About the book:
Three editors at a vanity press, bored with conspiracy manuscripts, invent their own grand unified conspiracy theory and find it beginning to take on a life of independent reality.
Eco's follow-up to The Name of the Rose is denser and more demanding, a novel about the seductive danger of pattern-making and the way meaning can be manufactured from coincidence.
Rewarding for readers willing to work.
Condition:
Great secondhand condition.
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About the author:
Umberto Eco (1932 to 2016)
Born in Alessandria in northern Italy, Eco spent the first half of his career becoming one of the most formidably learned academics of the twentieth century a medievalist, philosopher, and semiotician whose theoretical work on signs, meaning, and interpretation was internationally influential before most people had heard of him as a novelist. He wrote his first work of fiction at forty-eight. It sold ten million copies.
His influences are Borges above all the labyrinthine library, the infinite text, the detective story as a model for how we know anything and Joyce in the encyclopedic ambition, Aquinas in the medieval philosophical architecture, and Conan Doyle in the pleasure of detection. The blind monk Jorge of Burgos in The Name of the Rose is a direct homage to Borges, named and positioned deliberately. Eco owed the debt and paid it openly.
His academic work particularly The Open Work and The Role of the Reader argued that a text's meaning is completed by its reader rather than fixed by its author, which is both a theoretical position and a description of how his novels actually function: they reward whatever the reader brings, and punish nothing except incuriosity.
The intellectual thriller as a genre the labyrinthine archive, the hidden manuscript, the conspiracy behind history owes its contemporary existence largely to him. Dan Brown built an industry on a simplified version of Foucault's Pendulum. Eco noted, with characteristic precision, that he had already described the type of person who would believe it.
He died in Milan in February 2016, in a house reportedly containing thirty thousand books. It is not clear where he slept.
