![]() ![]() This concept comes to be involved in a time-keeping method that is essential for the next phase of Roberto's odyssey: the search for a reliable means of assessing longitude. Having had meetings with unremarkable men at the siege of Casale, Roberto moves on to Aix-en-Provence, where he meets both Lilia, the courtly love who will dog him ' and us ' for the next three hundred pages, and an Englishman called d'Igby, who introduces to him the notion of the 'Powder of Sympathy'. The machine I began to long for was one that would automatically read the novels of Umberto Eco, leaving me free to get on with my life. With them, it is a load of anachronistic cobblers. I understand Eco's curiosity about the hinterland between natural philosophy and magic, but, put bluntly, minus his interminable listings of such esoterica as 'a Combinatory lamp, Mensa Isaica, Metametricon, Synopsis Anthropoglottogonica, Basilica Cryptographica' this novel would be asinine but bearable. This is the first of a number of odd machines and bizarre techniques, the descriptions of which blight the pages of the book. There's also Padre Emanuele, a Jesuit who has constructed a machine that can generate infinite metaphors. Saint-Sauvin isn't the only one to take an interest in Roberto. This proto-libertine manages ' God only knows how ' to inculcate him with various rather far-sighted ideas, such as the Freudian unconscious, and hard empiricism. Roberto moves from home ' for the first time ' to the siege of Casale, where he sees his father die, falls in love, and encounters a French nobleman, Saint-Sauvin. Set in the first half of the sixteenth century, the action of the novel concerns Roberto della Griva, scion of a minor noble house from the duchy of Milan. This is a loathsome confidence trick, one that Eco pulls off by labouring to create a sense of authenticity that is ersatz in the extreme. He has come to occupy a perverse and tendentious position as a novelist, writing as he does the kind of superficially 'intellectual' books that somehow manage to convince a great number of people that they are reading something with a certain cachet. It may well be 'impossible' for Eco to do other than this, but he has no right to speak for anyone but himself in this matter. The answer comes on the last page, when the narrator (an 'unreliable' Eco ' but more of that later), sums up the structure of the book in the following terms: 'Finally, if from this story I wanted to produce a novel, I would demonstrate once again that it is impossible to write except by making a palimpsest of a rediscovered manuscript ' without ever succeeding in eluding The Anxiety of Influence.' The use of the word 'impossible' is what gives the game away here.
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