matched for its insight and familiarity with both primary and secondary sources.Students of history (whether sociological or intellectual), theology and mysticism, and art will benefit from the lucid work.Casual readers will benefit from it as well, and likely find themselves looking at light - and all that it brings to sight - just a little differently as a result of reading it.

Brilliant and uet it could have been blindingly bright
An extremely important book that answers marvellously our prejudices against the Middle Ages. It explores in great details their literature and philosophy to show how people understood beauty then. He sees three phases. First the aesthetics of proportion in direct connectionwith the greek mathematical heritage and the biblical teachings about the wisdom of the creation by God who projected his own balanced vision and essence in every single creature. Second the asthetics of light which reveals a more sensorial and even sensual approach to beauty in the fact that light and colors are beautiful at first contact and felt as such without any reflection. Finally the aesthetics of the organism that sees beauty in the fact that a complex composition is the creation of perfect balance among all the elements that are themselves balanced in the same way at a lower level. The second great approach is that of allegorical and symbolical beauty. For philosophers and theologians beauty was to be found in the meaning of things and meaning was to be found in the allegorical and symbolical value of every element considered because for them nothing existed that did not represent the higher level of divine nature, divine perfection. Even a representationof the devil can be beautiful if it shows perfectly the ugliness of the beast in him. Yet Thomas Aquinas reveals his deeper sense of beauty in the fact that he provides this concept with a certain amount of autonomy. This autonomy had been in the air for many centuries but he is the first theologian to accept it as an important element in his evaluation of beauty. We find the same dilemma with art. At first art is nothing but what is produced by the manual work of people. But through poetry on one hand, and groups or corporations of artists on the other, the aesthetic value of artistic work is captured at least partly. Yet the book has aged a little bit over the last forty years or so. It does not consider enough the practical and material level of things. The existence of poetical tournaments in important pilgrimage cities like Le Puy in France, the constant use of music and singing (and the specialization of some monks in that field), the training of architects and sculptors in some abbeys to build the churches of their abbeys or their priories. It also does not see that some practices, like poetry, is in perfect continuation of what it was in the celtic, nordic and germanic traditions : the poet was on his way to becoming a druid, or singing epics was part of the know-how of a good warrior, or a celtic god was nothing but a good craftsman in one trade and a good poet and singer, etc. The global evaluation then is slightly defective. This leads him to concentrating on gothic cathedrals and neglecting the romanesque period that built thousands of little marvellous gems in villages with sculptures, paintings, etc. The romanesque period is thus undervalued and the gothic re-orientation is over-valued. The pesrpective is then defective. Finally he takes the present conception of art and beauty too much into account to assess the conceptions of the people in those days. Even when dealing with art history we must not, never, look back at things to assess them but always compare what follows to what has come before. In this case he should have compared medieval art - exclusively - with roman art et celtic-nordic-germanic art without forgetting that the chirstianization of the Roman Empire and the Germanic invaders also brought a complete shift from what was done for the free elite of a fundamentally slave-society to something that was supposed to be done for everyone within the church, the liturgy, but also mass events like pilgrimages, fairs and carnavals, or the famous Masses of Fools or Danses Macabres. It was, in our world, the first time ever the whole society was associated to cultural and artistic activities that were integrated in general social life not as an entertainment or a decoration but as something meaningful, even if we can consider the necessity for that meaning to be religious or articulated on a religious dimension as being a limitation. And these elements were quasi-permanent since situated in all the churches and taking place at all religious occasions, as well as non-religious occasions. We will then note that Troubadors were a regression when they were playing and singing only for the noble elite, though from Eco's point of view they were progress since they introduced a new conception that was closer to our modern conception of poetry. From the slave-owning elite, to mass christian pedagogy, and then to the new noble feudal castle-enclosed elite. From refined feelings going along with the barbarity of circus games, slavery and gladiators, to the massive culture of the Peace of God and God's arts and beauty going along with the barbarity of some warmongering local or not so local barons and other nobles, and then to the refined troubador music and poetry for the castle-protected nobles going along with the continuation of the religious oriented arts for the people abandoned by the poets and the musicians. Maybe the Middle Ages were looking for a uniformized society too much, but it is a selective elite practice that came out of it for the superior social class of the nobility. The Middle Ages is a period that tries to manage its contradictions in a balanced way hence shifting from one elitist contradiction to another elitist contradiction. Umberto Eco misses this last point.

Dr Jacques COULARDEAU

Strike Out
Umberto Eco's best efforts are probably contained in this rather labyrinthine and meandering effort to codify Thomistic philosophy. Thomism doesn't have a philosophy of the "aesthetic,' a notion wholly alien to the medieval mind. So Eco has to kind of create such a notion from a plethora of Thomas' writings. Fortunately, Eco does stay on track, even if he creates and follows tangents widely, by staying focused on the contribution ART (vis-a-vis "aesthetics") offers to modern sensibility.

Frankly, if one wants a better understanding of Medieval attitudes toward art, Emile Male's "Gothic" is incomparable. Male's work is a tour d'force and a "must" for anyone seriously interested in medieval art.

Even Jacques Maritain's "Art and Scholasticism" does a better job of presenting Thomistic views on art and beauty. The same can be said of Josef Pieper, who has written many books on art and the scholastic mind.

Eco, who made a name for inviting deconstruction into the Italian worldview, is better skilled at directing his attentions to that field than the medieval notions, concepts, and theories of art and beauty. If one wants a more concolidated assessment of the "philosophical" underpinnings of scholasticism's attitude toward art, simply read Aristotle. The scholastic view isn't much different, except that it is differently deployed in a manner consistent with Male's "Gothic."

This book bored me. ... Read more

Product Description
'Eco's very erudite and provocative book draws on philosophy, linguistics, sociology, anthropology, and aesthetics and refers to a wide range of scholarship, both European and American. It raises many fascinating questions which merit considerable probing.'-Language in Society ... Read more

Customer Reviews (3)

Poor printing and typography make reading painful
Eco's "Theory of Semiotics" may well be a book of valuable content but I doubt if I will ever struggle through it to the end. The so-called "typesetting" is beyond pathetic for a University Press. It looks as though it were typed on an old 1970's Selectric ball typewriter which was badly in need of alignment. The text was appallinglyslugged into the pages by an unskilled typist and then photo-copied numerous times to assure that reading it would cause pain and suffering to the hapless reader.The text is bold and blotchy with hiccups in letter alignment that makes one wonder if this were a low-tech pirated rip-off instead of the real thing. I would very gladly return this book if they would replace it with a text file that I could format myself and make readable.

My apologies to Umberto because I am a fan of his work in semiotics but the dear folks at Indiana University Press and perhaps "General Editor" Thomas A. Sebeok, need a lesson in typography from Robert Bringhurst or a visit from nearby Miles Tinker for a sound flogging with a pica ruler.

Chris Lozos

never again will words be the same
I stepped off the edge of normal thinking and rose to new heights of awareness.I have appreciated Mr. Eco as an author of great books, but I see him now as Dr. Eco, the man who makes words speak new meaning.When I listen to people, friends, family, (yes and God forgive me, TV talking heads) I no longer hear what they say, I see they are trying to express ideas with words they do not control.I just wish I could control them, the words, as Dr. Eco does.An excellent read, and excellant study and a great way to build your mind. Thank you Dr. Eco, mille gracie, mille, mille gracie.

Symbols: Development of a Methodology of Communication
The Italian Umberto Eco is a towering figure. A literary critic, novelist, and semiotician (studying symbols and symbol systems), he gained international recognition with "The Name of the Rose" (1980) in which he brought the study of semiotics to fiction. In this book, "Theory of Semiotics", he makes his contribution to the theoretical study of signs encompassing all cultural phenomena. His focus is on the development of a methodology of communication.

Like Roland Barthes, Eco starts from the foundations of semioticsin Saussure (Course in General Linguistics: who developed the idea of sign-systems and the sign/signified distinction, as well as the distinction between langue/parole - language and speech) and Claude Levi-Strauss (Structural Anthropology). Yet Eco surpasses this tradition to move into new territory, recognizing the limits to structuralism and Saussure's ideas. He recognizes, for example, that meaning is not merely governed by structure, but also interactively constructed by the reader/interpreter, who often inserts or fills-in missing meaning to construct a coherent picture.

Those interested in an introductory work to this fascinating field should be pointed to Eco's work "Semiotics and the Philosophy of Language" which is easier to start with. ... Read more

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Customer Reviews (97)

I would stay away from this book.It is as boring as it is confusing.
Roberto de la Griva is an Italian nobleman from the 17th century.After a leisure living experience in Paris, he is accused of treason by Cardinal Richelieu's advisors and sent on to travel the Amaryllis to the South Pacific to discover the means by which navigators can understand the mystery of the "longitude."He is supposed to spy on the Dutchmen and report back to Richelieu.

After a violent storm, Roberto finds himself shipwrecked.Swept from the Amaryllis, he manages to pull himself aboard the Daphne--anchored in the bay of a beautiful island.

The Daphne is fully provisioned but the crew is missing.As he resolves to write a diary we learned from his youth: Ferrante, his imaginary evil brother; the siege of Casale which cost him his father's death, and the lessons given him on fencing, blasphemy, and the writing of love letters.

Soon he discovers that he is not alone on the Daphne--Father Caspar Casale, a Jesuit and scientist, is also obsessed with the problem of longitudes.Roberto and Caspar perform certain experiments--to no avail.

The book is 503 pages and it basically deals with the mysteries of life and death: "I am not urging you to prepare for the next life, but to use well this, the only life that is given you, in order to face, when it does come, the only death you will ever experience.It is necessary to mediate early, and often, on the art of dying, to succeed later in doing it properly just once." (p. 132).

Unfortunately the book is narrated by an unknown person, the point of view being universal and confusing.To quote the narrator: "We will remember, I hope--for Roberto has borrowed from the novelists of his century the habit of narrating so many stories at once that at a certain point it becomes difficult to pick up the thread." (p.423)

And that is why I would stay away from this book.It is as boring as it is confusing.

If you're studying vocabulary for the GRE read this book!
Seriously.I was studying a box of 500 vocabulary flashcards in preparation for the GRE, and I swear Eco used that same box as he was writing this book.It really was good practice to go along with the studying, because I could actually see the words in context.Unfortunately that was one of the few redeeming qualities for this book in my opinion.This is only the second book I've read by Eco (the first being The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana), but I'm pretty sure it will be my last by him.There are too many good books out there to waste my time buying his books and feeding his ego.

brain-breaking amazing stuff
just another masterpiece from Eco. It's a match to Foucault pendulum by its depth and complexity (compare to enjoyable light Name of the Rose and Baudolino.) I don't understand one's point that it's not the best Eco's novel - so what? It still IS orders better than millions of other books.

Pointless read with a handful of interesting tangents
island of the day before is a waste of time.I am a fan of umberto eco, first having read his fantasy novel baudolino and then getting to the name of the rose.

i was hoping for at least a somewhat straightforward narrative, but this was like switching off between an adventure story without a climax every other chapter, alternated between chapters out of a philosophy textbook.

I am ok with tangents and rhetorical flights of fancy, but not within the context of a boring and meaningless story.

skip this and read name of the rose.

Josh Brown

http://thereformedbroker.com

The worst novel of one of my favorite authors
I have simply loved every other novel by Umberto Eco I've read. I started with Foucault's Pendulum which I read in college and is still one of my all-time favorite books. Of course, I then went on to read The Name of the Rose which was also great.

More recently I've read Baudolino which I thoroughly enjoyed as well - and which is a much easier read than most of Eco's stuff.

I own The Island of the Day Before in a hard-copy that I bought at Half Price Books, and I'm sorry to say I still haven't finished it.

I've forced myself to finish even some really horrendous novels, but for some reason I can't get through this. I'm such a big fan it bothers me and I can't help but wonder if it's Eco's fault or his English translator.

My advice is to read anything else by Umberto Eco, but not this one. ... Read more