From scholar to novelist

Umberto Eco's books, translated from Italian, are not an easy read. His plots are complicated and his characters are multi-dimensional, so you will need to concentrate from the first page. But I like his style and the twists and turns in his stories. There is a sophistication to his writing that is incomparable.

A regular follower of this blog would know by now that when I like a writer, I would read a number of his books. And Eco is no exception - I have three of his on my bookshelf. One, purchased in 2009 at a Big Bad Wolf sale for just RM8.00, is The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana. First published in 2004, it is a rather playful story about a rare-book dealer who, although he has lost his memory about his own life, can remember every book he has ever read. To retrieve his past, he withdraws to his family home in the country and attempts to relive his life through boxes of old newspapers, comics, records, photo albums and diaries kept in the attic. His search is made all the more realistic within the pages of Eco's novel with reproductions of actual items.

The above book is a walk in the park to read when compared to Eco's earlier novel, Foucault's Pendulum, which first came out in 1988. It is a thriller of interconnected mysteries running into more than 600 pages that, along the way, takes a dig at "exploitative publishers and pompous intellectuals" (Jonathan Coe, in The Guardian, 12 Octobeer 1989).

I came to appreciate Eco when I bought his first novel, The Name of the Rose, which was originally published in 1980 and went on to become an international bestseller. The book, later made into a movie starring Sean Connery and Christian Slater, is set in medieval times. It is in fact a detective story in which the protagonist, a learned Franciscan, is called upon to solve a mystery involving monks who were murdered in bizarre ways. 

In 2011, in an interview for The Guardian, Eco says, "People are tired of simple things. They want to be challenged." Thus, his books have been about conspiracies and the paranoia created because of them. Almost 80 years old at the time of the interview, Eco has had a distinguished academic career, publishing scholarly works, before he ventured into fiction-writing. The Name of the Rose established his reputation as a novelist and there was no looking back after that.