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oxnard_montalvo's review against another edition
2.0
This was oddly dry. For a plot that had so much potential, Eco seemed to plod from one scene to the next without much imagination or effort. I remember finding it boring and it was a struggle to get through to the end. I put it down thinking 'oh... that's it. I can do better than that!' (famous last words...) Very underwhelming.
snarkoman's review against another edition
dark
emotional
informative
inspiring
sad
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? No
4.75
savaging's review against another edition
3.0
Yes, I read the warnings that this was a boring book, but figured I was mostly immune to boredom. Unfortunately, even I was at a stretch to finish a work that was too little novel and too much illustrated vintage book catalog.
Of course Eco knows that his book -- and maybe all books, and the entire economy of scribblings on paper -- faces the threat of meaning too little. His character Yambo is an exaggeration of the masculine, academic mind, full of facts and without a personal story to confess to. "I don't have feelings. I only have memorable sayings." He is all mind and no heart -- except "heart" is neuroanatomized to Broca's area of the brain.
Eco is familiar with fevers and dreams, and writes well along the edge of a decomposing brain. The bubbling up of images that are piddling, profane, or just dumb -- senseless.
If you make it 350 pages in, you get to briefly meet the one heartfelt character. Gragnola is a tubercular, anarchist maltheist ("I believe that God does, unfortunately, exist. It’s just that he’s a fascist"). What follows is a little vignette that is the one real Story in the novel. When you read that, you remember why it is you typically read stories instead of book catalogs.
Ostensibly the (absent) center of the book is the face of the First True Love. But how is a person supposed to believe in this desire? It's desire from the brain of a semiotics professor, not from any other part of any other body. It is a paper desire. This love is the cold, absent love of academics, who have already figured out the psychoanalysis whereby desire has nothing to do with its object. And so another person doesn't even have to be considered, the gaze circles back to only-internal contemplation, a quest for the lost self.
Even if they're correct it's a shame to build your novel off of this fact. It would be like writing a story that never forgot the laws of physics and ergo denied that any two objects in a scene ever actually touched each other. Whether or not desire is projection, a novelist should know it never feels that way, that the experience is of being at the mercy of an external being. I guess I'm a crank, shouting that if you're going to write a novel, you just may have to pay attention to others.
I want to insist that Gragnola is the real love-object of the book, a person with some reality to him, not this faceless blond girl who functions as the blank slate for adolescent fantasy and bad poetry.
Of course Eco knows that his book -- and maybe all books, and the entire economy of scribblings on paper -- faces the threat of meaning too little. His character Yambo is an exaggeration of the masculine, academic mind, full of facts and without a personal story to confess to. "I don't have feelings. I only have memorable sayings." He is all mind and no heart -- except "heart" is neuroanatomized to Broca's area of the brain.
Eco is familiar with fevers and dreams, and writes well along the edge of a decomposing brain. The bubbling up of images that are piddling, profane, or just dumb -- senseless.
If you make it 350 pages in, you get to briefly meet the one heartfelt character. Gragnola is a tubercular, anarchist maltheist ("I believe that God does, unfortunately, exist. It’s just that he’s a fascist"). What follows is a little vignette that is the one real Story in the novel. When you read that, you remember why it is you typically read stories instead of book catalogs.
Ostensibly the (absent) center of the book is the face of the First True Love. But how is a person supposed to believe in this desire? It's desire from the brain of a semiotics professor, not from any other part of any other body. It is a paper desire. This love is the cold, absent love of academics, who have already figured out the psychoanalysis whereby desire has nothing to do with its object. And so another person doesn't even have to be considered, the gaze circles back to only-internal contemplation, a quest for the lost self.
Even if they're correct it's a shame to build your novel off of this fact. It would be like writing a story that never forgot the laws of physics and ergo denied that any two objects in a scene ever actually touched each other. Whether or not desire is projection, a novelist should know it never feels that way, that the experience is of being at the mercy of an external being. I guess I'm a crank, shouting that if you're going to write a novel, you just may have to pay attention to others.
I want to insist that Gragnola is the real love-object of the book, a person with some reality to him, not this faceless blond girl who functions as the blank slate for adolescent fantasy and bad poetry.
anyajulchen's review against another edition
2.0
Definitivamente, no es la mejor historia de Umberto Eco. No tiene esa chispa de suspenso ni de emoción de algunos de sus otros libros, sus mejores libros. Quizás esperaba demasiado, pero me encuentro bastante decepcionada.
meganmagicmusings's review against another edition
This is the second time I’ve tried to read this in ten years and I still cannot manage it.
alfsan's review against another edition
2.0
not my favorite book by Eco, i believe you have to be very italian to fully grasp the feeling he emits with his quotes on 40's and 50's memorabilia
lyrareadsbooks's review against another edition
2.0
I get the impression Eco wanted to write the Italian equivalent of Grass' The Tin Drum -- a parable of forgetting and the mercurial, childish ways memory tricks us. In this tale , Yabbo loses his memory and returns to his childhood home to discover what he lost. The reader expects a literary wonderland full of clever references , but to appreciate this work , one should probably have thourough knowledge of Italian pop culture of the 1930s. This one fell short of being enjoyable and thought provoking.
wannabekingpin's review against another edition
2.0
Great style and all, but the story... Eh, no. Unique, but not interesting.