Umberto Eco- Prediction

 

Probably the most well known candidate on my list but does he stand a chance?

There is one thing that may hinder Umberto Eco’s chances of winning the Nobel Prize.  His bestseller, ‘The Name of the Rose’, which was very popular, it was made into a film with Sean Connery, for a novel involving semiotics and other academic subjects.  But general popularity is not necessarily help to convince the committee you deserve the Prize, it can actually hinder your chances, partly the reason why Arthur Miller and Salman Rushdie haven’t been given it.  Is this fair?  Yes he is popular but he is also serious about literature and his popularity does not seem to detract from his intellectual pursuits.  

I’ve read ‘Foucault’s Pendulum’ and I was very impressed with it.  I thought it could be two hundred pages shorter but it contained a very well thought out story and some interesting ideas, memorable scenes and great characters.  The story is about a small group of men who devise a system for creating conspiracies involving the Knights Templar, which at first they do as a joke but slowly it becomes something more and actually starts to threaten their lives.  It’s a book about how stories and certain beliefs can become dangerous in the minds of some people.  It’s a great intelluctual thriller that’s worth pursisting with.

  Eco’s greatest strength would be his interested in complex ideas and their relation to ordinary humans and how they work with or agaisnt them.  He’s similar to Orhan Pamuk constructing his stories in a post-modernist world.  I think he would be a very suitable candidate but I would not be surprised if the committee would think of him as being too obvious a choice.  He’s not your usual best seller as he doesn’t compromise, or at least not too much, his scholally ideas.  He is just able to do that rarest of things, to write a highly critically acclaimed novel while being popular with the general public.  

It gives me hope for the reading public if they are putting books like ‘The Prague Cemetary’ on the best selling list.  How has a writer like him become so popular?  He writes thrillers that have driving plots and a certain readability but that does not make him necessarily easy.  He’s more interesting then the usual thriller writer who injects cerebral content to his chases, captures and fight scenes.

 He is also a writer that touches the emotion and writes in moving moments that counteract the mind games.  His female character in ‘Foucault’s Pendulum’ was an island of rational sanity amongst the mounting madness of the male characters and gave a gentle speech about how parts of the body have come to mean many different things and so one ultimate meaning is impossible to construct.  

One of the things that left a bad taste in my mouth was towards the end where Eco had created these wonderfully well rounded character only to then dispose of them one after another.  It seemed careless and insensitive.  That and I think it would be better if it was shorter and more focused but others may think that it’s length gives it layers of possible meaning and that may be justified, just not to me.

  
So Eco is a good candidate and I’m sure he’s been on the list for a while but it’s a question of whether he can overcome the committee’s prejudices of success.  I hope he does and I hope to read more of him, ‘The Island of the Day Before’ looked like a good book, maybe I’ll start with that. 

If you think Umberto Eco should win the Nobel Prize please comment below.

Next week I'll be looking at Michael Frayn.

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