Word: umberto
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Many a university professor daydreams about someday casting aside his footnotes and writing a splashy novel that will sell zillions of copies and make him rich. Umberto Eco, 57, a bearded and bespectacled professor of semiotics at the University of Bologna, fulfilled exactly that daydream eight years ago, when he concocted his mega-macro-medieval-mystery hit The Name of the Rose. He wrote part of the best seller in a 50-room country retreat near Urbino that he bought and restored himself and where he spends his leisure hours expanding his 40,000-volume collection of antique books...
Saul Bellow offers a literary bargain: A Theft, his vivid novella, costs $6.95. -- Umberto Eco's latest tome incites Ecomania in Italy...
Whether English-speaking readers adopt the Khazars with equal fervor remains to be seen. The runaway success of Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose (1983) may be a precedent, since both novels offer murders mixed with medieval arcana. But Pavic does not convey anything resembling the suspense generated by Eco's relentlessly straightforward, deductive progress toward the darkness at the heart of an obscure monastery. Instead, in the "Preliminary Notes" to this presumptive dictionary, readers are advised to proceed in any manner or order they choose: "No chronology will be observed here, nor is one necessary...
...Borgesian game of hunting a lost text may remind readers of Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose, where monks searched for the second part of Aristotle's Poetics, and it would not be a bad comparison. Like Eco, Pavic loves to play games with the textuality of the text--the Dictionary is more toy than book--and, like Eco, Pavic has profound doubts about the power of language to communicate...
...Semiotician and Novelist (The Name of the Rose) Umberto...