Jeff Waxman is a bookseller with the Seminary Co-op's 57th Street Books, and promotions manager at the University of Chicago Press.
As a teenager, I harbored unremarkable ambitions. Like you, probably, I thought of writing fiction, until a year—just a year!—of writer's block ended any hope I might have had that I could ever make a living stringing words together. But it never stopped me from reading. Surrounded as I was by books, I had a growing sense that the world obviously must have a place for someone of my uninspiration and limited abilities, a place for people who loved and understood books, but didn't or couldn't write them. A critic? A scholar? No, they write too much, and far too often alone.
Umberto Eco
But it was the critic and scholar Umberto Eco and his 1989 novel Foucault's Pendulum that changed everything for me. Writing had seemed to be a solitary thing, but people like Belbo, Casubon, and Diotallevi, Eco's alternately snide and earnest heroes, didn't work in a vacuum. Suddenly they meant a lot to me. They suggested by their mere fictive presence, just when I was ready to hear it, that there was a whole industry that would not only embrace people like me, but was composed of people like me.
Foucault's Pendulum
And even if Eco wasn't entirely in earnest, even if he was jousting at some of the worst kind of bookmaking, he had turned me on to the secret of academic and small press publishing: there are hidden, out-of-the-way places in this industry where the out-of-sync congregate to cast a curious and diabolical eye on the rest of the culture. On the rest of every culture. That that curiosity can support an interesting and not-entirely-derivative culture of its own is truly a wonderful and mysterious thing. And if these same characters and their too-smart games with words and meaning and with cause and effect turn readers off from time to time, there's always another book, even another book of Eco's, to get lost in.
The Prague Cemetery
Umberto Eco is the author of novels we know to be full-to-the-brim with truths bordering on lies. The author's gift for words is prodigious, but secondary—even in his fiction—to his stunning facility with ideas, his ability to synthesize and remix history, myth, and aimless supposition. The effect of any of his writing, or all of it, is the establishment of a deep, winking sympathy for every lucky reader who believes a word of it. I'm happy and proud to have been one of them.
Northwestern University School of Law, Thorne Auditorium: Nov. 13, 3:00 PM
Tags: Umberto Eco, literature, culture, Foucault, character, writer, Prague
