Every time I pick up one of Eco's books I'm surprised just how different they are from each other. I've been disappointed so many times by authors who seem to have something to say and then end up repeating the same things over and over again book after book. I'm not an expert on history or literature but at least to a regular reader simply the amount of knowledge that Eco seems to have on the subjects he writes about, down to the smallest details, is amazing. ( )

An interesting if not terribly cohesive collection of essays. ( )

I liked Name of the Rose and Island of the Day Before but I love Foucalts Pendulum.

This is a lovely and wonderous little book.
Peter Bruegel's Tower of Babl on the cover makes it even better.
I bathe in ancient history, origins of language, odd religions, psychic archeology, magick and the occult, and semiotics.
Geurilla ontology.
This book is about the serach for the a priori perfect pre-Adamic language. It used to be assumed that it was Hebrew. Early thinkers thought an infant left completely alone would naturally start speaking Hebrew. It was the language with which God conversed with Adam and the linguistic roots that Adam used to name everything.
It's about the fascinating failures of attempts to reconstruct and establish an architectonically perfect system of ideas composed of mutual dependences and strict classifications from the general to the particular.
It would, for instance, solve the librarian's dilemma at where to catalog a book (Dewey s system leaves a lot tobe desired and complimentary books at opposite ends of the library....)
Eco speaks of mentalese, a hopeful proposed language "written in the very convulutions of our brains, capable of supplying the deep structure of every expression in any natural language."
Borges plays with the idea and quotes from the Foucalt's description of the Chinese encyclopedia Celestial Emporium of Benevolent Recognitions":
CLASSIFICATION OF ANIMALS:
-those that belong to the Emperor
-embalmed ones
-those that are trained
-suckling pigs
-mermaids
-fabulous ones
-stray dogs
-those included in the present classification
-those that tremble as if they were mad
-innumerable ones
-those drawn with a very fine camelhair brush
others
-those that have just broken a flower vase
-those that look like flies from far away....

Wow.
Loving it. We are getting closer to a polydimensional encyclopedia with hypertext nowadays.
And Alembert could have been have been talking about Wikipedia hundreds of years ago:
"...a labyrinth, a tortuous path, composed of diverse branches, some of which converge towards a same center...and since departing from it , it is not possible to follow all the paths at once---the choice is determined by the nature of the different spirits..."

Interesting, funny, thoght-provoking, and an excellent translation by my favorite translator of Italian, William Weaver. (Is it too geeky to have a favorite translator? I love Cleary, too.)

BUY, BORROW, or BURN?
BORROW ( )

Not a bad little book. 5 essays about the quest for the language of paradise. The essay on Dante was particularly interesting. Only for the linguistically inclined. ( )

Eco starts out strong with the essay The Force of Falsity, easily the best selection in this collection of five articles on serendipity and language. Unfortunately, the essays that follow it become tedious and will probably not be very interesting to anyone that is not schooled thoroughly in linguistics.

In The Force of Falsity Eco points out that falsity, as well as truth, has shaped the world in important ways, using many interesting examples including Columbus, Prester John and the Rosicrucians.

Languages in Paradise is an essay examining Dante’s beliefs about the language of Adam and the effects of Babel upon it. I can’t imagine a popular audience finding this interesting, or even wholly comprehensible.

Things become more interesting again with the essay From Marco Polo to Leibniz. Returning to the titular topic, he discusses again how cross- language/culture misunderstandings often produced serendipitous results

The final two essays are criticisms of linguistic academics – one pertaining to Foigny’s burlesque perfect language and the final deeply critical of Joseph De Maistre’s linguistics.

I can’t recommend this book to anyone who is not studying linguistics. If you are a huge fan of Eco’s nonfiction, I suggest you read the first and third essays and skim the others to see if anything catches your interest. ( )