Pape Satàn Aleppe by Umberto Eco review – why the modern world is stupid

This collection of magazine columns published in Italy after the author’s recent death covers a vast array of subjects, from Facebook to Berlusconi to gun control – are all subject to his illuminating but rather withering glare

Umberto Eco’s death aged 84 on 19 February was an occasion for national mourning in Italy. Thousands turned up for the funeral at the Castello Sforzesco in Milan. The newspapers were filled with adoring obituaries. Yet he wasn’t always loved. In the 1960s Italo Calvino objected to his easy enthusiasm for popular culture and genre fiction. “You can’t write off the Proustian novel simply because it’s ‘traditional’,” he told him. Pier Paolo Pasolini was more brutal. “Eco knows everything there is to know and spews it in your face in the most blase manner: as if you were listening to a robot.” “Eco sees culture as an amusement,” wrote the philologist Cesare Cases, “a day at the hunt that allows him to rove across boundless prairies.” “A buffoon,” pronounced Italy’s most prominent literary critic, Pietro Citati.

The criticisms remind us of Eco’s roots as a “militant” semiologist, moving back and forth through the 50s and 60s between the university and popular media, working as a lecturer, a TV journalist and publisher’s editor, constantly writing lively, provocative articles that aimed to give a deeper sense to such phenomena as gameshow hosts, TV serials, song contests and so on – all in a period when Italy was experiencing rapid social and cultural change. Essentially, the world was a huge and complex text in need of an expert interpreter: himself. As a result, Italians have always thought of the man first and foremost as a cultural critic, rather than a novelist.

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