Confessions of a Young Novelist

Cambridge:  Harvard University Press, 2011.  Pp. 231
by Umberto  Eco

Reviewed by Dr. Susan K. Hedahl

            It is startling to find a new work by Umberto Eco in which the title uses the word “young” novelist.  The four chapters in this work are reprinted from the Richard Ellmann lectures in Modern Literature which Eco gave at Emory University.   Eco reflects on his journey from writing on non-fiction to fiction.  “…until 1978 I felt totally fulfilled being a philosopher and semiotician.” (6)  The author of the famous The Name of the Rose has no reason for why he entered the world of fiction:  “…I felt the urge to do it—and I think this is a sufficient and reasonable explanation.” (8)
            The topics of this work are intriguing. In Chapter One, “Writing from Left to Right,” he explores the surprises and learnings he had in writing fiction.  He upholds one virtue in fiction which he honed in writing non-fiction:  “Narrative is, first and foremost, a cosmological affair.  to narrate something, you start as a sort of demiurge who creates a world—a world that must be as precise as possible, so that you can move around in it with total confidence (14).
            In Chapter Two, “Author, Text, and Interpreters,” he addresses a number of issues that have been debated for a long time, including matters of translation, ambiguity and the “empirical reader” and the “model reader.”  He locates the actual text between “the mysterious history of a textual creation: and “the uncontrollable drift of its future readings…” (68).
            Chapter Three,  “Some Remarks on Fictional Characters,” raises the whole issue of what fiction is and who characters are.   Eco’s sophisticated background in philosophy and language plays humorously and deftly just behind the surface.  In addressing the matter of creating fictional characters, he asks this provocative question:  “But are we sure that fictional characters do not have some kind of existence?” (75).   As in the other chapters, he pays attention to detail in the fictional environment and recounts how this impacts readers.
            Finally, Chapter Four,”My Lists” is a truly dizzying look at the appearance of lists of things, entities, people, phenomena which make their appearance in works of all kinds. At the beginning of this lecture/chapter he notes, “I had a Catholic education, and thus became used to reciting and listening to litanies….Litanies, like phone books and catalogues, am a type of list.” (121). He describes the many ways he employs lists in his fiction works.  The chapter romps through all the types of lists one might create and their impact on readers; aesthetic, rhetorical, and poetic.
            This work of Eco’s is a great delight!  The few references in this review to it hardly tap the surface of this rich work, let alone the depths.  Add this to your “must read’ list. For those who are seriously embarked on the writing of fiction, this book should be included in one’s non-fictional reading.