22 Feb Umberto Eco (1932–2016)

‘To survive, you must tell stories’. The line is from Umberto Eco who died on 19 February – from The Island of the Day Before (1995) which, in the manner of Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels and Voltaire’s Candide, is a profound and ingenious story artfully told. And that could describe so much of the fiction of the great Italian polymath: from the most famous bestseller The Name of the Rose (1980), to Foucault’s Pendulum (1989), Baudolino (2001), The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana (2005), The Prague Cemetery (2011) and the brilliant Numero Zero (published last year). There’s a tremendous riff in The Island of the Day Before on the qualities of being a stone – of “stoneness”: “At this moment I feel the pleasure of being stone, the sun warms me, the wind makes acceptable this adjustment of my body, I have no intention of ceasing to be a stone. Why? Because I like it. So then I too am slave to a passion, which advises me against wanting freely its opposite. However, willing, I could will. And yet I do not. How much freer am I than a stone?” And this is typical of the diverting, learned, witty style of writing that permeates not only the novels but his rich corpus of writing on the medieval world, on media and culture, on anthropology, on philosophy and much more. His books are on our shelves waiting to be discovered anew.