“To be intellectually curious is to be alive,” Umberto Eco once said. The Italian thinker, who died in 2016, was a professor, novelist, author of the most famous and once inescapable The Name of the Rose, semiotician, columnist, and arcana philosopher. He was also an appraiser. He also conveyed a glittering sense of joy in reading and thinking about the world and literature, the notion that erudition can be as enjoyable as it is enlightening.
“Umberto Eco: The World’s Library” celebrates him and his many bookshelves, but it’s his iconic charm that comes through most of all. Davide Ferrario’s documentary brings the physicality of the book to the fore in drooling libraries from Turin, Italy to Tianjin, China, then clips Apertus and quip Eco about memory and contemporary noise. In the meantime, I’m slowly getting into the eclectic interest in eco.
Eco’s passion for canonical literature is evident, but we hear more about his favorite offbeat wanderings. For example, he is the 17th-century Jesuit scholar Athanasius Kircher, who wrote a voluminous and sometimes misguided treatise. The well-meaning dramatic readings of Eco’s book, interspersed with delightful anecdotes from his children and grandchildren, add to Eco’s image as an extravagant scholar. His love of the Arcana lends a more intriguing outward quirkiness to the film than his semiotic work and political commentary (he had been criticizing Silvio Berlusconi since the 1990s). ing.
Eko’s 1980 debut novel The Name of the Rose, a murder mystery set in a 14th-century monastery, was a stunning success. Eko neatly describes the appeal of such detective-style investigations as being mental in nature, asking who is behind all this. He would go on to more esoteric adventures such as Foucault’s Pendulum (1988). Throughout his work, from speculative travelogues to the phenomenon of lies, fiction and the various deceptions it contains have drawn Eko.
Viewers (and readers) of a certain age may wonder if Eko’s profile has faded a bit. Ferrario’s documentary portrays a figure that feels more European than international, not to mention outdated. (He was arguably the guy who liked to explain his disdain for his cell phone.) But exploring fictional worlds with Eko as a guide is still a distracting and often enlightening experience. It’s a quest.
Umberto Eco: The Library of the World
Unrated. Running time: 1 hour 20 minutes. at the theater.
