TIME: Almanac 1990/1990 Time Magazine Compact Almanac, The (1991)(Time).iso/time/030689/03068900.054

Text File | 1990-09-17 | 6KB | 112 lines

BOOKS, Page 71

Return of Ecomania

A successor to The Name of the Rose sweeps Italy

By Otto Friedrich  -- With reporting by Cathy Booth/Bologna


    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 and playing the recorder in his bathroom (because the
acoustics are best there).

    That bizarre scenario might seem impossible for even a
semiotician to duplicate. But guess again. Eco has produced another
novel, Foucault's Pendulum, which has sold more than half a million
copies in Italy since it was published last October and at one
point outsold the next highest best seller by 15 to 1. Translation
rights have been assigned in 24 countries, and an English version
by William Weaver will be published in the U.S. next October. Once
again the Italian press has orchestrated what it calls Ecomania
with cries of delight and outrage. One newspaper praised Foucault's
Pendulum as "the novel of the '90s," while the Vatican's
L'Osservatore Romano denounced it for "vulgarities."

    Not the least odd aspect of the affair is that Foucault's
Pendulum is not so much a thriller as a complicated parable that
contains pages and pages of erudite details about such medieval
phenomena as the Knights Templar, the Cathars and the Order of
Assassins. And Eco steadfastly refuses to explain what his
mysterious novel is all about. "This was a book conceived to
irritate the reader," he says in his drafty university office,
lighting up another of the 60 cigarettes he puffs every day. "I
knew it would provoke ambiguous, nonhomogeneous responses because
it was a book conceived to point up some contradictions."

    The plot, embedded in the 500 pages of mystic history, concerns
three editors in a Milan publishing house who are working on a
series about the occult arts. They become fascinated by a secret
plan supposedly concocted by the Knights Templar to dominate the
world by harnessing its magnetic currents. The Templars, Eco
explains in a 20-page aside, were one of the great military
monastic orders at the time of the Crusades and were suppressed
after the King of France accused them, probably falsely, of
homosexuality and sorcery.

    The editors become convinced that they can somehow unravel the
Templars' scheme if they put a secret map under Foucault's
pendulum, a device invented by the 19th century physicist
Jean-Bernard-Leon Foucault to measure the earth's rotation.  The
pendulum, which still stands in Paris today, will supposedly
indicate a site at which the earth's vital currents can be
controlled, earthquakes can be created, and so on.

    Eco periodically interrupts his narrative for learned
disquisitions on magic and the supernatural, on the Arians, the
Druids, the Cabala, the Freemasons, modern-day Brazilian Umbanda,
on such celebrated 18th century sorcerers as Cagliostro and the
Count of Saint-Germain, even on such hoaxes as the Protocols of the
Learned Elders of Zion. While the three explorers are pursuing
their experiment, some occultist zealots find out about it and
threaten to kill them unless they surrender the Templars' secret.

    Only in a rare interview, in La Repubblica, did Eco venture to
explain that his novel "is the story of all the cosmic plots that
people truly imagine. It is the story of a cancer afflicting the
spirit. The thriller aspect, the anguish, the uncertainty, are the
consequences of this psychosis of suspiciously interpreting nature,
society, the world, the text." Is that all quite clear?  "The
answer is there in 500 pages," says Eco, parrying further
questions.  "If I had a shorter answer, I would have written a book
of 200 pages." As for anyone else's answers, Eco simply says he
does not want to "impose my interpretation on the reader."

    The Italian press, of course, has offered all kinds of answers.
 Maria Corti, writing in L'Indice, declared that Eco's chief
message is that "a rational explanation of the world is improbable,
even unlikely." Critic Enzo Golino, writing for a socialist
magazine, suggested that "Foucault's Pendulum is a gigantic
psychoanalysis of history that questions a revealing aspect of
today's Western civilization: the return of irrationality and the
illusion of rationality." Others have been less respectful, using
semiotic signs like faticaccia (exhausting work) and uggiosissimo
(roughly, dullsville to the max). Some magazines have published
elaborate plot outlines, diagrams, glossaries of occult
terminology. Eco, theorizes sociologist and critic Francesco
Alberoni, "satisfies some deep need . . . not to remain at the
superficiality of things." The magazine L'Europeo suggested that
the only people who like the book -- or indeed have read it -- are
the author's friends.

    Eco will at least offer some thoughts on how his book came
about. "One answer," he says, "is that at age 48 I wrote the first
novel of my life, and then I had the problem of understanding
whether it was an exception, a mere accident or the beginning  of
something new. Suppose a vicious dog chases you, and to escape you
jump over a river.  Once you've done this, you wonder if it was
chance or could you do it a second time? Also, obviously I had
something more to say." Whatever that might be.

    Now that he has made a second killing in the fiction
sweepstakes, Eco is trying to return to the decent obscurity of
academe (he still lectures three days a week to some 200 students
in Bologna). In April the Harvard University Press will reissue
two scholarly works. He is working these days on what he describes
only as being "on the borderline of semiotics and philosophy." He
is still fascinated by St. Thomas Aquinas and Superman, on both of
whom he has written learnedly. He is readying a collection of
scholarly essays in English, and he has no plans for any new
novels. One every ten years, he says, is quite enough.