Umberto Eco, A Library of the World: Behold the Eco Chamber

By Chris Knight

Rating: A

Something there is that doesn’t love a library, to riff on Robert Frost. How else to explain the heartrending list of book collections that have been destroyed by fire, looting or simple neglect through the ages, from Alexandria through Constantinople to the Zaluski Library in Warsaw, ransacked by Imperial Russian troops in 1794, then again by the Nazis 150 years later.

But something there is that loves a library, too. And one such man was Umberto Eco, the Italian philosopher, medievalist, semiotician, critic, commentator, and reluctant novelist. (If you know him only as the guy who wrote The Name of the Rose, you’ve barely scratched his surface.)

Director Davide Ferrario has constructed a respectful, often buoyant paean to the man, who died seven years ago at the age of 84. Gathering interviews with family and friends, readings of Eco’s words by others, and a lot of archival material (some of it shot by Ferrario himself for a video installation at the Venice Biennale in 2015) he manages, in a brisk 80 minutes, to give a sense of his subject that will leave viewers hungry for more. (In which case, may I recommend Eco’s wonderful 1994 novel The Island of the Day Before and, from the same year, a slim volume of lectures entitled Six Walks in Fictional Woods.)

Eco saw libraries as one of the three pillars of human memory, the vegetal kind, since books have long been made of trees and, before that, papyrus. The second is the organic memory we carry in our brains, and the third the mineral kind, made of silicon. Eco wasn’t certain about that one, still so new and already prone to failure, as anyone who’s ever tried to read an ancient floppy disc will know.

“Memory is soul,” Eco says in one segment of the film. “When we say ‘I’ we mean our memories.” And a library, he felt, was both a symbol and the real embodiment of humanity’s universal memory. He straddled the personal with the universal in the form of his own library, or rather brace of libraries. He kept 30,000 volumes in his apartment in Milan, and another 20,000 in a vacation house near Urbino.

But Eco was not precious about his collection. He enjoyed trashy fiction as much as scholarly works, and after his death his family found a pair of white gloves among his books. They had never been used, because who wants to handle a book while wearing gloves? Better to let its ink mingle with the dirt from your fingers.

Ferrario’s film feels like a random ramble through a well if eccentrically stocked second-hand bookshop. We learn about Athanasius Kircher, a 17th-century Jesuit scholar with a ravenous thirst for knowledge, much of it wrong. (He translated Egyptian hieroglyphs, incorrectly, as it turns out, but that didn’t stop him.)

We hear the story of how, while at university, young Eco would go to see live theatre, but always missed the ends of plays because he had to be back in his dorm by midnight. Later in life he befriended a man who had worked as a ticket-taker at a theatre, and would then enter to watch the play, never seeing the beginnings.

And Eco himself discusses his love of imaginary places, unfinished works, non-existent languages, and self-published books, like the one featuring letters of correspondence to the Pope and Albert Einstein (none of them answered) or the guy who rewrote Alesandro Manzoni’s three-volume 1828 novel The Betrothed using shorter words to save time and space.

What emerges is a portrait of a thinker forever questing, contemplative, and opinionated and engaging and funny. A writer and most importantly, a reader, and one who will likely make you want to cancel your next movie date in favour of something more literary.

It was Borges who said: “I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library,” but it’s clearly a notion to which Eco would have agreed. I hope he found his.

Umberto Eco: A Library of the World. Directed by Davide Ferrario. With Umberto Eco. Now playing at Hot Docs Ted Rogers Cinema, Toronto, Carbon Arc Cinema, Halifax, and Screening Room, Kingston.