Every time I pick up one of Eco's books I'm surprised just how different they are from each other. I've been disappointed so many times by authors who seem to have something to say and then end up repeating the same things over and over again book after book. I'm not an expert on history or literature but at least to a regular reader simply the amount of knowledge that Eco seems to have on the subjects he writes about, down to the smallest details, is amazing. ( )

An interesting if not terribly cohesive collection of essays. ( )

I liked Name of the Rose and Island of the Day Before but I love Foucalts Pendulum.

This is a lovely and wonderous little book.
Peter Bruegel's Tower of Babl on the cover makes it even better.
I bathe in ancient history, origins of language, odd religions, psychic archeology, magick and the occult, and semiotics.
Geurilla ontology.
This book is about the serach for the a priori perfect pre-Adamic language. It used to be assumed that it was Hebrew. Early thinkers thought an infant left completely alone would naturally start speaking Hebrew. It was the language with which God conversed with Adam and the linguistic roots that Adam used to name everything.
It's about the fascinating failures of attempts to reconstruct and establish an architectonically perfect system of ideas composed of mutual dependences and strict classifications from the general to the particular.
It would, for instance, solve the librarian's dilemma at where to catalog a book (Dewey s system leaves a lot tobe desired and complimentary books at opposite ends of the library....)
Eco speaks of mentalese, a hopeful proposed language "written in the very convulutions of our brains, capable of supplying the deep structure of every expression in any natural language."
Borges plays with the idea and quotes from the Foucalt's description of the Chinese encyclopedia Celestial Emporium of Benevolent Recognitions":
CLASSIFICATION OF ANIMALS:
-those that belong to the Emperor
-embalmed ones
-those that are trained
-suckling pigs
-mermaids
-fabulous ones
-stray dogs
-those included in the present classification
-those that tremble as if they were mad
-innumerable ones
-those drawn with a very fine camelhair brush
others
-those that have just broken a flower vase
-those that look like flies from far away....

Wow.
Loving it. We are getting closer to a polydimensional encyclopedia with hypertext nowadays.
And Alembert could have been have been talking about Wikipedia hundreds of years ago:
"...a labyrinth, a tortuous path, composed of diverse branches, some of which converge towards a same center...and since departing from it , it is not possible to follow all the paths at once---the choice is determined by the nature of the different spirits..."

Interesting, funny, thoght-provoking, and an excellent translation by my favorite translator of Italian, William Weaver. (Is it too geeky to have a favorite translator? I love Cleary, too.)

BUY, BORROW, or BURN?
BORROW ( )

Review by Jason Kuykendall for RainTaxi

Umberto Eco has become famous in the U.S. for his fiction-his novel The Name of the Rose spent months on best-seller lists and was eventually made into a Hollywood movie. At the same time, he is well-known in academic circles for his work in linguistics and history, and has for many years held a post as Professor of Semantics at the University of Bologna. Eco's present volume of essays, Serendipities, is aimed at both academic and popular audiences, collecting five lectures he has given in recent years on language, culture, and what Eco calls "the language of the lunatic."

Serendipities examines the historical search for a perfect language, an ur-language that accurately reflects the natural world. Eco delineates a path through Christian thought, from the early belief that ancient Hebrew was the language closest to perfection, to the surprising belief (for Medieval Christian thinkers) that Chinese was the ideal, pre-Babel language. This idea was perpetuated by Leibnitz, who saw reflections of binary calculus, itself held as a reflection of God, in the I-Ching. Along the way, Eco considers the study of Egyptian hieroglyphics, the Cabala, Saussure, and Dante (who believed his own Italian vernacular to be of direct lineage to the language of Adam). Eco's primary aim is to undermine the very idea of linguistic perfection, and to show how language can be used to graft false or illogical relationships onto unfamiliar experience.

In tracing language and its interaction with culture, Eco establishes a concurrent theme: instances in which explicit mistakes have led to unanticipated findings. Columbus's attempt to reach the East was inspired by a miscalculation in the Earth's size; likewise, much human endeavor has been motivated by misguided premises. For example, medieval tradition convinced Europeans of the existence of the unicorn. Marco Polo, while traveling in Java, saw large gray animals with a single horn on their muzzles. Because an entire tradition taught him to find unicorns, he was unable to see the animals for what they truly were: the lowly rhinoceros. Eco argues that the process of how we perceive language-and therefore the world-is strongly conditioned by our subjective and idiosyncratic assumptions about the world. When Leibnitz found a language of Boolean purity in the I-Ching, or when Marco Polo discovered unicorns, they were essentially projecting their own familiar world onto the strange. The danger, Eco concludes, lies not in our methods of interpreting culture, but instead in our belief that our perceptions are absolute and universal

Eco's approach is in some ways similar to that of the medieval philosophers who are so often his subjects. Undeniably erudite, he is also undeniably haphazard. Veering from Egyptology to Columbus to Chinese history within the space of a few pages, Eco stitches together a meandering narrative that will leave more linear-thinking historians howling. Nonetheless, his obscure examples and references are interesting in their own right, and his prose-sly and genial throughout-replaces logical rigor with a sense of play often missing in the study of history.

Not a bad little book. 5 essays about the quest for the language of paradise. The essay on Dante was particularly interesting. Only for the linguistically inclined. ( )