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Semiotics Right and Left

Christopher Norris, 4 September 1986

On Signs: A Semiotics Reader 
edited by Marshall Blonsky.
Blackwell, 536 pp., £27.50, September 1985, 0 631 10261 2
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... get to grips with the politics of everyday experience without giving in to either temptation. Umberto Eco has a marvellous piece, ‘Strategies Of Lying’, which analyses Nixon’s shrewd manipulation of narrative codes in the televised ‘confession’ that followed the Watergate scandal. What the President tried to bring off was a crafty ...

The Atlantic Gap

Neal Ascherson: Europe since the War, 17 November 2005

Postwar: A History of Europe since 1945 
by Tony Judt.
Heinemann, 878 pp., £25, October 2005, 0 434 00749 8
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... the tremendous indictment of America over the Iraq war issued in May 2003 by Habermas, Derrida, Umberto Eco, Adolf Muschg and several illustrious others? ‘It was not reported as news, nor was it quoted by sympathisers,’ Judt remarks. ‘No one implored its authors to take up their pens and lead the way forward.’ He aptly compares the post-1989 ...

Blackberry Apocalypse

Nicholas Guyatt: Evangelical Disarray, 15 November 2007

American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America 
by Chris Hedges.
Cape, 254 pp., £12.99, February 2007, 978 0 224 07820 7
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... Hedges has a more sophisticated way of dealing with religious Nazis; he reprints a brief essay by Umberto Eco on ‘Eternal Fascism’ and, like other critics of the religious right, seizes on Sinclair Lewis’s line from the years of the Great Depression: ‘When fascism comes to America, it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross.’ According ...

The Politics of Translation

Marina Warner: Translate this!, 11 October 2018

This Little Art 
by Kate Briggs.
Fitzcarraldo, 365 pp., £12.99, September 2017, 978 1 910695 45 6
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Translation as Transhumance 
by Mireille Gansel, translated by Ros Schwartz.
Les Fugitives, 150 pp., £10, November 2017, 978 0 9930093 3 4
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Sympathy for the Traitor: A Translation Manifesto 
by Mark Polizzotti.
MIT, 168 pp., £17.99, May 2018, 978 0 262 03799 0
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The 100 Best Novels in Translation 
by Boyd Tonkin.
Galileo, 304 pp., £14.99, June 2018, 978 1 903385 67 8
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The Work of Literary Translation 
by Clive Scott.
Cambridge, 285 pp., £75, June 2018, 978 1 108 42682 4
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... practise translucinación, as a Chilean poetry movement expressed it. Polizzotti reminds us that Umberto Eco once remarked that the best road into Finnegans Wake is Joyce’s own translation of it into Italian. The contest between Augustinian scrupulous faithfulness and Hieronymite wilful nudging was very helpfully glossed by Dryden when he identified ...

On the Salieri Express

John Sutherland, 24 September 1992

Doctor Criminale 
by Malcolm Bradbury.
Secker, 343 pp., £14.99, September 1992, 0 436 20115 1
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The Promise of Light 
by Paul Watkins.
Faber, 217 pp., £14.99, September 1992, 0 571 16715 2
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The Absolution Game 
by Paul Sayer.
Constable, 204 pp., £13.99, June 1992, 0 09 471460 6
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The Troublesome Offspring of Cardinal Guzman 
by Louis de Bernières.
Secker, 388 pp., £14.99, August 1992, 0 436 20114 3
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Written on the Body 
by Jeanette Winterson.
Cape, 190 pp., £13.99, September 1992, 0 224 03587 8
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... himself stupid at Groucho’s in the company of (or at least in the same room as) Melvyn Bragg, Umberto Eco and Gore Vidal. Amnesia has gone away and names are being profusely dropped again. Bradbury has never had much luck with the Booker, and I would guess that he’s blown it for 1992. But what is intriguing about the description of Booker 1990 is ...

Into the Eisenshpritz

Elif Batuman: Superheroes, 10 April 2008

Life, in Pictures: Autobiographical Stories 
by Will Eisner.
Norton, 493 pp., £18.99, November 2007, 978 0 393 06107 9
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Epileptic 
by David B..
Cape, 368 pp., £12.99, March 2006, 0 224 07920 4
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Shortcomings 
by Adrian Tomine.
Faber, 108 pp., £12.99, September 2007, 978 0 571 23329 8
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Misery Loves Comedy 
by Ivan Brunetti.
Fantagraphics, 172 pp., £15.99, April 2007, 978 1 56097 792 6
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... freeze objects by blowing on them but by his second life as Clark Kent. In an essay on Superman, Umberto Eco characterised superhero comics generically as an amalgam of ‘mythopoeic’ and ‘novelistic’ narratives: Superman is simultaneously an epic-eternal hero who exists outside time (the Man of Steel), and a ‘consumable’ romantic-novelistic ...
Mason & Dixon 
by Thomas Pynchon.
Cape, 773 pp., £16.99, May 1997, 9780224050012
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... that M&D is only an Eric and Ernie with knobs on, or just a Post-Modern romparama of the sort Umberto Eco managed so elegantly in The Name of the Rose. It’s much more densely webbed with allusiveness. And its mood is far more rigorously subjunctive: it’s an open network of potentialities, like a mutating spreadsheet or grid. It is all these ...

Travelling in the Classic Style

Thomas Laqueur: Primo Levi, 5 September 2002

Primo Levi’s Ordinary Virtues: From Testimony to Ethics 
by Robert Gordon.
Oxford, 316 pp., £45, October 2001, 0 19 815963 3
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Primo Levi 
by Ian Thomson.
Hutchinson, 624 pp., £25, March 2002, 0 09 178531 6
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The Double Bond: Primo Levi, a Biography 
by Carole Angier.
Viking, 898 pp., £25, April 2002, 0 670 88333 6
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... latency we do not know. Yes, Primo Levi was born and died in the same apartment at 75 Corso Re Umberto, but I’m not sure this is a sign of neurotic closeness to his mother. He returned from Auschwitz to a war-torn Turin. As soon as he took his first job he lived, not at home, but in the bachelor quarters of the paint factory, where he wrote the first ...

On Complaining

Elif Batuman: How to Stay Sane, 20 November 2008

Philosophy in Turbulent Times: Canguilhem, Sartre, Foucault, Althusser, Deleuze, Derrida 
by Elisabeth Roudinesco, translated by William McCuaig.
Columbia, 184 pp., £15.50, November 2008, 978 0 231 14300 4
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... all, and by being young first, and then less young, we are none of us spared from belatedness. As Umberto Eco put it in Foucault’s Pendulum, To enter a university a year or two after 1968 was like being admitted to the Académie de Saint-Cyr in 1793: you felt your birth date was wrong … You are always born under the wrong sign, and to live in this ...

Episteme, My Arse

Christopher Tayler: Laurent Binet, 15 June 2017

The Seventh Function of Language 
by Laurent Binet, translated by Sam Taylor.
Harvill Secker, 390 pp., £16.99, May 2017, 978 1 910701 58 4
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... from the James Bond films – material, at last, that Bayard is at home with, as well as a nod to Umberto Eco’s analysis of Ian Fleming’s narrative structures. True to his initials, Simon uses his training to perform a Sherlock Holmes-like cold reading on Bayard, who responds by requisitioning him in the name of police intelligence. So begins a ...

An Invertebrate Left

Perry Anderson, 12 March 2009

... it were knocked sideways. Although critical engagement with pulp was not lacking in Italy – Umberto Eco was a pioneer – the PCI failed to connect. No creative dialectic, capable of resisting the blows of the new by transforming relations between the high and low, materialised. The case of the cinema, where Italy had above all excelled after the ...

Russia’s Managed Democracy

Perry Anderson: Why Putin?, 25 January 2007

... would be an anomaly in the West, if we except a single bestseller, never repeated, from Umberto Eco, though there is a close parallel in the astronomic sales and standing of China’s leading practitioner of martial arts fiction, Jin Yong, holder of various honorary positions at universities in the PRC. In Russia, it is a pattern: high-end ...

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