For half a century, he has been an internationally famous essayist, writing often about media culture and literature. Eco studied medieval philosophy at the University of Turin, and for many years he was a legendarily beloved professor of semiotics at the University of Bologna. These tensions, and his utter glee for a ripping yarn well told, Eco says, were present even during his childhood in Piedmont during the ’30s and ’40s, as he shunted from the Fascist-inflected local schools of the time to the joys of his beloved comic books and fiction. Up is down and black is white, and everything is ripe for some bar-stool raconteur to rewrite as the mood suits. In his world, towering ambition very often runs in tandem with his characters’ career failings, and staunch rationalism finds itself slumming into tawdry mysticism. This dense broth of story, ideas, intrigue, and dizzying weirdness is pure Eco. What they end up building through their satirical scheme, though, weaving together the myths of those Knights Templar, of the Bavarian Illuminati, the Rosicrucians, and every other famous cult or historical bogeyman is, ironically, nothing less than the secret history of the world. Hilarity obviously ensues, but I say “cynical,” because none of these investigators, such as they are, believe in the supernatural designs in their work, or not at first.

UMBERTO ECOĪn editor, a cabalist, and a Templar scholar walk into a bar-this, essentially, is the setup for Umberto Eco’s maximalist occult epic Foucault’s Pendulum-and, out of boredom or desperation or something like existential ennui, these failed or failing intellectuals launch a sadly cynical investigation into the various conspiracy theories, urban legends, and supernatural spook stories that have possessed mankind for millennia. Sometimes it is not true what Flaubert said, that ‘Madame Bovary c’est moi.’ Sometimes my characters are not myself.

I write stories about conspiracies and paranoid characters while I am, in fact, a very skeptical person.

Umberto eco zero