Umberto Eco

Eco is the central figure of Part II and the lesson's most vivid presence. He is a prodigiously productive scholar — a professor of semiotics at the University of Bologna with an enormous output of academic books and essays (over forty scholarly works against five novels) — who also became a best-selling novelist with The Name of the Rose. What comes through in the interview is a warm, witty and self-possessed personality. He is modest about his fame yet clear about who he is: he defines himself first as an academic and philosopher, "a university professor who writes novels on Sundays," and only secondarily as a writer of fiction. He is disciplined, explaining that he achieves so much by working in the small "empty spaces" or interstices of the day that others waste. He is also playful and reflective — he narrates the very process of his research so that his scholarly writing reads like a story, he tells "stories like a Chinese wise man," and after dinner he happily watches ordinary television such as 'Miami Vice' or 'Emergency Room'. He speaks with candid amus …