Hillary Kelly on Umberto Eco’s Confessions of a Young Novelist

There are few authors whose new book is always a literary event on a global scale - Umberto Eco is one of that very small club. Hillary Kelly at The Millions (an excellent blog for book lovers) reviews his newest offering, Confessions of a Young Novelist.

Fountain of Youth: Umberto Eco’s Confessions of a Young Novelist

By Hillary Kelly posted at 6:01 am on May 4, 2011 0

Is there anything Umberto Eco cannot do? It has been said before and certainly will be said again—Umberto Eco is a true Renaissance man. His contributions to the literary world are as varied as the knotty and layered Theory of Semiotics, and as delightful and nostalgic as The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana. His novels are no easy reading, with long raptures on, say, Dulcinian heresy as considered among the Bendictines of the fourteenth century, but his erudition is never for the sake of mere difficulty. Now, with the publication of Confessions of a Young Novelist, he offers readers an effective primer on both his oeuvre and the contemporary field of semiotics.

Confessions of a Young Novelist is a compact but meandering little book—in fact, it was first conceived in 2008 as a lecture series at Emory University, which explains its chatty, unpretentious tone. Akin to a Paris Review interview turned essay, Confessions is both polemic and intensely personal, infused with Eco’s trademark fastidiousness and also bursting with bombasticity. No matter the subject, Eco appears both grandiose and also dedicated to the minutiae. For a public figure and academic, he is delightfully unguarded and frank.

But a man of such wit and linguistic ability does not trap himself so easily as to offer a full confession of literary sins. The term confession, religiously charged as it is, seems particularly apt for a writer so entranced by the constraints of spirituality and religiosity. However, readers hoping to discover the dark underbelly of Italian academia have come to the wrong person and place. Eco’s confessions remain of the amusing variety, far more venial than mortal. Their triviality, however, does not detract from their edification. The fruits of Eco’s semiotic detective work (though perhaps a bit shopworn) are presented so clearly as to become Confessions‘s most fascinating revelations.

Confessions is divided into four parts, each of the first three dedicated to a question of literary theory: “Writing from Left to Right,” “Author, Text, and Interpreters,” and “Some Remarks on Fictional Characters”. Although at times erudite, the essays are gloriously uncomplicated—rather uncustomarily, they seek to solve puzzles, not create them. More importantly, Eco appears less like he is presenting a particular theory of reading than presenting a set of common truths. His style is so common-sensical and well-tuned that one cannot help but be swayed by his logic.

Read the whole review.

Tags: books, fiction, Philosophy, reading, Hillary Kelly, Umberto Eco, Confessions of a Young Novelist, The Millions, reviews, semiotics, Writing from Left to Right, Author, Text, Interpreters, Some Remarks on Fictional Characters, My Lists