Confessions of a Young Novelist
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- 979,00 Kč
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- 979,00 Kč
Publisher Description
Umberto Eco published his first novel, The Name of the Rose, in 1980, when he was nearly fifty. In these “confessions,” the author, now in his late seventies, looks back on his long career as a theorist and his more recent work as a novelist, and explores their fruitful conjunction.
He begins by exploring the boundary between fiction and nonfiction—playfully, seriously, brilliantly roaming across this frontier. Good nonfiction, he believes, is crafted like a whodunnit, and a skilled novelist builds precisely detailed worlds through observation and research. Taking us on a tour of his own creative method, Eco recalls how he designed his fictional realms. He began with specific images, made choices of period, location, and voice, composed stories that would appeal to both sophisticated and popular readers. The blending of the real and the fictive extends to the inhabitants of such invented worlds. Why are we moved to tears by a character’s plight? In what sense do Anna Karenina, Gregor Samsa, and Leopold Bloom “exist”?
At once a medievalist, philosopher, and scholar of modern literature, Eco astonishes above all when he considers the pleasures of enumeration. He shows that the humble list, the potentially endless series, enables us to glimpse the infinite and approach the ineffable. This “young novelist” is a master who has wise things to impart about the art of fiction and the power of words.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this tongue-in-cheek-titled collection of four Richard Ellmann Lectures he gave at Harvard, semiologist, medievalist, and bestselling novelist Eco (The Name of the Rose) hardly young anymore, as he and we know confronts the question of what, exactly, creative writing is. ("Why is a bad poet a creative writer, while a good scientific essayist is not?") To answer the question, Eco examines the slippery relationship between author, text, and their interpreters. How does the author's intent come to engage the reader? Can the text in itself produce its own Model Reader? How might we best identify the qualities that make readers believe fictional characters really exist?, The final third of the book is devoted to a favored Ecoian pastime: enumeration, with the last stop being infinity. An eclectic list of writers who themselves use lists "as a literary device" joins in the fun: Rabelais and Joyce; Homer; Whitman; Alfred D blin; and the "confessing young novelist" himself in a shameless package of self-referencing and promotion. Always clever and thoughtful, these musings will delight devotees and enlighten newcomers alike.
