IN THE DARK REVIEWS

Umberto Eco enlightens, entertains

Kirk Boxleitner | Sep 07, 20230

Courtesy photo count

As seen in "Umberto Eco: A Library of the World," Italian scholar and author Umberto Eco's private library reached 50,000 volumes before his death in 2016.

When it comes to sources of casually consumable storytelling, polymath scholar Umberto Eco isn't the first name anyone thinks of, which is a shame, because while he produced challenging, data-dense novels such as "The Name of the Rose" and "Foucault's Pendulum," he was playful for an intellectual, as director Davide Ferrario reveals in his documentary, "Umberto Eco: A Library of the World."

Before Eco died in 2016, he gave Ferrario a tour of his library, which has since been donated to the Italian government. Eco amassed 50,000 volumes, favoring rare books and unorthodox subjects.

Through interviews and dialogues with Eco, and also anecdotes recounted after his death by those close to him, Ferrario reinforces what a raconteur Eco was. He combined a fantasist's passion for wildly inaccurate worldviews with a truth-seeker's commitment to curating information.

Eco filled his library with books devoted to totally incorrect yet intricately developed alchemical theories, and atlases' worth of locales that never existed in the real world, but he preached constant vigilance in questioning one's sources of learning.

Moreover, though Eco cherished libraries as repositories of humanity's memories, he also asserted that an essential aspect of memory is that it should be incomplete, as inconsequential details and occurrences are discarded, to underscore the relative importance of the more meaningful knowledge and events that we retain.

When it came to anticipating phenomena such as "fake news," Eco was ahead of the curve, but as an Italian who grew up under Mussolini, he had the good sense to keep an eye out for the return of fascism.

For all his high-minded reading, Eco was a fan of comics ranging from "Superman" to "Peanuts," as Ferrario shows us the Charlie Brown bobbleheads nodding on shelves stacked with careworn antiquities of literature.

Eco was a master of so many academic disciplines that it's hilarious how Ferrario puts Eco's career as a novelist into context, as a virtual footnote to the rest of his pursuits. Eco's 1980 debut novel, "The Name of the Rose," was practically produced on a dare, as a mere thought-exercise, in response to a mass solicitation for fictional stories from nonfiction writers.

Although I was acquainted with Eco as a critically well-regarded novelist and public thinker prior to seeing this film, watching "Umberto Eco: A Library of the World" made me regret not familiarizing myself further with the man while he was still alive. Even Ferrario's glimpses of Eco in life manage to convey how charming and mentally engaging he was.

Even if you have no interest in Eco, I guarantee you'll come away from this film feeling like you've sat in on a pleasant dinner-table conversation with an old friend. If you love books, Ferrario's footage of Eco's library and other exceptional libraries of the world will blow you away.

I followed watching "A Library of the World" by watching the 1986 movie adaptation of "The Name of the Rose," which deserved a better reception than it got from audiences and reviewers.

When he was asked whether he could write a short detective story, Eco insisted that it couldn't be short, and that it must be set in a medieval Italian monastery, which would have limited the box office drawing power of "The Name of the Rose" adaptation, even during the auteur-friendly 1970s, never mind the blockbuster-driven 1980s.

The film's casting likely was an attempt to offset its esoteric qualities, except most of the actors were either far less famous back then or in career slumps. Their talent nonetheless shines on through.

Sean Connery plays a fictionalized version of the real-life Franciscan friar William of Baskerville, accompanied by a then-unknown Christian Slater as his novice, Adso of Melk, as they arrive at an early 14th-century Benedictine abbey, to take part in a theological Church conference, just as a young manuscript maker has mysteriously died.

What follows is the sort of clever, well-constructed historical whodunnit that would qualify as mainstream viewing by modern television standards, but which was apparently too "out there" for many American moviegoers in the 1980s.

Even with the loss of complexity that naturally occurs from translating a novel like "The Name of the Rose" into a two-hour film, Eco's interests animate the film's spirit and narrative, as it acknowledges the disparities of standards of living between social classes, and the hypocrisies of overgrown institutions.

It's fitting that Eco's hero is a man who loves books enough to be willing to risk his life to save them, while the tale's villain, if not quite a fascist per se, is an authoritarian who is every bit as undone by the thought of comedy as Inspector Javert is by Jean Valjean's mercy in "Les Misérables."

If you're a fan of "Hey, it's that guy" actors, you can anticipate compelling performances from Michael Lonsdale (Hugo Drax from the 1979 James Bond film "Moonraker") as the abbot, Elya Baskin (Peter Parker's landlord from Sam Raimi's second and third "Spider-Man" films) as one of the monks, deeply creepy character actor William Hickey as real-life Franciscan friar Ubertino of Casale, and Ron "Hellboy" Perlman as a half-mad, multilingual hunchback.

Oh, yes, and not long after winning an Academy Award for playing Antonio Salieri in the 1984 biopic "Amadeus," we have F. Murray Abraham as Dominican friar Bernard Gui of the Inquisition (nobody expects them), again taking liberties in depicting an actual historical figure, but in an watchable way.

Treat yourself to this double feature of Umberto Eco, and you should come away feeling both enlightened and entertained.