RIP, Eco. I haven’t read The Name of the Rose, his most well-known book, but it’s currently in the “to read” stack. I did see the movie version, with Sean Connery and Christian Slater, but I was too young to really appreciate it.
I’ve only read Foucault’s Pendulum (free PDF here). I liked it so much that an earlier version of this blog was titled “Foucault’s Vacuum.” The idea of a group of writers inventing a conspiracy theory cobbled from existing, “our world” conspiracy theories, was fascinating.
Eco’s description of the Parisian auto museum in the early few chapters had me hooked. It was like Ballard finally got over his drugged-out fetishization of mechanics and got on with the story (though there are some scatological references here):
I didn’t have much time: they closed at five-thirty. I took another quick look at the ambulatory. None of the engines would serve the purpose. Nor would the great ship machinery on the right, relics of some Lusitania engulfed by the waves, nor Le-noir’s immense gas engine with its variety of cogwheels. In fact, now that the light was fading, watery through the gray window-panes, I felt fear again at the prospect of hiding among these animals, for I dreaded seeing them come to life in the darkness, reborn in the shadows in the glow of my flashlight. I dreaded their panting, their heavy, telluric breath, skinless bones, viscera creaking and fetid with black-grease drool. How could I endure in the midst of that foul concatenation of diesel genitals and turbine-driven vaginas, the inorganic throats that once had flamed, steamed, and hissed, and might again that very night? Or maybe they would buzz like stag beetles or chirr like cicadas amid those skeletal incarnations of pure, abstract functionality, automata able to crush, saw, shift, break, slice, accelerate, ram, and gulp fuel, their cylinders sobbing. Or they would jerk like sinister marionettes, making drums turn, converting frequencies, transforming energies, spinning flywheels. How could I fight them if they came after me, instigated by the Masters of the World, who used them as proof—useless devices, idols only of the bosses of the lower universe—of the error of creation?