Eco is still Eco
I've been putting off posting about The Island of the Day Before because there's something about its similarity to Eco's other books that makes me feel so at home that I'm uncomfortable.
In this (reassuringly) big heavy book Eco plays the same games with language and authorial intrusiveness as in all his novels. There's arcane scientific knowledge, as in Foucault's Pendulum, except this is about the search for longitude rather than the strangeness of whatever the Knights Templar were looking for (it's been a while and I always mix Foucault's Pendulum up with William Burroughs's Cities of the Red Night which I read immediately afterwards. There were Templars in both and at least one had a homunculus.) There are elements of the quest with impaired and deluded protagonists who may or may not be doing what they say they're doing as in Baudolino. And there's philosophising about religion and the clash between philosophy and Chrstianity as inThe Name of the Rose. There's even the theme of the inacessible beloved, which is at the beating heart of the recent The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana, although not as extensively as in that strange and moving meditation on ageing, memory and the intense power of nostalgia. (I decided to tackle Proust after reading Queen Loana but I haven't had a spare month yet.)
Because of these similarities, I wonder if I like reading Eco because he makes me feel smart. I can follow him up his arcane paths and jumps between Latin and German and English. Subconciously I might be saying 'Look, I have this big fat book and I understand it! Give me a gold star!' To be a bit less self-referential, I think his process of taking the history of science and putting it into a novel can educate the reader and make them feel like they're doing something a bit clever in choosing to read these books. So they'll buy the next one. Sort of like the Reader's Digest theory of selling the Great Books of the Western World series to suburbanites in the seventies. Can you still buy them?
And it's all too easy to do Eco's schtick badly. Essentially, this is the same turf that Neal Stephenson covered in such a pedestrian fashion in the Baroque Cycle. I ploughed through all three million pages of those books, feeling patronised and not very entertained. At least Eco is funny.
In this (reassuringly) big heavy book Eco plays the same games with language and authorial intrusiveness as in all his novels. There's arcane scientific knowledge, as in Foucault's Pendulum, except this is about the search for longitude rather than the strangeness of whatever the Knights Templar were looking for (it's been a while and I always mix Foucault's Pendulum up with William Burroughs's Cities of the Red Night which I read immediately afterwards. There were Templars in both and at least one had a homunculus.) There are elements of the quest with impaired and deluded protagonists who may or may not be doing what they say they're doing as in Baudolino. And there's philosophising about religion and the clash between philosophy and Chrstianity as inThe Name of the Rose. There's even the theme of the inacessible beloved, which is at the beating heart of the recent The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana, although not as extensively as in that strange and moving meditation on ageing, memory and the intense power of nostalgia. (I decided to tackle Proust after reading Queen Loana but I haven't had a spare month yet.)
Because of these similarities, I wonder if I like reading Eco because he makes me feel smart. I can follow him up his arcane paths and jumps between Latin and German and English. Subconciously I might be saying 'Look, I have this big fat book and I understand it! Give me a gold star!' To be a bit less self-referential, I think his process of taking the history of science and putting it into a novel can educate the reader and make them feel like they're doing something a bit clever in choosing to read these books. So they'll buy the next one. Sort of like the Reader's Digest theory of selling the Great Books of the Western World series to suburbanites in the seventies. Can you still buy them?
And it's all too easy to do Eco's schtick badly. Essentially, this is the same turf that Neal Stephenson covered in such a pedestrian fashion in the Baroque Cycle. I ploughed through all three million pages of those books, feeling patronised and not very entertained. At least Eco is funny.
posted by Mary Bennet | 5:19 pm
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