The truth about novels

Umberto Eco is a medievalist, philosopher and scholar of modern literature who, as he says in his latest book, Confessions of a Young Novelist (Harvard University Press, $18.95), “is a novelist only as an amateur”, or just for the fun of it. Good non-fiction, he believes, is crafted as a whodunnit, and a skilled novelist builds precisely detailed worlds through observation and research — qualities that were evident in his first novel, The Name of the Rose (1980), which became a bestseller. His novels, however, are not easy reading; they are as knotty and layered as his “Theory of Semiotics” with long asides on medieval philosophy. But the erudition is not for the sake of mere difficulty, only to enhance the mystery of things.

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