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Summary
Summary
A posthumous collection of essays about the modern world from one of Europe's greatest, and best-selling, literary figures
Umberto Eco was an international cultural superstar. In this, his last collection, the celebrated essayist and novelist observes the changing world around him with irrepressible curiosity and profound wisdom. He sees with fresh eyes the upheaval in ideological values, the crises in politics, and the unbridled individualism that have become the backdrop of our lives--a "liquid" society in which it's not easy to find a polestar, though stars and starlets abound.
In these pieces, written for his regular column in L'Espresso magazine, Eco brings his dazzling erudition and keen sense of the everyday to bear on topics such as popular culture and politics, being seen, conspiracies, the old and the young, new technologies, mass media, racism, and good manners. It is a final gift to his reader--astute, witty, and illuminating.
Author Notes
Umberto Eco was born in Alessandria, Italy on January 5, 1932. He received a doctorate of philosophy from the University of Turin in 1954. His first book, Il Problema Estetico in San Tommaso, was an extension of his doctoral thesis on St. Thomas Aquinas and was published in 1956. His first novel, The Name of the Rose, was published in 1980 and won the Premio Strega and the Premio Anghiar awards in 1981. In 1986, it was adapted into a movie starring Sean Connery. His other works include Foucault's Pendulum, The Island of the Day Before, Baudolino, The Prague Cemetery, and Numero Zero. He also wrote children's books and more than 20 nonfiction books including Serendipities: Language and Lunacy. He taught philosophy and then semiotics at the University of Bologna. He also wrote weekly columns on popular culture and politics for L'Espresso. He died from cancer on February 19, 2016 at the age of 84.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (4)
Publisher's Weekly Review
This posthumous collection of essays reprints spirited selections from a column, "La bustina di Minerva," that the late novelist Eco (Numero Zero) wrote for the Italian weekly magazine L'Espresso. These "brief jottings," which span the years 2000-2015, cover a range of topics, including education, technology, racism, and religion, and add up to a picture of a society in flux. Eco's writing reveals a humanist in every sense of the word, well acquainted with the classics of Western civilization and able to take a broad, often amused view of human affairs. Neither a snob nor a prude, Eco takes as his central theme the value of knowledge, along with the process of identifying, acquiring, preserving, and transmitting it. His conclusions are grounded in moral principles such as tolerance and good old-fashioned courtesy, and the only enemies he identifies are the enemies of knowledge: ignorance, credulity, violence, and fear. Dixon's translation is seamless, capturing Eco's erudite style (and keeping the occasional sprinkle of Latin.) This volume's primary reward lies in the pleasure of watching a finely calibrated, expansive, and logical mind build an argument or deconstruct cant. Eco has left us an intelligent, intriguing, and often hilariously incisive set of observations on contemporary follies and changing mores. (Nov.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
A posthumous collection of brief opinion pieces from late in Eco's (Numero Zero, 2015) career demonstrates the great novelist-scholar's lively wit and vigorous intellectual engagement with our rapidly changing world. Originally appearing in the Italian news magazine l'Espresso, the essays were intended as glimpses at whatever might come into his head: observations about current events and cultural trends as well as more esoteric intellectual topics. That his column was named after a well-known brand of matchbook underscores both his anecdotal, scratch-paper approach and the reliable, if quick, illumination provided. Typically prompted by recent books or events, Eco's subjects are diverse: technology, anti-Semitism, Silvio Berlusconi, Harry Potter, the philosopher Hypatia, terrorism, and the excess of stupidity that clogs the Internet. But his erudition and his sharp critical eye remain constant. And if he is frequently exasperated by modern progress he longs for the days when cell phones were only used by adulterers he is also clearly energized by the pace of today's world and its ability to outpace those, like himself, who try to understand it. Eco will be missed.--Driscoll, Brendan Copyright 2017 Booklist
Kirkus Review
A swan song from one of Europe's great intellectuals.After publishing numerous novels, criticism, essays, and so much more, Eco (Numero Zero, 2015, etc.) died in 2016 at the age of 84. Like a few others before him, including Edmund Wilson and Lionel Trilling, among others, Eco proved that one could write for many audiences. Following up on two similar collections, this book contains more than 100 short opinion pieces originally published in L'Espresso magazine from 2000 to 2015. He calls them "reflections on aspects of this liquid society' of ours," and they encompass the current crises facing countries across the world, a collapse of ideologies, and the rise of unbridled individualism. They are divided into 13 titled sections, including "From Stupidity to Folly." Eco was no curmudgeon, but he didn't suffer fools gladlye.g., the "excess of stupidity is clogging the [internet] lines." The author regularly discusses his dislike of cellphones; people "no longer talk face-to-faceno longer reflect on life and death, and instead talk obsessively, invariably with nothing to say." There's a distinct Italian lean to these pieces, so some travel better than others, but it's not so much the information they convey as much as the intellect and thought processes of the conveyor. As Eco admits in one of the last pieces, "don't take the things you have just read as pure gold." In one piece, he discusses the Italian government selling off their Maserati cars; in another, the letters of Ian Fleming, who "was a master of style," and James Joyce. We learn that Eco is a big fan of the "amiable universe" of Rex Stout's Nero Wolfe and that Art Spiegelman is a "genius," Maus "one of the most important pieces of literature on the Holocaust." Even when he's apologizing for not writing prefaces for people's books, Eco entertains with his intellect, humor, and insatiable curiosity. Although some of these pieces have a tired feel, there's much here to enjoy and ponder. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
Starting in 1985, novelist and essayist Eco (1932-2016) wrote a regular column for the Italian weekly L'Espresso. Two previous collections of these essays-How To Travel with a Salmon & Other Essays and Turning Back the Clock-were published in 1994 and 2007, respectively. This new compilation includes selected pieces from 2000 to 2015, and again shows the range of Eco's interests and concerns. The writings are arranged under broad topics such as "Turning Back the Past," "Online," "On Cell Phones," "On Mass Media," "Forms of Racism, Religion and Philosophy," and more. By "liquid society," Eco refers to the constant state of change, sometimes radical, that individuals and nations undergo, in which the old truths collapse and newer ones have not been fully developed, which leads to a sense of dislocation and confusion. For example, the rapid acceleration of new media and technologies have people constantly trying to catch up with the latest advances, resulting in a feeling of being left behind as newer systems are brought forth. Although one may not recognize some of the philosophers and social thinkers analyzed and dissected here, the prose (excellently translated by Dixon) is easy to read and often amusing. VERDICT Recommended for all library collections. Readers familiar with Eco's entertaining, occasionally humorous style will be further delighted. [See Prepub Alert. 5/8/17.]-Morris Hounion, New York City Coll. of -Technology, Brooklyn © Copyright 2017. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Excerpts
Excerpts
The Liquid Society The idea of "liquid" modernity or society comes from Zygmunt Bauman. Those who want to understand the various implications of this concept may find it helpful to read State of Crisis, where Bauman and Carlo Bordoni discuss this and other topics. The liquid society begins to take shape with the movement known as postmodernism, an umbrella term that brings together a great variety of phenomena, from architecture to philosophy to literature, not always in a coherent fashion. Postmodernism signaled the crisis of "grand narratives," each of which had claimed that one model of order could be superimposed on the world; it devoted itself to a playful or ironic reconsideration of the past, and was woven in various ways with nihilistic tendencies. But postmodernism, according to Bordoni, is also on the way out. It was temporary in character, we have passed through it without noticing, and it will be studied one day like pre-Romanticism. It served to point out an event that was happening and represented a sort of ferry from modernity to a present that still has no name. Among the characteristics of this nascent present Bauman includes the crisis facing the state: what freedom do nation-states retain when faced with the power of supranational entities? We are witnessing the disappearance of something that used to ensure that individuals could resolve the various problems of our time in a homogeneous fashion. This crisis has led to a collapse of ideologies, and therefore of political parties, and to a general call for a sharing of values that allowed individuals to feel part of something that understood their needs. The crisis in the concept of community gives rise to unbridled individualism: people are no longer fellow citizens, but rivals to beware of. This "subjectivism" has threatened the foundations of modernity, has made it fragile, producing a situation with no points of reference, where everything dissolves into a sort of liquidity. The certainty of the law is lost, the judiciary is regarded as an enemy, and the only solutions for individuals who have no points of reference are to make themselves conspicuous at all costs, to treat conspicuousness as a value, and to follow consumerism. Yet this is not a consumerism aimed at the possession of desirable objects that produce satisfaction, but one that immediately makes such objects obsolete. People move from one act of consumption to another in a sort of purposeless bulimia: the new cell phone is no better than the old one, but the old one has to be discarded in order to indulge in this orgy of desire. The collapse of ideologies and political parties: it has been suggested that political parties have become like taxis taken by vote-controlling mob leaders or Mafia bosses, who choose them casually, according to what is on offer -- politicians can change party allegiance without creating any scandal. It's not just people: society itself is living in an increasingly precarious condition. What can replace this liquefaction? We don't yet know, and the interregnum will last for quite a long time. Bauman notes that a typical feature of the interregnum, once the faith in salvation from above, from the state, or from revolution is gone, is indignation. Such indignation knows what it doesn't want, but not what it does. And I'd like to mention that one of the problems the police raise in relation to Black Bloc protest movements is that they can no longer be labeled, as used to be the case with anarchists, Fascists, or the Red Brigades. Such movements act, but no one knows when they will act, or in what direction. Not even they know. Is there any way of coming to terms with liquidity? There is, and it involves an awareness that we live in a liquid society that, to be understood and perhaps overcome, requires new instruments. But the trouble is that politicians and a large part of the intelligentsia haven't yet understood the implications of this phenomenon. For the moment, Bauman is still a "voice of one crying in the wilderness." Freestyle Catholics and sanctimonious secularists When people refer to the great spiritual transformations that marked the end of the twentieth century, they immediately start talking about the collapse of ideologies, which is undeniable, and has blurred traditional distinctions between right and left. But the question remains whether the fall of the Berlin Wall was the cause of this collapse or just one of its consequences. Think of science. People wanted science to be a neutral territory, ideal for progress shared by both liberals and socialists: the only difference was how this progress was to be managed and in whose favor -- still exemplified by the Communist Manifesto of 1848, which lauded capitalist triumphs only to conclude, more or less, that "we too now want these things." A liberal was someone who believed in technological advance, whereas a reactionary preached the return to tradition and the unspoiled nature of once upon a time. The cases of "revolution back to the past," like that of the Luddites who sought to destroy machinery, were marginal -- they had no real influence on the net division between the two positions. This division began to go wrong in 1968, a time that mixed together Stalinists in love with steel, flower power, workerism (which expected automation to bring about the destruction of employment), and prophets of liberation through the drugs of Don Juan. It fell apart at a time when third-world populism became a common standard for both the far left and the far right, and now we find ourselves confronted with a movement like that of Seattle, a meeting point for neo-Luddites, radical environmentalists, ex-workerists, lumpen and spearhead workers, in the rejection of cloning, of the Big Mac, of transgenic and nuclear technologies. A significant transformation came about in the opposition between the religious and the secular worlds. For thousands of years, the spirit of religion was associated with a distrust of progress, rejection of the world, doctrinal intransigence. The secular world, on the other hand, looked optimistically upon the transformation of nature, the flexibility of ethical principles, the fond rediscovery of "other" forms of religion and of primitive thought. There were, of course, those believers, such as Teilhard de Chardin, who appealed to "worldly realities," to history as a march toward redemption, while there were plenty of secular doom merchants, with the negative utopias of Orwell and Huxley, or the kind of science fiction that offered us the horrors of a future dominated by hideous scientific rationality. But it was the task of religion to call to us at the final moment, and the task of secularism to sing hymns in praise of the locomotive. The recent gathering of enthusiastic young papal groupies shows us the transformation that has taken place under the reign of Pope John Paul II. A mass of youngsters who accept the Catholic faith but, judging from the answers they recently gave in interviews, are far distant from neurotic fundamentalism are willing to make compromises over premarital relationships, contraceptives, even drugs, and certainly when it comes to clubbing; meanwhile, the secular world moans about noise pollution and a New Age spirit that seems to unite neo-revolutionaries, followers of Monsignor Milingo, and sybarites devoted to Oriental massage. This is just the start. We have plenty of surprises in store. Excerpted from Chronicles of a Liquid Society by Umberto Eco All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
Table of Contents
Foreword | p. ix |
The Liquid Society | p. 1 |
Turning Back the Clock | |
Freestyle Catholics and sanctimonious secularists | p. 7 |
Have we really invented so much? | p. 9 |
Full speed backward! | p. 11 |
I remember, I remember | p. 14 |
Being Seen | |
Wave ciao ciao to the camera | p. 19 |
God is my witness that I'm a fool... | p. 21 |
I tweet, therefore I am | p. 24 |
The loss of privacy | p. 26 |
The Old and the Young | |
The average lifespan | p. 31 |
Fair is foul, and foul is fair? | p. 33 |
Thirteen years misspent | p. 36 |
Once upon a time there was Churchill | p. 38 |
A generation of aliens | p. 41 |
Online | |
My email doubles | p. 47 |
How to elect the president | p. 49 |
The hacker is crucial to the system | p. 51 |
Too much of the Internet? But in China ... | p. 53 |
Here's a good game | p. 55 |
The textbook as teacher | p. 57 |
How to copy from the Internet | p. 59 |
What's the point of having a teacher? | p. 62 |
The fifth estate | p. 64 |
A further note | p. 67 |
Dogmatism and fallibilism | p. 69 |
Marina, Marina, Marina | p. 71 |
I urge you to be brief | p. 73 |
On Cell Phones | |
More thoughts on the cell phone | p. 77 |
Swallowing the cell phone | p. 82 |
On photography | p. 83 |
Evolution: all with just one hand | p. 85 |
The cell phone and the queen in "Snow White" | p. 86 |
On Conspiracies | |
Where's the deep throat? | p. 91 |
Conspiracies and plots | p. 93 |
Fine company | p. 96 |
Don't believe in coincidences | p. 98 |
The conspiracy on conspiracies | p. 100 |
On Mass Media | |
Radiophonic hypnosis | p. 105 |
There are two Big Brothers | p. 107 |
Roberta | p. 109 |
The mission of the crime story | p. 111 |
Bin Laden's allies | p. 112 |
Going to the same place | p. 115 |
Mandrake, an Italian hero? | p. 117 |
Are viewers bad for television? | p. 120 |
Give us today our daily crime | p. 122 |
Maybe Agamemnon was worse than Bush | p. 125 |
High medium low | p. 128 |
"Intellectually speaking" | p. 130 |
Suspects behaving badly | p. 132 |
Shaken or stirred? | p. 134 |
Too many dates for Nero Wolfe | p. 136 |
Unhappy is the land | p. 139 |
Time and history | p. 140 |
Forms of Racism | |
Women philosophers | p. 145 |
Where do you find anti-Semitism? | p. 147 |
Who told women to veil themselves? | p. 150 |
Husbands of unknown wives | p. 153 |
Proust and the Boche | p. 155 |
From Maus to Charlie | p. 159 |
On Hatred and Death | |
On hatred and on love | p. 165 |
Where has death gone? | p. 167 |
Our Paris | p. 169 |
Religion and Philosophy | |
Seers see what they know | p. 175 |
European roots | p. 177 |
The lotus and the cross | p. 179 |
Relativism? | p. 182 |
Chance and Intelligent Design | p. 183 |
The reindeer and the camel | p. 186 |
Watch it, loudmouth ... | p. 188 |
Idolatry and iconoclasm lite | p. 191 |
The cocaine of the people | p. 193 |
The crucifix, almost a secular symbol | p. 196 |
Those strangers, the Three Kings | p. 198 |
Mad about Hypatia | p. 201 |
Halloween, relativism, and Celts | p. 203 |
Damned philosophy | p. 206 |
Evasion and secret redress | p. 208 |
The holy experiment | p. 210 |
Monotheisms and polytheisms | p. 212 |
A Good Education | |
Who gets cited most? | p. 217 |
Political correctness | p. 219 |
Thoughts in fair copy | p. 221 |
Meeting face-to-face | p. 223 |
The pleasure of lingering | p. 225 |
On Books, Etc. | |
Is Harry Potter bad for adults? | p. 231 |
How to protect yourself from the Templars | p. 233 |
The whiff of books | p. 236 |
Here's the right angle | p. 238 |
Journey to the center of Jules Verne | p. 241 |
Corkscrew space | p. 243 |
On unread books | p. 246 |
On the obsolescence of digital media | p. 249 |
Festschrift | p. 251 |
The Catcher in the Rye fifty years on | p. 252 |
Aristotle and the pirates | p. 255 |
Lies and make-believe | p. 257 |
Credulity and identification | p. 259 |
Who's afraid of paper tigers? | p. 261 |
From Stupidity to Folly | |
No, it's not pollution, it's impurities in the air | p. 267 |
How to get rich on other people's suffering | p. 270 |
Miss World, fundamentalists, and lepers | p. 272 |
Return to sender | p. 274 |
Give us a few more deaths | p. 277 |
Speaking with license | p. 279 |
Conciliatory oxymorons | p. 281 |
The human thirst for prefaces | p. 283 |
A noncomrade who gets it wrong | p. 286 |
Saying sorry | p. 288 |
The Sun still turns | p. 291 |
What you mustn't do | p. 293 |
The miraculous Mortacc | p. 294 |
Joyce and the Maserati | p. 296 |
Napoleon never existed | p. 298 |
Are we all mad? | p. 300 |
Idiots and the responsible press | p. 302 |