To What Would Umberto Eco Compare This Film About His Library?

When news reached the French republic that Victor Hugo had died on May 22, 1885, many thousands of its citizens began milling about the streets of Paris in hopes of catching a glimpse of the casket as it traveled to its final destination at the Panthéon. By the time “the hugest thinker in the universe” was laid to rest, some two million people had come to honor him. Hugo had requested a modest burial and received a hero’s valediction. Welcome to the first celebrity funeral.The opening moments of “Umberto Eco: A Library of the World,” a new documentary by David Ferrario, put me in mind of Hugo’s send-off. There’s a scene of Eco’s funeral — he died in 2016 at 84 — in which a crowd has gathered in the courtyard of Milan’s Sforza Castle to pay homage to the famed author, academic, and intellectual. When Eco’s widow, Renate Ramge, attempted to navigate the multitudes, she was told, in so many words, to take a number. “You want to pass?” the grieving widow was asked. “We’ve all been waiting since morning.” Ms. Ramge stood in line.Celebrity funerals have become a staple of our culture since Hugo’s time, but count me surprised that the passing of a literary figure, a Man of Letters, should occasion such an outpouring in the here and now. Heads of state, sure; royalty, okay; rock stars, absolutely; but the author of “The Theory of Semiotics” and “The Limits of Interpretation”? There can’t be that many eggheads on the planet. Eco is, of course, best known to general audiences not as a scholar, but as the writer of best-sellers like “Foucault’s Pendulum” and, especially, “The Name of the Rose.” The latter, his first novel, is a murder mystery set in a 14th-century monastery. It sold more than 50 million copies and was made into a movie starring Sean Connery. What did the author think of the picture? Eco likened it to a club sandwich absent of turkey or salami. There have been more effusive compliments. Before Ms. Ramge recounts the story of her husband’s funeral, she sits down with her daughter, Carlotta, to discuss a memento from an event that, in her estimation, is far more impressive: a flier from a local amusement park announcing its closure to “celebrate the memory … of a great master.” Ms. Eco then brings out an issue of “linus,” the long-running Italian comics anthology, in which her father is portrayed as Charlie Brown, Superman, a smurf, and, as Mr. Ramge notes wryly, “a big belly.” Eco’s voraciousness does seem to have extended beyond intellectual pursuits, if his expertise in club sandwiches is any indication.“A Library of the World” began as a video installation for the 2015 Venice Biennale and morphed into a film about Eco’s labyrinthine library. Scenes of the philosophe walking past endless shelves of books taken from Mr. Ferrario’s footage were used in news reports upon Eco’s death and, when posted online, went viral. The author’s library subsequently became the focus of a “movie we could not make together.” Proceeding with the Eco family’s blessing, Mr. Ferrario tasked himself with creating a cinematic equivalent of the author’s “vegetal memory.”How well-versed in Eco’s writings does a viewer have to be in order to enjoy “A Library of the World”? As someone who has only dipped his toe into the author’s daunting corpus, I wish that Mr. Ferrario had erred on the side of a traditional biography and given us more context regarding Eco’s cultural standing and literary accomplishment. The movie, in that regard, is lopsided in focus. Still, Mr. Ferrario has recompensed with existing television and film interviews, as well as dramatizations of the author’s often hermetic theories.As it is, Eco comes across as impish and approachable, a man given as much to extolling the virtues of “Peanuts” as he is to exploring abstruse fields of intellectual endeavor. The contents of his library will be distributed to a university collection in Bologna and Milan’s Biblioteca Braidense. Should you value antique books, the printed word, open intellectual inquiry, and anyone who harbors significant doubts about Ye Olde Internet, as Eco most certainly did, “A Library of the World” should prove a delight.

To What Would Umberto Eco Compare This Film About His Library?

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