According to the BBC
I will always remember him as the writer of the adult version of the “Da Vinci Code” (aka Foucault’s Pendulum)
May he rest in peace.
He also wrote “In the Name of The Rose” which was an amazing book that was turned into a lousy movie (IMHO). Even though it starred Sean Connery!
Looks like I was nine minutes ahead of you with my thread.
Maybe a Mod could merge the two?
Damn. I took his class on semiotics at Yale back in the late '70s. Wonderful professor. And I loved the hell out of Name of the Rose when it came out a few years later.
That is a f*kking strange novel. But I liked the first half or so…
(Haven’t read it since I was 25 or so. Maybe it’s time to read it again!)
It wasn’t that bad. I still maintain that the scene where Sean and Christian get separated and lost in the library was the inspiration for the moving stairs in Hogwarts.
Foucault’s Pendulum is one of my favorite books. I used to read it on a regular basis. I think it’s time to add it to my Kindle.
I loved Umberto Eco’s writing, and read several of his novels, but eventually they started to wear me out. I see there are a few recent ones that I haven’t looked at; I may seek them out.
Thanks for always making me think.
He is a very hard novelist to read, but he’s worth it. I should probably reread him now but I have Wikipedia; when I first read Foucault’s Pendulum I had to keep running to reference books at the library, that ugh if I hadn’t I wouldn’t have learned what En Sof was or so many other great esoteric things.
He was one of the answers in Eugene Sheffer’s crossword puzzle today.
God fucking dammit! This year has been the worst!
“Stop him! He’s eating Aristotle!”
R.I.P., Signor Eco.
He will be missed. I loved The Name of The Rose, even though it required my to read it with my Latin textbook always on hand.
Although I must admit, I keep getting him mixed up with Calvino in my head…
Very sad news, The Name of The Rose is still one of my all time favorite books I even quite like the film if I’m honest. His books of essays such as Mouse or Rat? and Serendipities are well worth a read too.
Very sad.
I asked for, and got, a hardback of The Name of the Rose for Christmas back in 1986 the year it came out in English and loved it. (I had admired it in the shops for weeks!) Bought Foucault’s Pendulum the day it came out… That one took me a bit longer to get into!
When I heard of his death late last night I went looking fo my copy of How to Travel with a Salmon but I’ve been rearranging things and couldn’t find it. Made do with reading a couple of the shorter essays from Travels in Hyper-Reality.
Back in November I read his latest book - maybe his final one, I suppose - Numero Zero - and enjoyed it a lot. It was much slimmer than his early novels and almost seemed to be poking fun at the giant conspiracies in them.
I don’t know if I’ve got time to read anything substantial by him right now but I hope I can. He deserves it.
R.I.P. Signor Eco.
Mine, too. It hugely influenced the way I think about the world. Lia’s explanation of archetypes arising from the human body (and mind) made such obvious sense to me. And whenever I heard some grand conspiracy theory, I think “Yeah, and Col. Ardenti’s Great Templar World Domination Plan turned out to be a to-do list.”
Foucault’s Pendulum is why I am now a skeptical secular humanist. Molto grazie and requiescat in pacem, Professor Eco.
Damn it, I just finally finished *The Prague Cemetery * three days ago and was wondering if he’d be able to write another novel in his lifetime, and now these bad news. I read The Name Of The Rose about thirty years ago and became an instant fan. I’ve read all his novels since then, plus some of his essay collections, and I liked them all though it was never an easy read and I cannot claim that I understood all of it, especially in Foucault’s Pendulum. But I like his style of cross-references, allusions, quotations and strange (mis-)directions, it inspires to explore the subjects further. Some of the motives in Foucault’s Pendulum let’s you think of the WWW, especially the concept of hyperlinking, in 1988.
Arrivederci Signore Eco, you were a very wise man.
So… you knew him “before”?
Even if it had been “after”: I envy you!
Sorry about that. I didn’t see it posted in this forum, so I went ahead and created this thread. Maybe they didn’t merge them because they are in different forums(?) ?
I was very sorry when I heard about this. I enjoyed Foucault’s Pendulum very much and have it and a some of his other novels on my shelves. When I was in library school circa 1990, The Name of the Rose was extremely popular among the students; everybody was reading it and a bunch of us got together one night to watch the movie on VHS.
Just a couple of weeks ago, I was watching an old episode of Dark Shadows where one of the characters drugged another by putting some substance on the pages of a book the other was reading–years before The Name of the Rose, but of course it made me think of Eco. I’d even wondered if he’d seen the show. 
I hadn’t even realized he was still alive.
And I couldn’t get through Focault’s Pendulum (there’s only so much I can tolerate being inside a crazy man’s head), but I loved The Name of the Rose.