Iain Pears: The Dream of Scipio

      I’m really not quite sure where to start with this remarkable novel, and I can’t fathom why it’s taken twenty years and a book group choice to bring it to my attention. Influences: the focus on mediaeval times and integration of philosophy into a novel inevitably reminds me of Umberto Eco’s classic The Name of the Rose. The astonishing plot structure, hooking the reader with a major event and then immediately dropping it reminded me of Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent: a massive explosion in London: how did that happen? The writer teases, and you have to read and piece so many things together to get there and understand. And the interweaving of the three plot strands and the cutting from story to story in such a skilful, cinematographic way…

I was also hooked because of the setting in an area of Provence I’ve known and loved since my student days; I had vivid pictures in my mind as I read. Pears linked in to my interest in Roman history, church history and the Renaissance as well. Two things stretched my credulity just a little too much: the likelihood of Oliver the poet gaining access to the Pope and having such a powerful influence in him, and also the chance encounter between Julia the artist and Picasso.

So three stories are interwoven, from the start, each with a male hero and a significant female: a Roman aristocrat striving to sustain what remains of Roman civilisation in Provence in the mid-fifth century as all around is collapsing; a troubadour poet at the time of the emerging Renaissance and the arrival of the plague epidemic in the mid-14th century; a dilettante French intellectual in the 1930s as Europe lurches towards the inevitable crisis. The similarities in their situations and in their concerns are gradually revealed as the interwoven stories develop, and the 20^th century character gradually unearths and pieces together the history of the other two characters.

The women are equally significant: one of the last-surviving Greek philosophers, a woman briefly glimpsed by a poet who instantly is love-stricken, and an artist seeking inspiration and originality.

Where is truth, is one of Pears’ questions, as multiple versions of his characters’ pasts are unearthed, explored, theorised about. How much is lost over time, drifts into myth, or is deliberately distorted for others’ purposes. An even bigger issue is the idea that good people should strive to preserve the values of civilisation while the world around them crumbles into chaos. This is a difficult task, and fraught with compromise and betrayal, as each of the characters must discover; characters who we warm to and come to like have their very dark moments; we may be shocked, and at the same time we much acknowledge our gratitude at never having been tested in that way. Surrendering to barbarism is actually quite easy; it creeps up on you.

Pears digs deeper, though: what, exactly, is civilisation, and is it worth preserving? The perspective of the good or the worthy is restricted by their own time; later generations will look differently, judge differently. Each of the three male characters sells out or compromises himself in order, supposedly, to preserve that which is dearest to him, and in the grand scheme of things the enormous betrayals achieve very little. Interestingly (or significantly), none of the female characters does. In some ways, I found this a profoundly pessimistic novel, because so true to the human condition, it seemed to me.

It is a novel of ideas, and yet the characters are also vividly and convincingly drawn; I was surprised and moved by how Pears developed the initial flirtation between Julien the intellectual and Julia the artist into a powerful relationship, and what it ultimately led to. It’s a very thought-provoking read, at least to me; I shall hope to return to it some time soon, not least to try and unpick what Pears’ imagined characters explore about God, the soul and our purpose as human beings. Anyway, highly recommended.

Jorge Luis Borges: Collected Fictions

     This re-reading of Borges’ short stories was less satisfying than my previous visits, as I recall; it was a case of separating the wheat from the chaff. I have always liked him for the bizarreness, as well as for his ability to do something really interesting with the short story form, which I have so often found thin, empty and disappointing. I also respect him as part of the inspiration for Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose, one of my favourite novels of all time, in which the mad monastery librarian is named Jorge, in tribute to Borges.

Borges here is in translation, of course, and for me, the translator has successfully captured a style and use of language, particularly through the use of long, languorous sentences, descriptive and atmospheric. There is often an almost Brechtian sense of alienation from our particular reality in Borges’ playing with time and space in so many of the stories, and in requiring the reader to suspend disbelief in more ways than fiction usually asks of us.

There is also his aptitude for creating a sense of verisimilitude, through the use of small plausible details which we cannot or have no real desire to verify, in totally invented situations, in order to confuse or deceive the reader; I found myself being reminded of the very earliest novelists such as Defoe and Swift, who realised way back in the early 18^th century how to do this to great effect. The overall weirdness of Borges’ universes also recalled to me the fiction of Ben Marcus, and I wondered if that writer was familiar with Borges.

So, the tales or fictions are often bizarre or disturbing. The summit, I think, is reached in The Library of Babel, which posits a library as big as the universe which contains all possible writings; it combines Borges’ fascination with books with his fascination with labyrinths, and there is a computer programmer who has paid tribute to these by constructing a website that lets you interact with the library of Babel.

While I enjoyed my favourite stories again, I found myself wondering what exactly Borges had been trying to achieve; weirdness, a sense of eeriness? Alienation? Ensnaring his reader? Throughout, there is a sense of a man, a human like the rest of us, haunted by the meaninglessness of existence when confronted with time, immortality and the inevitability of death; hence the labyrinths in which characters wander, trapped… I found the earliest and the last stories better than those from the middle of his writing career, where there are too many about macho confrontations and knife fights in South America for my liking. There are some real gems, but you have to search for them.

Amin Maalouf: Balthasar’s Odyssey

     I’ve just re-read another of my favourites by Amin Maalouf, and find myself wondering what it is I find so captivating in his writing. The socio-cultural and historical essays such as Adrift I find very interesting not just because his analyses largely concur with mine, but because they are far-sighted and take me out of my limited Western perspective and comfort-zone. With the novels, it’s different, and I’m beginning to wonder if this is to do with the nature of storytelling being different in other cultures; I’m not widely-enough read to judge at the moment.

I cam to Maalouf via Samarcand, then Leo the African, then this book. The settings are exotic, in the sense of a historical past, either in what we would have called mediaeval times, or else the Renaissance, and located in the Middle East, and the European parts of the Muslim world at those times. There are also usually characters from all three religions of the book, living together reasonably peacefully and tolerantly (within the parameters of their age), so perhaps Maalouf is looking back to a golden age in more ways than one, compared with our times. There is obviously an overlap – wishful thinking? – with his non-fiction.

This story is set in 1665-66, with overtones of the year of the Beast (666) and end times; there is a mysterious book which comes into and leaves the possession of the narrator repeatedly, which allegedly tells how to learn the mysterious hundredth name of God (according to the Qur’an there are ninety-nine) which will bring about transformation. Our narrator ranges the known world in obsessive pursuit of the book, which brings calamity in its wake; even in his possession and open in front of him, somehow it is impossible to read more than a few pages…

Maalouf’s characters in many of his novels are seekers, wanderers about the world; they are thinkers and they meet other kindred spirits on their travels and discuss religious and philosophical notions. Not only questing after truth, they are also on personal journeys of self-discovery and seeking happiness. Balthasar is 40 – significant, perhaps – seeking a book, love, a purpose for his future. I think this is one of the aspects of this novel, and Maalouf’s writing in general that appeals to me: there are real ideas and insights woven into the fiction.

There’s also something in the style of the story-telling: it’s first person, done through dated journal entries, so at one level there’s the potential for it to be fairly dull in terms of no suspense or changing viewpoints. But it’s not, it works in the sense that it’s the mind of his character that Maalouf wants us to know, and there is suspense via the gaps between the journal entries, and the unexpected changes of location of our narrator. It’s definitely not a Western novel as most of us might understand the term. In a way, it’s how some of the earliest English fiction was crafted; perhaps Maalouf is deliberately imitating something like Defoe’s Journal of the Plague Year?

Finally, there’s a kind of meta-fiction here too, a book about a book or books, such as we find in Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose, in various of Jorge Luis Borges’ short stories, in Carlos Ruiz Zafon’s The Shadow of the Wind or in Gilbert Sinoué’s Livre de Saphir. There are books containing hidden or arcane knowledge for those who care to look or seek it, although perhaps not with the obsessiveness of the hero of this novel.

There’s a lot here. It’s not the average, evanescent stuff of much contemporary fiction – this is the third time I’ve read and enjoyed the novel, and it’s gone back on my shelves for the future.

Bildungsromane

The idea of the bildungsroman – the novel that shows a character’s development through childhood to maturity, with a focus on the influences that shape the personality, is an interesting one, that has fallen out of favour: I think it was a creature of the earlier days of psychology when it was not only scientists but also writers who explored, in their different ways, how we become who we are.

And we can look at our own lives from that perspective, too, although it seems to have become easier as I have grown older, and have a greater span of time to look back on, as well as some greater clarity about the sort of person I’ve turned into. I can perceive all sorts of influences, first from my parents, obviously, and then from significant friends and acquaintances at various points in my earlier life. And I suspect there comes a point where I cease to be strongly influenced by anyone any more; perhaps I am now ‘fixed’ as it were…

I realise that Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre comes from the days before psychology, yet it’s surely a novel about the formation and development of Jane’s personality, from the malign influences of her early days to the kindlier ones of her friend Helen Burns, and some of her teachers at Lowood School. Her strength of character is tested by her feelings for Rochester, as is her moral sense; her acquired wisdom happily leads her to refuse the wiles of St John.

I can now remember very few details from Samuel Butler’s later and now sadly neglected novel The Way of All Flesh, but there is a clear picture of the malign influence of his overbearing father, and his struggles to break away from him, become a separate individual, and make his own choices about his life, which may have a chance of leading to happiness.

And then there’s the modernist James Joyce, and his marvellous A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, autobiographical in places, and using the stream of consciousness to explore the inside of the character’s head. Here it’s the suffocating combination of the small-mindedness of Irish patriotism and Catholicism combined that leads to breakdown and the decision that the only way to escape is exile… The oppression of the child Stephen is evident in that novel, and it’s explored further, and differently, in parts of Ulysses.

Various other titles occur to me, and also the idea that all of these novels about the development of an individual into their own person, finding themselves and creating their lives, came along at a similar time in my own personal development and growth: I first read almost all of these texts avidly, and maybe not all that critically, in my later teens and early twenties. I remember being powerfully moved by the search for meaning undertaken by the hero of Somerset Maugham’s The Razor’s Edge, by various of Hermann Hesse’s heroes, perhaps particularly Siddhartha, and even by some of D H Lawrence’s characters.

I often return to Socrates’ famous dictum, ‘the unexamined life is not worth living’, at times like this, and realise that perhaps not everyone does look back and consider the ways in which their lives have been shaped in key ways at certain times. Parental influence is perhaps the most powerful, given that it lasts the longest; then there is that of certain friends at particular moments, and perhaps later in life of people whom we might describe as mentors, maybe at crucial moments in the development of a career. You can’t undo your past, of course, but seeing clearly can be useful, as well as realising the moments where the choices made were actually one’s own, and therefore acts of conscious control over one’s life. And there is Umberto Eco’s (I think) observation, that one who reads lives hundreds or thousands of lives…

Narrative, truth and lies

The idea that all narratives are lies surfaced during a discussion (of David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas) in our book group recently, and has been preoccupying me since then. The notion quickly needed some qualification. I think it’s clear we refer to fictional narratives here, to describe which we might use the words ‘invented’ ‘untrue’ ‘lies’, all of which have certain connotations. At one level it’s clearly a matter of semantics, but we normally overlook the invented-ness of fictional narrative and the implications thereof. The word fiction itself means something made, as in invented, and this should lead us, as I recall frequently reminding my students, to reflect on the author, the maker, as well, and her/his purposes and choices as s/he made their narrative. What had they chosen to include, exclude, emphasise? How had they ordered their invented artefact, and how did that affect the ways we received, understood and interpreted it?

There is perhaps a certain relative innocence to fiction, in contrast to the benefits from making things up, or lying in other contexts. Untruths in the personal and the imaginative spheres are not qualitatively the same thing… we may tell untruths for personal gain or advantage: consider almost any politician you care to name (said he cynically).

We like and enjoy made-up stories, and this reflects a higher stage of development and mental operation, that we can imagine, visualise, and create things which are not. Even in our prehistory, humans created art, music, poetry, story. It is deeply hard-wired into us.

Stories we read, as well as entertaining us, broaden our knowledge and experience of the world vicariously: we can explore situations and emotions we may not have experienced personally, and learn something from them. Someone – I have a suspicion it may have been Umberto Eco – pointed out that a reader lives thousands of lives as well as their own. And narratives – factual ones, based on real events we have experienced ourselves – are also surely a way we use to make sense of our own lives, as we see progressions and developments, and become aware of connections between events and experiences.

Mitchell was trying to make a point about other narratives, too, I think: the narratives that we, as a species, the human race, tell about ourselves: our histories. And these may be based on facts, have facts behind them, but are nevertheless made, shaped and interpreted by those who write them, and there are agendas and effects that we need to be aware of behind such narratives. In some ways, I think he was saying, the created narratives can over-write the realities they sprang from…

If, for instance, we read a narrative of ourselves as basically a selfish, or a warlike species, or a cruel species, do we unconsciously accept and integrate those interpretations unthinkingly? Do we believe we are innately competitive, that it’s about the survival of the fittest because we have been told this so often? In which case, who told us, and why? And if so, what if we tried different narratives, ones which focused on co-operation, on mutual self-help, on our capacity for good? Might this affect our future behaviour, might it be capable of changing subtly our lives and our world for the better? Interesting stuff…

Overrated

There are quite a few things in the world of literature that make me cross. For the life of me – and I’ve read it several times (because I had to!) – I cannot see what some people find to rave about in The Great Gatsby. It’s always struck me as being about superficial, trivial, privileged people who I couldn’t care less about and the narrator puts me off right from the start.

Equally, I fail to see why some think so highly of Lolita. I’ve had it recommended to me a number of times, by people whose opinions and tastes I rate highly. I’ve tried to read it at least three times, have never got beyond fifty pages or so. I’ve found it dull, and I’ve also found it toe-curlingly creepy, in a perverted sort of way. I shan’t be bothering again.

I shall also confess that I find Wuthering Heights grossly overrated. I read it, unravelled the complex plot at the time, and could now tell you almost nothing about the book or its characters, so deep an impression it didn’t make on me. Emily Bronte I can do without; her sister Charlotte, on the other hand, I rate very highly: the ending of Villette is an absolute master-stroke.

At least I’ve made the attempt with those books. There are writers I haven’t really bothered with – Dickens, and Hardy for instance: I had to read Hard Times in my first year at university, and Tess of the D’Urbervilles too. The former I quite enjoyed, the latter I found rather silly because of the leaden hand of fate that rested on the heroine’s shoulders throughout. Certainly, I’ve never felt called to use up any more eyeball time on those writers.

I have quite a large blind spot about British and American fiction of the last few decades: I haven’t read very much of it at all, because very little of it has recommended itself to me, and quite honestly, I don’t think I’ve missed much. My general feeling has been that writers in other countries and continents have found much more interesting stories to write. No recent English language writer has, for me, reached the heights of Gunter Grass, Umberto Eco or Amin Maalouf, for example.

I’ve enjoyed having a bit of a gripe here, and I can imagine some of my readers thinking, “Well, I never saw anything in Philip Pullman, or, what has Josef Skvorecky got to say to me?” So, what are the books or writers you consider overrated?

Josef Skvorecky: An Inexplicable Story

     This was a really strange one to come back to; apart from the Roman setting I’d completely forgotten the plot, which is presented in the standard ‘mysterious manuscript found’ trope, with all sorts of spurious annotations and authentications.

A mysterious set of decayed scrolls in Latin, from the years of Tiberius, has been found in Mexico, in a settlement where the Maya civilisation once existed. Translated, it provides a very scrappy and disconnected tale of a Roman who was perhaps in some way related to the poet Ovid and who is interested in the poet’s exile and final disappearance, and who also seems to have been an inventor of some kind who may have invented a steam engine which assisted a ship across the ocean…

It’s obviously an exercise in constructing a plausibly fake manuscript and story, and meshing it in an already known reality, in the way such writers and Defoe, Eco and Conan Doyle have successfully done, along with many others. I should have recalled Skvorecky’s interest in, and writing of, detective stories among his other novels, and his particular liking for Edgar Allen Poe (he weaves in the latter’s Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym very cleverly).

The story is nested in many layers to give it a semblance of authenticity: a corrupt manuscript, introduction and detailed commentaries and annotations from academics, which weave in many well-known details and figures from Roman history, and supporting documents provided by others… and yet, in the end the author’s dedication to his wife of forty years makes clear it’s basically a very elaborate hoax he’s devised to refer back to their mutual admiration of Poe. It also links nicely into my favourite Skvorecky novel, The Engineer of Human Souls, in which the hero is a teacher of American literature to college students, and one of the chapters focuses on Poe.

It’s a short read, a diverting one, and a clever one, and a reminder of how much I have long admired this under-rated Czech dissident writer.

Do you really need another reading list?

One or two bloggers whom I follow have posted lists of books they recommend during the current lockdown. I haven’t done this, but felt moved to revisit one of my ‘pages’ (as opposed to ‘posts’) where I listed my favourites way back in 2013, to see if I still agreed with what I said way back then. Here we have my listing of world fiction, which is of writers who hadn’t originally written in English:

Gabriel Garcia Marquez: One Hundred Years of Solitude. I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve read this, and it still blows me away every time. The magical rise and fall and eventual disappearance of the city of Macondo and the Buendia family sweeps you along, and the final section is, for me, a tour-de-force almost on the level of the ending of Joyce’s Ulysses. However, Marquez’ other great novel, Love in the Time of Cholera, has grown on me and crept up to become an equal, as I’ve found myself in my later years reflecting on what exactly I understand by love, and what it means/has meant to me.

Günter Grass: The Tin Drum. I was fifteen when I first visited Gdansk, then behind the Iron Curtain, and as we went on a boat trip out to Westerplatte, where the Polish forces heroically held out for days against the Nazis in September 1939, I noticed graffiti, which my father translated for me: “We have not forgotten, and we will not forgive.” I was pretty shocked. Gradually I learned about what the Second World War had done to Eastern Europe, and I understood a little more; a couple of years later I came across this novel, which is another I have regularly re-read. It recreates a loved and totally vanished world. Some ten years ago a relative took me around some of the sights and places Grass writes about: it’s now a much-followed tourist-trail. Grass opened my eyes to what many Germans have tried to do by way of understanding and trying to come to terms with what they or their forbears did in those awful years.

Umberto Eco: The Name of the Rose. This one is often top of my list, Eco’s absolute best, filmed well and also a reasonable TV series. I think it’s what Eco does with time that moves me most, with the aged Adso looking back after so many years to his days with William of Baskerville, unravelling the mysteries and murders at the abbey, a forerunner of our beloved Sherlock Holmes. We are connected both to eternity and to our own mortality through Adso’s reflectiveness, and the beautifully created mediaeval setting.

Fyodor Dostoevsky: Crime & Punishment. Russian novels can be a slog, more of a duty than a pleasure, although they are usually worth it, and this one certainly is. The murder is quickly done, and it’s the aftermath that grips you: the man who thought he was so strong he could kill and not be affected by the deed, and how his conscience and the police investigator reduce him to an ordinary human who must suffer, repay his debt to society and redeem himself. And he does.

Giovanni di Lampedusa: The Leopard. Here’s another novel that lyrically recreates and recalls a vanished past, this time of Italy before its unification in the late nineteenth century. It must be coming up to time for a re-read because I remember very little other than the powerful impression it has on me; I had a copy of Visconti’s film for years, intending to watch it and not got round to it yet.

To be continued…

Reading time…

I’m not ill. And being officially classed as ‘elderly’ we are self-isolating at the moment. When I’m ill, I have lots of time on my hands, and this means lots of reading time. Isolation is also offering a lot of reading time, so I have been taking stock of what will be occupying my eyeballs over the coming months.

There’s comfort-reading: revisiting the familiar old favourites for the nth time – and why not? Jane Austen never pales, so I feel a Mansfield Park coming on. And detective fiction too: let’s re-read all of Sherlock Holmes, Raymond Chandler, Agatha Christie too. It’s easy to hoover the stuff up, and comforting in times of stress.

There’s a different kind of re-reading which is currently calling to me, a re-visiting of books I’ve wanted to go back to for a while, and for various reasons. Last year was a great year for new fiction for me, and having devoured the new Margaret Atwood and Philip Pullman quite quickly, it really is time for a more thoughtful and considered read of The Testaments and The Secret Commonwealth, without the lure of plot-line urging me on. Such writers deserve reflection.

I’ve wanted to re-read Umberto Eco’s Baudolino again, and I now have a copy of it in English, so I can see how good it is compared with the French version I have, bought because it appeared a full year before the English one. Addicts can’t wait that long. Incidentally, did you know that there are apparently some differences between the English and French versions of The Name of the Rose? I have been wondering if life is too short to try and discover what they are…

I have also taken down Joseph Roth’s The Radetzky March from the shelf again. It is truly a wonderful book, with an ending so powerful I am regularly drawn to re-read the book just for the experience of that ending. And I have strong memories of another, utterly different novel which I have also added to the re-read pile, Neal Stephenson’s doorstop Cryptonomicon, all about ciphers and code-breaking.

Finally, there are the treats which I’ve not read yet, of which I have great hopes and high expectations. There are a couple of history books, Christopher Bayly’s The Birth of the Modern World, and Jürgen Osterhammel’s The Transformation of the World. And the doorstopper to beat them all – The House on the Embankment, by Yuri Slezkine, a tale of life in the upper echelons of Moscow society in Soviet times, that comes in at a shade under 1100 pages. And, having been shocked by the power of Vassily Grossman’s newly published Stalingrad last summer, I was intrigued to find a novel on the same subject but from German perspective, Heinrich Gerlach’s Breakout at Stalingrad.

And I must overlook travel writers, of course, so I hope to reread the four volumes of the travels of the great Ibn Battutah, who travelled longer and further than Marco Polo in mediaeval times.

I shall, of course, report on my reading during isolation. And do not be surprised if read completely different books…

The Name of the Rose – TV series

Well, I finally watched the last episode of the internationally-produced series of The Name of the Rose. I’m glad I made the effort to stick with it – I nearly gave up after two episodes – and yet it was a very flawed production.

What worked? We did get a very detailed picture of the awfulness of the Inquisition and how it worked, and the casting and acting of Bernardo Gui the Inquisitor was superb. I was chilled a couple of years ago when I toured the Palais des Papes in Avignon, and there high up on the wall in one of the huge rooms was inscribed ‘the Inquisitor Bernardo Gui used to sit here’. Generally the casting and acting was good: I wasn’t too enamoured of the young Adso of Melk, but William of Baskerville excellently played, far surpassing Sean Connery’s effort in the earlier film of the novel.

More attention was paid to the scope of the original novel, which of course is rather more easily done in an eight-part series than in a feature-length film.

And yet… The set of the abbey itself I found rather cheap and tacky. Much of the earlier film was shot in an around a well-known, real abbey (Kloster Eberbach) in Germany; this studio set failed to convince, and the library was particularly poor, I felt.

The screenplay was a very unbalanced version of the novel. And for such an intricate and carefully composed text as The Name of the Rose, I think that really matters. What spoiled things most for me was the way that, gratuitously, the Adso story was expanded, and the ‘romance’ with the heretic girl was developed in completely unconvincing ways, with the novice heading out into the countryside for secret assignments with her. Eco’s version in the novel is much briefer, and far more convincing as an integral part of the story and of Adso’s life: it’s a brief, one-off sexual encounter where he is seduced and experiences the pleasures of the flesh as a youth. That experience clearly marks his life; the girl is burnt as a witch and there is also a cruel message in that for him. The earlier film remains true to the novel; in the TV series there is a very long rigmarole involving another woman stalking the Inquisitor, and rescuing the seductress, and yet Adso just leaves her then… what? I’m afraid the producers just wanted there to be more female interest that Eco had not provided, so they invented it – badly.

Similarly, the labyrinth that is the library in the novel is an integral part of the plot and the detective work, as well as a metaphor; this was very much sidelined and then rushed through in the final hectic episode. And the whole matter of the nature of the mysterious book that monks would kill for is also sidelined, whereas it’s at the core of some of the key theological arguments that run through the book: did Christ ever laugh? Is laughter a necessary part of human existence? Again, a rushed and nodding gesture in the final episode only. I also felt that the detective work by William and Adso was rather underplayed, only allowed to intrude occasionally rather than developing in any connected way. Why did the producers think Eco named his protagonist William of Baskerville, for goodness’ sake?

Even the title of the novel itself, which Eco links into the scholasticism of the mediaeval era in which he sets the novel, is glossed over almost incomprehensibly in the final seconds of the series: you’d miss the allusion were you not familiar with the novel. And finally, the framing of the entire novel by the aged Adso as he nears the end of his earthly life is lost, given up, when that shift in the closing pages of the novel is so powerful in drawing all the strands of such a complex story together.

It’s a little trite to say that perhaps some stories cannot successfully be filmed, but, after two very different and imperfect versions, perhaps this has to be the verdict on Eco’s finest novel, and for me, one of the best ones of the last century.