Volume 42, Number 2 · February 2, 1995
The Riddle of Umberto Eco
By Bernard Williams
The Limits of Interpretation
by Umberto Eco
Indiana University Press, 304 pp., $27.95; $14.95 (paper)
Interpretation and Overinterpretation
by Umberto Eco, by Richard Rorty, by Jonathan Culler, by Christine Brooke-Rose, edited by Stefan Collini
The Tanner Lectures, Cambridge University Press, 151 pp., $12.95 (paper)
Six Walks in the Fictional Woods
by Umberto Eco
The Charles Eliot Norton Lectures, Harvard University Press, 153 pp., $18.95
Apocalypse Postponed
by Umberto Eco, translated and edited by Robert Lumley
Indiana University Press/British Film Institute, 242 pp., $29.95
Misreadings
by Umberto Eco, translated by William Weaver
Harcourt Brace, 180 pp., $12.95
How to Travel with a Salmon & Other Essays
by Umberto Eco, translated by William Weaver
Harcourt Brace, 248 pp., $18.95
At the beginning of Umberto Eco's novel Foucault's Pendulum, there are two epigraphs. Every chapter of this book also has an epigraph, so these are particularly prominent—they come before everything else. One is a quotation from an occultist writer, Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa von Nettesheim. The other is from a contemporary logician, Raymond Smullyan: 'Superstitition brings bad luck.' The quotations bring together two obsessions in which much of Eco's work is involved, one with logical paradox, the other with obscure facts about Hermetic traditions, magical riddles, prophecies, the cabbala, and interpretations of history and nature according to complex, hidden, and often conspiratorial patterns.
Review, 4831 words
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