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| Umberto Eco in Bologna, Italy, last year. As a semiotician, Mr. Eco studied signs and symbols. Credit Roberto Serra/Iguana Press, via Getty Images |
Umberto
Eco, an Italian scholar in the arcane field of semiotics who became the
author of best-selling novels, notably the blockbuster medieval mystery
“The Name of the Rose,” died on Friday in Italy. He was 84.
His
Italian publisher, Bompiani, confirmed his death, according to the
Italian news agency ANSA. He died at his home in Milan, according to the
Italian news website Il Post. No cause was given.
As
a semiotician, Mr. Eco sought to interpret cultures through their signs
and symbols — words, religious icons, banners, clothing, musical
scores, even cartoons — and published more than 20 nonfiction books on
these subjects while teaching at the University of Bologna, Europe’s
oldest university.
But
rather than segregate his academic life from his popular fiction, Mr.
Eco infused his seven novels with many of his scholarly preoccupations.
In
bridging these two worlds, he was never more successful than he was
with “The Name of the Rose,” his first novel, which was originally
published in Europe in 1980. It sold more than 10 million copies in
about 30 languages. (A 1986 Hollywood adaptation directed by Jean-Jacques Annaud and starring Sean Connery received only a lukewarm reception.)
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| Mr. Umberto’s first novel, “The Name of the Rose,” sold more than 10 million copies. Credit Harvest Books |
The
book is set in a 14th-century Italian monastery where monks are being
murdered by their co-religionists bent on concealing a long-lost
philosophical treatise by Aristotle. Despite devoting whole chapters to
discussions of Christian theology and heresies, Mr. Eco managed to
enthrall a mass audience with the book, a rollicking detective thriller.
His
subsequent novels — with protagonists like a clairvoyant crusader in
the Middle Ages, a shipwrecked adventurer in the 1600s and a
19th-century physicist — also demanded that readers absorb heavy doses
of semiotic ruminations along with compelling fictional tales.
In
a 1995 interview with Vogue, Mr. Eco acknowledged that he was not an
easy read. “People always ask me, ‘How is it that your novels, which are
so difficult, have a certain success?’” he said. “I am offended by the
question. It’s as if they asked a woman, ‘How can it be that men are
interested in you?’” Then, with typical irony, Mr. Eco added, “I myself
like easy books that put me to sleep immediately.”
While
Mr. Eco had many defenders in academia and the literary world, critics
in both realms sometimes dismissed him for lacking either scholarly
gravitas or novelistic talent. “No cultural artifact is too lowly or
trivial for Eco’s analysis,” Ian Thomson, a literary biographer, wrote
in The Guardian in 1999 in a review of “Serendipities: Language and
Lunacy,” Mr. Eco’s collection of essays on how false beliefs had changed
history.
And
the British novelist Salman Rushdie, in a scathing review in The London
Observer, derided Mr. Eco’s 1988 novel, “Foucault’s Pendulum,” as
“humorless, devoid of character, entirely free of anything resembling a
credible spoken word, and mind-numbingly full of gobbledygook of all
sorts.”
Appearing alongside Mr. Rushdie at a literary panel in New York in 2008, Mr. Eco wryly chose to read from “Foucault’s Pendulum.”
As
a global superstar in both highbrow and popular cultural circles, Mr.
Eco accepted such criticism with equanimity. “I’m not a fundamentalist,
saying there’s no difference between Homer and Walt Disney,” he told a
Guardian journalist who was exploring his juxtaposition of scholarship
and pop iconography in 2002. “But Mickey Mouse can be perfect in the
sense that a Japanese haiku is.”
Able
to deliver lectures in five modern languages, as well as in Latin and
classical Greek, Mr. Eco crisscrossed the Atlantic for academic
conferences, book tours and celebrity cocktail parties. Impish, bearded
and a chain-smoker, he enjoyed bantering over cheap wine with his
students late into the night at taverns in Bologna.
He
and his German-born wife, Renate Ramge, an architecture and arts
teacher, kept apartments in Paris and Milan and a 17th-century manor
once owned by the Jesuits in the hills near Rimini, on the Adriatic Sea.
They had two children, Stefano, a television producer in Rome, and
Carlotta, an architect in Milan.
Umberto
Eco was born on Jan. 5, 1932, in Alessandria, an industrial town in the
Piedmont region in northwest Italy. His father, Giulio, was an
accountant at a metals firm; his mother, Giovanna, was an office worker
there.
As
a child, Umberto spent hours every day in his grandfather’s cellar,
reading through the older man’s eclectic collection of Jules Verne,
Marco Polo and Charles Darwin and adventure comics. During the
dictatorship of Benito Mussolini, he remembered wearing a fascist
uniform and winning first prize in a writing competition for young
fascists.
After
World War II, Mr. Eco joined a Catholic youth organization and rose to
become its national leader. He resigned in 1954 during protests against
the conservative policies of Pope Pius XII. But Mr. Eco maintained a
strong attachment to the church, writing his 1956 doctoral thesis at the
University of Turin on St. Thomas Aquinas.
He
went on to teach philosophy and then semiotics at the University of
Bologna. He also gained fame in Italy for his weekly columns on popular
culture and politics for L’Espresso, the country’s leading magazine.
But
it was the publication of “The Name of the Rose” that vaulted Mr. Eco
to global renown. The monk-detective of the novel, William of
Baskerville, was named after one of Sherlock Holmes’s cases, “The Hound
of the Baskervilles.” The novel is narrated by a young novice who
accompanies William through his investigation at the murder-prone
monastery and acts as a medieval Doctor Watson.
In
another literary allusion, this time to the blind Argentine writer
Jorge Luis Borges, who set one of his stories in an encyclopedic
library, Mr. Eco named the villain of the novel Jorge de Burgos and
portrays him as the monastery’s blind librarian. De Burgos and his
accomplices carry out their killings to prevent the disclosure of a
supposedly lost Aristotle tome exalting the role of humor. The murderers
believe the book is an instrument of Satan.
In
“Foucault’s Pendulum,” his second novel, Mr. Eco tells the story of
Léon Foucault, a French physicist in the 1800s who devised a mechanism
to demonstrate the rotation of the Earth. Despite mixing allusions to
the Kabbalah, mathematical formulas and Disney characters, the novel
also became a worldwide best seller — even though it did not receive the
near unanimous acclaim that critics had accorded to “The Name of the
Rose.”
The
pattern repeated itself with Mr. Eco’s other novels, which were often
disparaged by critics but devoured by readers in spite of their dense
prose and difficult concepts.
Reviewing Mr. Eco’s fourth novel,
“Baudolino” (2000), in The New York Times, Richard Bernstein wrote that
it “will make you wonder how a storyteller as crafty as Mr. Eco ended up
producing a novel so formulaic and cluttered as this one.”
Set
amid the religious disputes and wars of the 12th century, “Baudolino”
became the best-selling hardcover novel of all time in Germany and a
commercial success elsewhere in the world.
Critics
were kinder to Mr. Eco’s third novel, “The Island of the Day Before”
(1994), in which an Italian nobleman, who cannot swim, survives on his
shipwrecked vessel at a point in the tropical Pacific Ocean where the
dateline divides one day from another.
“Eco
has abandoned his familiar Middle Ages to create an extravagant
celebration of the obsessions of the seventeenth century,” a reviewer in
The New Yorker wrote, alluding to the author’s many anecdotes and
explanations on the philosophy, politics and superstitions of Europe in
that era.
Last
fall, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt published a new Eco novel, “Numero
Zero,” translated by Richard Dixon. The story, set in 1992, revolves
around a ghostwriter who is pulled into an underworld of media politics
and murder conspiracies, with a suggestion that Mussolini did not
actually die in 1945 but lived in the shadows for decades. “This slender
novel, which feels like a mere diversion compared with his more epic
works, is nonetheless stuffed with ideas and energy,” John Williams
wrote in The New York Times Book Review.
Mr.
Eco received Italy’s highest literary award, the Premio Strega; was
named a Chevalier de la Légion d’Honneur by the French government, and
is an honorary member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
While
he continued to make his scholarly peers uncomfortable with his pop
culture celebrity, Mr. Eco saw no contradiction in his dual status. “I
think of myself as a serious professor who, during the weekend, writes
novels,” he said.
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