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Eco cajoles his readers to go out and learn more, and perhaps, to disagree with him. -- Scott Gordon The Daily Yomiuri Erudite, wide-ranging, and slyly humorous... The literary examples Eco employs range from Dante to Dumas, from Sterne to Spillane. His text is thought-provoking, often outright funny, and full of surprising juxtapositions. The Atlantic Fans of Eco's novels will not be left dissatisfied--his fictional players are still present: Templars, Illuminati, Jesuits, Theosophists, and Masons. They all have a part in this intriguing look at how the study of language can be full of surprises. Booklist Rich in historical anecdotes... Throughout, his treatments are informative, intellectually sophisticated, and thoroughly entertaining. Library Journal This collection will certainly appeal to specialists. But Eco's ability to balance technical subject matter with broadly intelligible anecdotes and illustrations should make it valuable and pleasurable for anyone seeking a gallant introduction to the philosophy of language. Publishers Weekly Eco's insistent curiosity, his vital imagination and his almost overwhelming erudition work together like forces of nature to push and pull the book's five essays in unpredictable directions. Review of Contemporary Fiction These essays are equally entertaining and unusual. Scotland on Sunday Informative, instructive, and entertaining. World Literature Today

Italy's most celebrated public intellectual gathers five essays that focus (more or less) on how lunatic misunderstandings concerning the perfect language have led to new discoveries (sort of). Eco (The Name of the Rose, 1983, etc.; Semiotics/Univ. of Bologna) remains Italy's most successful and prolific writer. He is a novelist, cultural commentator, essayist, literary critic, and scholar of language. The present volume of essays is spun off his work on the historical search for the perfect language, i.e., the language that God gave Adam, the one that was lost in the catastrophe at the Tower of Babel. But the conceit with which he rather unsuccessfully attempts to unify the book is this: the search in the cases he explores always involves either outright errors or otherwise fictional inventions that have somehow led to positive discovery. After all, Columbus accidentally discovered the New World owing to miscalculations about the size of the earth. Eco sees similar situations in the history of language. For example, a 16th-century Jesuit, Father Athanasius Kircher, fancifully and elaborately interpreted ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics as the lost language of the Garden of Eden. Kircher was wildly wrong. Still, notwithstanding his eventual failure, he is the father of Egyptology. This and similar disappointingly general findings do not satisfyingly deliver on the promise that the errors serendipitously produce truth. But all is not lost. The meandering erudition of Eco's book is interesting enough in its own right. He speculates, for example, that Dante believed his own Italian vernacular, as distinct from official Latin, was in fact an echo of Adam's perfect language. And, he examines philosophical attempts by Leibniz and others to recreate a perfect language and Joseph de Maistre's combination of linguistic mysticism and reactionary politics. The genial Eco may have had the lay reader in mind when he wrote these essays (which were originally lectures), but his book of linguistic arcana is also of avowedly esoteric interest. (Kirkus Reviews)

Eco cajoles his readers to go out and learn more, and perhaps, to disagree with him. -- Scott Gordon, The Daily Yomiuri Erudite, wide-ranging, and slyly humorous... The literary examples Eco employs range from Dante to Dumas, from Sterne to Spillane. His text is thought-provoking, often outright funny, and full of surprising juxtapositions. -- Atlantic Monthly

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Umberto Eco is the author of five best-selling novels and numerous collections of essays. He is a professor of semiotics at the University of Bologna and lives in Italy.

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