[BRIEF NOTE] On the death of Umberto Eco

[rfmcdonald]

Umberto Eco is dead. I shared his Guardian obituary on Facebook.

The novelist and intellectual Umberto Eco has died, aged 84, according to reports. Eco, who was perhaps best known for his 1980 work the Name of the Rose, was one of the world’s most revered literary names.

The author, who had been suffering from cancer, passed away at 9.30pm (8.30pm GMT) on Friday, La Repubblica said on its website.

He was the 1992-3 Norton professor at Harvard and taught semiotics at Bologna University and once suggested that writing novels was a mere part-time occupation, saying: “I am a philosopher; I write novels only on the weekends.”

The Name of the Rose was Eco’s first novel but he had been publishing works for more than 20 years beforehand.

He discussed his approach to writing in an interview at a Guardian Live event in London last year. “I don’t know what the reader expects,” he said. “I think that Barbara Cartland writes what the readers expect. I think an author should write what the reader does not expect. The problem is not to ask what they need, but to change them … to produce the kind of reader you want for each story.”

My favourite of his novels was his Foucault's Pendulum, a superb satire of the conspiracy theory and the people who believe it. There's so much brilliance to be found in his œuvre.