How to Travel With a Salmon & Other Essays - Hardcover

Eco, Umberto

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0151001367 ISBN 13: 9780151001361

Publisher: Harcourt, 1994

Synopsis

Offers essays on militarism, computerese, art, bureaucracy, health, airplane food, bad coffee, taxi drivers, fax machines, porno films, football fans, and other topics

About this title

About the Author

Umberto Eco is professor of semiotics at the University of Bologna.

Reviews

In this collection of parodies, satires and whimsical mini-essays written over the last 30 years, Italian novelist/critic Eco (The Name of the Rose) takes readers on a delightful romp through the absurdities of modern life. A curmudgeonly cosmospolite, he waxes irate at his pet peeves, which include American trains, taxi drivers in New York City and Paris, soccer fans and cellular phones. He mockingly deconstructs Western movies, art catalogues, library regulations and, with tongue in cheek, proffers advice on how to take intelligent vacations and how to become a Knight of Malta. Eco parodies science fiction in a tale of intergalactic sex and espionage, and spoofs detective fiction in an account of "the perfect crime." Serious issues that emerge from the antics include how the mass media confuses reality and fiction, and how our "consumer civilization" turns adults into children whose endless needs require constant gratification. First serial to Esquire.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Popular novelist (The Name of the Rose, 1983, Foucault's Pendulum, 1989) and notorious semiologist (at the Univ. of Bologna) Eco shows himself to be a journalist as well with this generally diverting volume of short pieces. Eco calls these short essays diario minimo--minimal diaries- -after the magazine column where he first published a series of such efforts (previously collected in Misreadings, not reviewed). The work presented here, much of which dates from the late '80s and early '90s, celebrates, or more often condemns, postmodern life in a style familiar to American readers. Occasional parodic fantasies in the mode of Borges or Calvino find Eco exploring the intriguing, if absurd, notion of a map in 1:1 scale, chronicling race relations in a future universe populated by humorously bizarre alien life- forms, or describing watches whose features cause one to lose track of the time. But Eco focuses on articulating his amusing complaints, analyzing our quotidian myths with light touches and lamentations that will recall Andy Rooney and Erma Bombeck--at best, an academic Mike Royko--sooner than Roland Barthes. Pieces on once-current events have been carefully excluded, but most of these essays remain essentially journalistic in their devotion to exploring contemporary life. The title piece pits Eco against an English hotel bureaucracy intent on making it difficult for him to refrigerate an expensive salmon that he has brought from Copenhagen; others mock ``how-to'' essays--on fax machines and cellular telephones, for example; there are cautionary tales of encounters with Amtrak trains and Roman cabs. All have as their subtext the chaos brought in the wake of unbridled technological innovation and intercontinental travel. While he wastes some time exposing clich‚s--Indians in westerns, unworthy sequels--that are clich‚s to expose, Eco entertains with his clever reflections and with his unique persona, the featured player in his stories. -- Copyright ©1994, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Written mostly between 1975 and 1991, these how-to miniessays (how to eat in flight, how to go through customs, how to deal with the taxi driver) are in the same vein as Misreadings (LJ 5/1/93). Generally, they are shorter, like monologs by a somewhat amusing and not too garrulous conversationalist. The persona presumes to be self-deprecating but is actually fatuous, pleased to be recognized on the street by television viewers and happily aware that readers will not have had all his opportunities for travel, fame, and affluence. On the whole, this persona is rather snide vis-a-vis officialdom, the service occupations, and the masses. The closest counterpart in U.S. journalism is Calvin Trilling, but this is a Trilling without any good nature or affection. As translator, Weaver has made some inspired word choices. For literary collections.
Marilyn Gaddis Rose, SUNY-Binghamton
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: Harcourt
• Publication date: 1994
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0151001367
• ISBN 13: 9780151001361
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 248