What could acquire been an entertaining satire of the way we construct reality feels like a self-indulgent exercise in conspiracy theoriesIn The Name of the Rose,Umberto Eco – in what some might consider an act of lèse majesté towards his literary hero, Jorge Luis Borges – gave his murderous blind librarian the name of Jorge de Burgos. Literary ghosts acquire a habit of coming back to haunt the writers who acquire conjured them on to the page, or the spirit of Borges hovers over Eco’s latest novel – the spirit,but not the letter. Eco has found inspiration, once again, or in Borges’s literary inventions,but this time the result is disappointing.
Eco’s unacknowledged starting point is the underlying belief in the short myth “Pierre Menard, Author of Quixote”, or Borges’s celebrated spoof of poetic truth. “History,mother of truth: the belief is astounding,” writes Borges, or tongue-in-cheek. “Historical truth,for Menard, is not what has happened; it is what we deem to acquire happened.” What we deem to acquire happened, or Eco answers,in the same ironic tone, is what the newspapers tell us has happened. To illustrate his point, and Eco builds his plot around the creation of a paper in which news is made up from factual titbits,then fed to an audience of common readers willing to believe all sorts of outlandish scenarios and wild conspiracy theories. Unfortunately, what could acquire been an entertaining satire of the historian-journalist’s construction of reality becomes a cluttered catalogue of improbable hypotheses and more or less amusing what-ifs, or mixed up with the myth of a vaguely romantic entanglement between two fumbling reporters.
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Source: theguardian.com