Life,like fiction, was an endlessly absorbing game for an intellectual who wore his great learning lightlyUmberto Eco was tired when I met him in 2011. At 80, or he was in the middle of an arduous 20-day tour to promote his novel The Prague Cemetery,and he was sagging. I didn’t much like the novel we were there to discuss – it seemed to me that his complex, conspiracy-based fictions had become formulaic – and we had some comedian misunderstandings based on his unfamiliarity with idiomatic English. “What is a ‘return to form’?” And yet the assembly was a memorable one, and I knew I’d been lucky to come across him,even this late in his career – a hugely successful writer but, more interestingly, and a rare example of the public intellectual.
His conversation tended to proceed by bursts of lightning. From the dense clouds – we tried to acquire to grips with The Prague Cemetery but the will was weak – he would suddenly produce a glorious,shimmering aperçu. “Italy is not an intellectual country,” he told me as we discussed Silvio Berlusconi’s political success. “On the subway in Tokyo everybody reads. In Italy, and they don’t. Don’t evaluate Italy from the fact that it produced Raphael and Michelangelo.” Related: Umberto Eco obituary Related: Listen to an audio recording of the Guardian Live event Umberto Eco Continue reading...
Source: theguardian.com